Cleanness by Garth Greenwell
“How much smaller I have become… through an erosion necessary to survival perhaps and perhaps still to be regretted, I’ve worn myself down to a bearable size.”
This novel follows the experience of a gay American poetry teacher living in Bulgaria’s capital Sofia in the months before, during, and after he falls in love with a Portuguese student called R. The book is organised in three parts, with the central three stories titled “Loving R,” while the pieces that bookend it explore similar themes of kink, loneliness, shame, desire, power, and consent.
The book itself is primarily concerned with power dynamics and how these play out on both a personal and political scale, such as those between teacher and student, master and slave in BDSM, and the people and the state. It is filled with tipping points, where the balance of power tilts one way, then back again. Bulgaria is a bleak, oppressive setting, and many of his characters feel that there is no future or freedom in the country. While set during a time of student protests where change may be on the wind, this is only for some. The LGBTQ community in Bulgaria is still ostracised and discriminated against: forced to campaign for their human rights, hide their relationships, seek discreet sex in public toilets, or in random encounters on hook-up apps.
Greenwell is excellent at capturing the blow-by-blow of a sexual encounter and the sex scenes between men unfold with precise choreography. He captures the performative aspects of sex, the negotiations of give and take in dominant/submissive exchanges, and the constantly changing frequencies of desire, power, and erotics. The penetrable male body is not often the subject of fiction, and as such, these descriptions feel quite revelatory (Greenwell’s language has been described as “pornography meets high art”). Consent is always negotiated, and the rules are sometimes broken, such as in the explicit “Gospodar,” where a master/slave hook-up becomes a violent sexual assault.
The stories highlight how shame, concealment, humiliation, punishment, and erasure can be central to the queer, male experience. In a review, Jake Nevins calls the narrator “a poet of self-abasement,” as he states many times that he “wants to be nothing” or “a negative space,” particularly during sex where he often takes a submissive role. Yet, despite this longing for erasure, there is a redemptive power (and comfort) in love and intimacy – a more euphoric loss of self. One powerful scene sees our narrator covering every inch of his lover’s body in kisses until he had “garlanded him.”
Comparisons have been made to W.G. Sebald and Ben Lerner, but I felt Greenwell’s style was closer to that of Rachel Cusk’s in her Outline trilogy. His narrator is an observer, an outsider in Bulgaria, both self-reflexive and self-conscious. Each story unfolds slowly around one interaction, event, or conversation. His long, rhythmic sentences, constantly qualifying themselves, capture every minute flicker in emotion and tension, giving each scene a sense of tension, but also of happening in real-time.
The first third of the book is stronger perhaps, with the last third echoing or rehearsing similar themes, facts, and relationships with slightly less character development. However, the interplay between the personal and the political, as well as Greenwell’s hypnotic, poetic language, kept me compelled to the very end.