Small Rain
Garth Greenwell is unafraid to depict plainly what often goes unspoken ... But Small Rain is not a critique of U.S. health care disguised as a novel. Its power, instead, comes from the dissonance between the terrifying condition of waiting for answers and the flights of imagination that this purgatory, paradoxically, sustains ... Throughout Small Rain, a consistency of cadence makes the novel feel like a cohesive whole—not unlike the recurring motif you might hear in a movement of a symphony. Inspiring acts of kindness and moments of mundane bureaucracy are depicted with the same tender attention.
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Each blood draw, each medical detail, is presented with documentary precision, lifted, one assumes, from life ... The narrator becomes conversant in a new language—the language of the medical system—and a new vocabulary of touch ... There is something almost showy about the formal challenge of this novel ... From a tale of great pain—a rare kind of story—it becomes one so difficult to render that it is thought to be impossible: a story of ordinary love, ordinary happiness ... Small Rain feels like a culmination, which comes with its own feeling of melancholy for the reader.
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...a paean to some of life’s most meaningful pleasures ... It’s a daring, mysterious work that audaciously and successfully marries the physical and the metaphysical. As in all great novels, its philosophical insights are spliced with details that root the work in a specific time and place but do nothing to diminish its timelessness.
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