Cleanness by Garth Greenwell review – interlinked stories of pain and desire

Garth Greenwell’s 2016 debut novel What Belongs to You was a spare, spellbinding account of an American academic’s intense desire for a rent boy in post-Soviet Bulgaria. It received a lot of attention for a book set in the public loos of Sofia. It won the British book award for debut of the year, and no fewer than 50 publications across nine countries named it best book of the year.

And rightly so. Written in gorgeously limpid prose, it was fearless and nerve-racking autobiographical fiction, incandescent with yearning, rage and rejection. But it was the middle section, about the molten anguish of growing up gay with a Republican father in Kentucky, that had me gripped. Written in one supple, unbroken paragraph of 40 pages, it remains one of the most heartbreaking accounts of pained desire that I can remember reading. The novel is worthy of its comparisons to James Baldwin and Alan Hollinghurst as well as Virginia Woolf and WG Sebald.

Greenwell’s much-anticipated follow-up, Cleanness, follows the same unnamed expat teacher in Sofia – a man for whom sex is still “fraught with shame and anxiety and fear”. Desire remains closely linked with disease, pleasure always darkly ripening into danger – even in a relatively innocent game of spin the bottle among colleagues. Spin the bottle turns out to be an apt metaphor for the book’s symmetrical structure, with the narrator at the centre of a circle of troubled characters, each taking turns to tell their story.

In Mentor, the first of nine interlinked stories, anxious student G reveals his heartbreak over a best friend who has rejected his romantic advances. The narrator can offer little comfort, except for perhaps laying a hand on G’s, which he is not sure will be welcome. “That’s the worst thing about teaching, that our actions either have no force at all or have force beyond all intention.”

That day, Sofia is tormented by a “fierce and incessant wind”, apparently from Africa, which reappears in the book’s central section when the narrator is feeling his own romantic vulnerabilities most acutely. His beautiful Portuguese lover R is late to meet him because he’s going to elaborate lengths to disguise his relationship from his old friends. The wind represents a biting, interrogative force, “carrying off whatever wasn’t secure, worrying every loose edge”. We sense their affair is doomed but Greenwell takes his time to recount the happiness they experienced over two years, the budget holidays in Venice and Veliko Tarnovo, “moments that have filled me up with sweetness, that had changed the texture of existence for me”.

But as the relationship fizzles out, the narrator seeks “brutal” sex with men picked up on websites. Greenwell explores the extent to which these transactional encounters are scripted by porn and how much they follow their own momentum, spilling into animal violence. In Gospodar we see the narrator as the victim of a power game with an older man, while in The Little Saint we watch in slow motion how the victim can become the inflictor of cruelty. Midway through sex, the mild-mannered American teacher begins to channel the fury of his father, spitting out words like “whore” and “faggot”: “maybe once you have heard such language it infects you, that was what it felt like, like something bursting free in me”.

The book encompasses all kinds of experiences from the tender to the tawdry, as well as political hopes and fears of the narrator’s Bulgarian friends. At times, it put me in mind of Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy, about a woman, Faye, who spends her time listening to the stories of others. However, Cleanness struggles to define its purpose. The narrator is a man of boundless appetites who is constantly lost in the fog of desire – often literally losing his bearings, whether in the backstreets of Sofia or Venice. There were times when I did too. Some of the episodes feel overstretched and anticlimactic – and though anticlimax is often the desired effect, the energy of the stories peaks and troughs in much the same way.

However, even if Greenwell’s second book didn’t captivate me as much as his first, there’s something refreshing about the way he sets his own terms. The emotional eloquence of the narrator is compelling, the observations exhilarating in their accuracy. Each fervent encounter with another reminds him: “We can never be sure of what we want, I mean of the authenticity of it, of its purity in relation to ourselves.”