The Mystery of Pain

Garth Greenwell’s novel of extreme affliction and ordinary happiness.

- PARUL SEHGAL

The attempt to capture pain in language transforms Greenwell's sentences.

Pain, it has ain, it has been said, is the great censor, the eater of words. Pain shatters language; it remains untranslatable not just anti-narrative but pre-narrative, calling us back to our first sounds. In the canon of illness writing, there are those accounts— Alphonse Daudet's "In the Land of Pain" and Christina Crosby's "A Body, Undone," to name two-which closely observe how pain shapes a life, how it exists both within and alongside the self as antagonist and intimate companion (Nietzsche called his chronic pain his dog). Typically, however, writers do not sit long with their pain; they busy themselves with the history, the social meanings of sickness. Pain, on its own, seems to have no plot; as Emily Dickinson wrote, it "has an Element of Blank." Perhaps it is a great anatomist of pleasure who can fill in some of the blanks in the story of pain. Garth Greenwell, the author of two previous works of fiction, "What Belongs to You" (2016) and "Cleanness" (2020), has been lauded for his depiction of sex our "densest form of communication," he calls it. His sinuous, stately sentences have brought a formal feeling to scenes of cruising; public bathrooms have become versions of the nineteenth-century ballroom, full of their own occult codes, hierarchies, the season's new beauties. The books have followed the same narrator-a writer and a Southerner by birth, who has spent time teaching poetry in Bulgaria. We meet him again in Greenwell's latest novel, "Small Rain," in the late summer of 2020. He is now living in Iowa, teaching at a college.