Small Rain

by Garth Greenwell
Small Rain cover
Good Books rating 4.31
Literary Fiction
Technical:
  • ID: 441
  • Added: 2025-09-11
  • Updated: 2025-09-18
  • ISBN: 9781509874682
  • Publisher: Pan Macmillan
  • Published: 2024-09-19
  • Formats: 12
  • Reviews: 4
Buy online
Waterstones
Paperback • £9.99 Hardback • £18.99

Small Rain is a deeply moving novel that captures the experience of a life-altering medical emergency faced by a poet in the American Midwest during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. The narrator endures intense physical pain and the disorienting, often dehumanizing routines of hospital care, which force him to confront his own mortality and the fragility of the body. Through this intimate and detailed portrayal, the novel explores the complex interplay between illness, memory, and the search for meaning. Beyond the hospital walls, Small Rain expands into a luminous meditation on the forces that give life value—art, poetry, music, and care—while also reflecting on the limits and possibilities of sympathy and the elusive ideal of America. It is ultimately a love story of an unexpected kind, revealing how vulnerability and beauty emerge even in the darkest moments of human experience. Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the novel has been praised for its exquisite prose and profound emotional insight.

Reviews
Please Read It To Me · 2025-09-11
intimate 4.00

The novel is a slow, intimate exploration of illness and love, focusing on the tender, mature relationship between the narrator and his partner amid the isolating hospital experience.

This review highlights the autobiographical intensity of the novel, emphasizing its focus on the decline of the body and the quiet strength found in the narrator's relationship with his partner, L. The absence of a conventional plot is noted, but the storytelling is lauded for mining deep human truths through detailed hospital life and reflective flashbacks. The tenderness and honesty in the couple's relationship provide a hopeful counterpoint to the narrator’s physical suffering. The reviewer appreciates how Greenwell uses the narrator's memories and present experience to explore how people rationalize and come to terms with their lives, making the book feel personal and relatable. The narrative's slow pace and focus on minutiae allow readers to immerse themselves in the emotional and psychological landscape of the protagonist’s ordeal.

Quick quotes

    It’s impossible to ignore the autobiographical threads here, and while 'Small Rain' isn’t officially labeled as such, it feels intensely personal.

    The relationship between the narrator and L., his partner, is tender, unflinchingly honest and devoid of the angst that colored his earlier works.

    Know there isn’t much of a plot, but one isn’t needed when the storytelling is solid.

Goodreads · Meike1 · 2025-04-08
poignant 4.50

The novel is praised for its profound and poetic exploration of human consciousness during a sudden, life-threatening illness, capturing the narrator's fear, helplessness, and reflections on life amidst a pandemic.

The reviewer admires Greenwell's skill in translating complex human consciousness into language, particularly through the protagonist's harrowing experience with infrarenal aortic dissection. The story is intimate and confined, focusing on the emotional and mental struggles during hospitalization and isolation caused by COVID, with tender moments between the narrator and his partner providing a lifeline to normalcy. The reflections on family, politics, and art enrich the narrative, making it a chamber play of vulnerability and endurance. Meike1 finds the novel deeply immersive and emotionally resonant, highlighting how the protagonist's mind wanders through memories and present fears, making the hospital stay a profound meditation on life and mortality. The mix of medical drama and personal history creates a compelling portrait of human fragility and connection.

Quick quotes

    He is an expert when it comes to turning human consciousness into language.

    This experience of being separated from life is heightened by the fact that Covid is raging and the only person allowed to visit the narrator is L.

    Doctors and nurses come and go, some of them building caring, temporary relationships with their patient, but L is the only person connecting him to what he knows as normalcy.

America Magazine · 2024-09-20
enchanting 4.25

The novel is praised for its enchanting, sensitive prose and its fluid depiction of consciousness, portraying illness as a transformative occasion for gratitude and grace.

This review admires Greenwell’s prose style, describing it as quiet, sensitive, and gentle, with a porous sense of time that mirrors the narrator’s shifting consciousness during illness and recovery. The seamless movement between past and present, memory and moment, evokes the natural flow of thought, making the novel a profound artistic testament to human consciousness and connection. The reviewer suggests the novel offers an imaginative 'art of living' that embraces gratitude and grace even amid suffering.

Quick quotes

    Greenwell’s prose is enchanting—quiet, sensitive, gentle.

    Within a single paragraph, Greenwell seamlessly takes us across time and around the globe.

    Maybe it wasn’t true that there were no arts of living, with L’s hand in mine it seemed that maybe there were.

The Brooklyn Rail · 2024-09-11
poetic 4.50

The novel is a masterful, poetic meditation on physical pain and mortality, capturing the isolating hospital experience during the pandemic with a profound spiritual intimacy.

The Brooklyn Rail praises Greenwell's stylistic mastery in portraying the narrator’s intense pain and hospital confinement as a transformative experience. The depiction of time as both compressed and expansive, alongside the narrator’s fevered reflections, creates a vivid, almost mystical atmosphere. The narrative’s attention to small details and the rhythms of hospital life evoke a deep sense of shared humanity and vulnerability. The review highlights how the novel gives voice to the physical and emotional realities of suffering, while also exploring the narrator’s fear of death and loss of creative and intimate connection. The poetic quality of the prose enhances the spiritual tone, making 'Small Rain' a striking exploration of consciousness and endurance in the face of crisis.

Quick quotes

    Physical pain is the lingua franca of this story, 'a medium of existence,' and 'a brute crushing fact, a hammer pounding meat.'

    The hospital is isolating, not only for its echoes of the first waves of the pandemic—nurse burnout among them—but also because protocols limit when L, the narrator’s beloved, can visit.

    There’s poetry in the way Greenwell describes the crinkle of medical packaging, the swirling rhythms of hospital staff.

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