His writing in Cleanness is more Cusk than Knausgaard, in more ways than one. In a climate of literary fiction that seems inundated with autofiction, Greenwell manages to stand out.
Cleanness is far and away one of the most evocative and sobering novels I’ve read in a long time, in which Greenwell manages to write about sex and violence, love and distance, and the feeling of home and language itself, in a way that feels immediately intimate and insightful. Yet, while the two novels share a setting, a protagonist, and overlapping history, Cleanness is a blossoming for Greenwell, who exhibits peaks here only hinted at in the preceding What Belongs To You. Of course, the irony of this idea is not lost on Greenwell, whose beautiful writing is matched by his self-awareness, and has now written his second book novelizing his time spent in Bulgaria as a teacher. As the teacher wanders his way back to his apartment, he thinks to himself about the problem facing the student, and how any gains toward understanding ourselves comes at the cost of a dreamy, near-novelistic understanding of our lives that’s often so easy to fall into.
The teacher’s advice for his student doesn’t have the effect he wants it to, and the student ends up leaving disappointed. It’s a situation familiar to the narrator, and will be familiar to readers of Greenwell’s first novel, What Belongs To You, which features the same auto-fictional protagonist and describes one such similar circumstance. The protagonist, a queer American teaching abroad at the American College of Sofia in Bulgaria-as Greenwell was himself-listened somewhat regretfully to the man, a student of his, describe being rejected and distanced by his best friend after confessing having feelings for him.
In a smoky, half-submerged bar in Sofia, Bulgaria, the protagonist of Garth Greenwell’s latest novel, Cleanness, finds himself giving advice to a young man facing a predicament all too familiar to our unnamed narrator.
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