Cleanness

by Garth Greenwell

In the highly anticipated follow-up to his beloved debut, What Belongs to You, Garth Greenwell deepens his exploration of foreignness, obligation, and desire

Sofia, Bulgaria, a landlocked city in southern Europe, stirs with hope and impending upheaval. Soviet buildings crumble, wind scatters sand from the far south, and political protesters flood the streets with song.

In this atmosphere of disquiet, an American teacher navigates a life transformed by the discovery and loss of love. As he prepares to leave the place he’s come to call home, he grapples with the intimate encounters that have marked his years abroad, each bearing uncanny reminders of his past. A queer student’s confession recalls his own first love, a stranger’s seduction devolves into paternal sadism, and a romance with another foreigner opens, and heals, old wounds. Each echo reveals startling insights about what it means to seek connection: with those we love, with the places we inhabit, and with our own fugitive selves.

Genres: Fiction, Queer, LGBT, Contemporary, Short Stories, Gay, Literary Fiction

240 pages, Hardcover

First published January 14, 2020

About the author

Garth Greenwell is the author, most recently, of Small Rain, which won the 2025 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. His first novel, What Belongs to You, won the British Book Award for Debut of the Year, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and was a finalist for six other awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His second book of fiction, Cleanness, was a New York Times Notable Book. He is also the co-editor, with R.O. Kwon, of the bestselling anthology KINK: Stories. His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, A Public Space, and VICE, and he has written criticism for The New Yorker, The Yale Review, and Harper’s, among others. His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Harold D Vursell Memorial Award for prose style from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Iowa City and New York, where he is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at NYU.

Reviews

[Adam Dalva · Rating 5 out of 5]

Update: my review for Guernica https://t.co/eVGFG3Fj0j

What a book - audacious, innovative, sometimes disturbing, sometimes romantic. It feels like a short story collection but in many ways functions as a novel, or perhaps more like a symphony. The masterful center of CLEANNESS shows 3 vignettes from the lead's (this isn't a spoiler) doomed romance. The 6 non-chronological stories that surround it initially seem disconnected, but are linked, both thematically and structurally. (1 and 6 are about the students of the lead, a high school teacher in Bulgaria; 2 and 5 are centered on explicit queer BDSM sex scenes after the break-up; 3 and 4 are about fracturing in group dynamics and further color in the local details of the book). The ethics of the lead are in flux, particularly in the final story, which reminds me greatly of Knausgaard's MY STRUGGLE 4, and the book takes on complicated questions of masculinity, power dynamics, and cultural exchange throughout. I savored it, was challenged by it, and will come back to it.

[Meike · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have a hunch that this major release will be polarizing, which only speaks to its poetic power and daring structure - I am deeply impressed by Greenwell's achievement. At the heart, this is a story about a gay American teacher in Sofia, Bulgaria, who wins and loses the heart of a young man from Lisboa - consequently, these events are told in the middle section of the novel, entitled "Loving R.". The first and the last third of the book offer three vignettes each that illustrate the unnamed teacher's life in Bulgaria, his experiences and desires and the repercussions of his love to R.. Greenwell is a fantastic psychological writer, diving deep into the thoughts, subconscious urges and conscious longings of his main character, and the result is not for the timid: If you think you read explicit sex scenes, think again ("At times in this book, I had the goal of writing a scene that was, at once, one hundred percent pornographic and one hundred percent high art", Greenwell explains). The author uses those elaborate and detailed episodes, always told from a first-person perspective, to show sex as a form of communication, to illustrate the workings of sexual desire and what it might be rooted in, and this intention is extremely well executed. On many levels, this is a book about sex, power and control.

So let's go back to the main character and his lover R. for a second. While the former teaches English to high school students, R. is a college exchange student. Our protagonist explains: "Sex had never been joyful for me before, or almost never, it had always been fraught with shame and anxiety and fear, all of which vanished at the sight of his smile, simply vanished, it poured a kind of cleanness over everything we did." The narrator perceives this love as clean, as pure, and some of his sexual desires as shameful, which represents a toxic version of the ideal of cleanness - a complex dynamic that runs through the whole book. The teacher and R. stay together for two years, even after R. has to leave the city, but then their relationship collapses (no spoiler, it becomes clear very early on). Greenwell effectively conveys the inner workings of this transformative relationship, and the fact that the narration is limited to the teacher's point of view makes the reader question the validity of the account.

The other six vignettes all take place after the teacher and R. split up. They are very atmospheric and present a kaleidoscopic account of who and where our narrator is. In part 1, we read about our protagonist
- meeting with a troubled and distressed student who comes out to him hoping to find sympathy and advice for his situation as a gay man in conservative Bulgaria;
- visting a man he met online for a BDSM sex date;
- taking part in anti-government protests.

In part 3, we read about our protagonist
- spending time with Bulgarian writers;
- having very rough sex with a man he met online;
- going out with acquaintances shortly before he leaves Sofia.

All of these present events evoke memories of the narrator's past and reveal their deeper subjective meaning through them. And yes, the book is intentionally disparate, but the voice of the narrator manages to hold it together: The striking details, the gripping descriptions of shifting emotions, the acute perceptions. The writing is captivating and develops a very peculiar dynamic, the mounting curiosity being rooted in the question what other aspects of the main character Greenwell will reveal and how the author will further investigate his central theme, the ambiguity of desire (Greenwell: "I do think one component of desire is always a kind of desire for obliteration of the self, whether we figure that as a metaphysical experience of union and transcendence, or as the desire to be made nothing").

This is daring, fresh, unusual literature, telling a story with no holds barred, showing alienated characters who long for pain and degradation, but also for love. There is something brutal about this narrative, but it's never intentionally shocking. Greenwell himself taught literature at the American College in Sofia, and his first novel What Belongs to You was also set there (and was also a triptych, just like "Cleanness"). The author's approach might thus be compared to Édouard Louis' autobiographically tinged writing. "Cleanness" is a fascinating read and will certainly make waves.

EDIT: I did an interview with Garth Greenwell, and you can listen to parts of it on the podcast, and you can also listen to my piece for German public radio (the translation of the book is titled Reinheit).

[mwana · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was provided by Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

There are books that exist as an attempt to recreate reality. They morph, becoming a string of words that become code—still prose—flowing from page to your body. Imbuing themselves into your very essence. As though slotting themselves in your DNA. Leaving you walking around, marked, stamped. Here walks this bitch, she read me. Short of a pulsating tattoo of text that rolls all over you there's no way to see how a book fundamentally changes you.

I received this book from Netgalley back in 2020 and since then I've had no excuse for not reading it. Perhaps I had thought to read the author's previous work, his debut, What Belongs to You. But alas a bitch is broke and it's not available on Libby. The book lingered in my Kindle library. The bare grayscale back always berating me with its silence. I mocked its existence the longer it stayed unread. I have encountered Greenwell's work before in my reason for living—The New Yorker—and I was impressed. I always knew I'd love this book but perhaps some Providence-led intuition led me to leave this book until 2022 when I could fully appreciate how brilliant, masterful and wonderful it is.

The book starts with our narrator, who remains unnamed and even goes as far as referring to the people around him by their initial, going for a meeting with a student in his class, G.. G. arrives late, by the narrator's American standards, and off they go for a discussion in a tea-hued underground cafe with cigarettes and Deep Conversation™️ about poetry and literature. Immediately, you will feel the narrator's otherness. A running theme where he will compare his status as an American, as a gay man, as an old man, as a fat man and whatever other demographic where he doesn't meet the "default". Or where he is an arbitrary minority like a teacher among students.

The narrator being this mirror, this control experiment, creates a perfect sounding board for all the brilliant characters he meets as he winds down his teaching tenure in Sofia, Bulgaria. In this first chapter, Mentor, G. tells him about his unrequited love for his childhood best friend.

I felt lucky, he said, I expected the whole time that I would mess it up, that our friendship would burn out the way my friendships would always burn out... I understood him entirely, and it seemed to me the intimacy he had drawn between us deepened further, becoming a sort of kinship, which I greeted with both welcome and dread.

This book catches you off-guard with the nonchalant way it delivers heartbreak. These daily pains that we walk with, poverty, ended relationships, job rejections, our narrator encounters them and treats them with the same pragmatism, despair and disdain. Pain knows no geography. You can get your heart broken in Paris just as easily as you can in Nairobi. The difference is, in Paris, the lights will distract you. For a moment, the city will be a beacon of art, romance, culture. In Nairobi, you will get robbed.

But I digress, the narrator has sound-ish advice for our unloved lover.

the intensity you feel now will be like a puzzle you can't solve, a puzzle it finally isn't worth your while to solve. I was speaking of myself, of course, of my own experience with love, with overwhelming love that had made me at times such a stranger to myself...

Which of course, G. with all the brashness and ineptitude of youth dismisses,

I don't want to feel it less, he said, I don't want it to stop, I don't want it to seem like it wasn't real. It would be for nothing if that happened, he said, I don't want it to be a dream, I want it to be real, all of it. And who else could I love... who could I love as much? What life could I want except for that life... what other life than that could I bear?

I understood where G. was coming from. Maybe better than most. And for the first time in my life, I didn't argue. there would be loss in loving another.

The story continues with such beats. Chapter 2 is about Gospodar. A Bulgarian word for Master. A man who our narrator dallies with in order to invoke in him feelings of nothingness. An antithesis to the man who broke our narrator's heart, R. In Loving R., he says

Sex had never been joyful for me before, or almost never, it had always been fraught with shame and anxiety and fear, all of which vanished at the sight of his smile, simply vanished, it poured a kind of cleanness over everything we did.

This is perhaps the most poignant part of the book. The one that had me shedding tears on the bus while I listened to Norah Jones. THIS part is the reason why anyone should read this book. Even though our narrator is a remarkable teacher. A talented observer who finds words to articulate feelings we never even knew we felt,

he must have been quiet as he moved the furniture. I caught my breath at it, I felt a weird pressure and heat climb my throat. I felt like my heart would burst, those were the words for it, the hackneyed phrase, and I was grateful for them, they were a container for what I felt, proof of its commonness. I was grateful for that, too, the commonness of my feeling; I felt some stubborn strangeness in me ease, I felt like part of the human race.

And of course other gems like, there was so much pleasure in being a fool, why had I spent so much of my life guarding against it? which of course mean more to me than they would another reader.

There is a lot of commentary on the political struggles in Bulgaria which I can equate to those in my country. Corrupt leaders go brrr. Tale as old as time.

But perhaps the bit that left me the most...unsettled... is a scene in the final chapter, Valediction. In it the narrator and three of his former students go on bar hopping spree. A final toast for their godspodin. From Sofia with love. One of the students, Z. perches his cocktail of a juice box and vodka on a pillar of historic significance.

Z. chose a pillar the right height and sat the carton on top of it, making me suck my breath between my teeth. What, he asked, and I said something about its antiquity, how it was thousands of years old and he was using it as his table. N. laughed. All this time in Bulgaria, he said, and you're still such an American. We have stuff like this everywhere, he said, if we couldn't touch it we couldn't live.

What good is art, if you can't live it?

[Kai Spellmeier · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Anything I am you have use for is yours.”

Why not start off this review by saying that Cleanness includes the most intense sex scene I’ve ever read? Cause there are quite a few descriptions of gay intimacy in this novel and they’re all rather...memorable.

Now before we get to the rest of it there’s probably one thing that’s helpful to know: Cleanness is more or less a sequel to Greenwell’s first novel. It has the same narrator and I was told that it apparently helps understand him and his actions better if you’ve read it, although the author himself says it’s not necessary to do so in order to read Cleanness. I agree, I certainly didn’t know that before starting this book but I’m going to check out his debut because I feel like I didn’t quite grasp everything that happened here.

I liked the main character well enough and I often felt seen, especially when he struggles trying to balance desire and shame, trying to let go and just explore his sexual fantasies while often feeling like his lust is sinful and inappropriate. I believe it’s a general human experience. We all grow up thinking nudity and sex must be hidden away, must remain unseen. The stigma around queer sex and sexuality only adds to that shame. Being gay is unacceptable, the exploration of queerness is viewed as dirty and forbidden.
All of that is bullshit. As long as sex is consensual by everyone involved, shame has no part in it whatsoever. Still, freeing yourself from these ideas isn’t easy and Greenwell did great discussing the struggle.

Overall I really liked the portrayal of Sofia, Bulgaria and enjoyed the chapters about travels and romance. There were a couple of things that I didn’t love like missing quotation marks (come on) and names being abbreviated to their first letter (why) but I can only recommend this book. Just remember that the content is very graphic and even brutal at times. It’s an adult novel for a reason.

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[Gerhard · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I first had an inkling as a teenager that I might be gay (heaven forbid), I did the first thing that anybody in such a situation, and in their right mind, would do: I headed to the library. Remember that this was before the internet and Google search, so my hunt for ‘gay literature’ had to begin, paradoxically, with books. That is, the reference section.

One of my most prized possessions in those days was a set of Encyclopaedia Britannica … I wonder how many children were as traumatised as I was when I furtively read the entries on ‘sexual pathology’, which included homosexuality and (heaven forbid) masturbation.

I was fortunate enough to stumble across some of the major classics, such as Giovanni’s Room and A Boy’s Own Story. The first gay novel to really grab my attention was The Folding Star by Alan Hollinghurst (which culminates with a real stonker of a sex scene; as a teenager that is all you are interested in, really … so much for the literary aspirations of the poor author.)

Thus began a lifelong love for Hollinghurst, no doubt due to his particular felicity at writing sex scenes. The general media pointed this out rather sniffily when Hollinghurst won the Booker for The Line of Beauty: Do you really have to go into so much detail? (They didn’t complain at how Hollinghurst tended to wax lyrical about furniture and paintings, so I definitely sensed a double standard here.)

Then Hollinghurst himself suddenly seemed to realise that he was now a ‘serious writer’, and announced he would forego forensically correct sex scenes. This was round about the time of the general literary debate that the ‘gay novel’, as it was known, that focused on men exclusively and ignored women, not to mention the rest of the world, was doomed. Of course, the implication was that Hollinghurst himself was an old fossil with some very suspect proclivities.

One of my all-time-favourite gay novels about sex, lust and desire is Giovanni’s Room. I recall a scene where Baldwin describes a lingering scent of shit in the room after sex, which really grossed me out in my virginal state at that time. The only writer to even come close to matching Baldwin for frankness, in my opinion, is another old codger, Edmund White, who wrote somewhere that his prevailing memory of the 1960s was the scent of ‘shit and patchouli’ (I think this was in Our Young Man.)

I have been following gay literature over the years, and have been astounded to see how it has mutated in accordance with the prevailing zeitgeist. Now we have spectacularly diverse books like Jonny Appleseed and Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, which jump head-first into the whole frothy gender bubblebath.

And then there are weird crossover novels like Red White & Royal Blue, which are quite sexually frank (and strangely progressive in their own way, as we have gay anal sex written by a woman), but which, bizarrely, appeal to a largely straight teen audience. Has the entire world gotten its wires crossed?

Imagine my surprise then when a book called What Belongs to You popped onto my reading radar, by the young whippersnapper Garth Greenwell, written in the style of old codgers like Hollinghurst and White. I took an instant dislike to the book, as I thought it was a step backwards for the gay novel itself (which is probably why the critics fawned over it, as admittedly a book like Jonny Appleseed is probably as irksome today as Giovanni’s Room was in its own time.)

For me, the trope of a virginal foreigner travelling to a distant land for a spiritual and sexual awakening, not necessarily in that order, had achieved perfection in Necessary Errors by Caleb Crain, which I had finished just before I read Greenwell. I think in hindsight this did colour my perception of What Belongs to You, but my gut feeling was that it was too stilted, mannered, predictable and, perhaps its biggest offense of all, not nearly ‘gay’ enough (the same kind of writing trap that Hollinghurst had inadvertently fallen into with his later novels, I have always thought.)

So when Cleanness came out, I simply ignored it. I similarly ignored The Sparsholt Affair, and when I did get around to reading that, I was quietly disappointed. I suspected the same would happen with Greenwell’s second book, which came on my radar again when I was looking for a gay novel to read.

I remember the initial hype surrounding Cleanness, tinged with a mild interrogation as to why on earth Greenwell was revisiting the setting and even a character from his debut novel. I think the implication was that he was a ‘one-hit’ wonder, doomed to spiral around his earlier success in ever-widening circles until he dissolved into the literary aether … I mean, there is only so much you can write about the gay scene in Bulgaria.

Apart from the title, and one of the nine vignettes being called ‘Cleanness’, the world only appears once in the actual text, but in a telling context:

Sex had never been joyful for me before, or almost never, it had always been fraught with shame and anxiety and fear, all of which vanished at the sight of his smile, simply vanished, it poured a kind of cleanness over everything we did.

What makes this quotation so compelling is that Cleanness is undoubtedly one of the filthiest ‘literary’ novels that many people are likely to ever read. Even Hollinghurst would raise an eyebrow, I think, probably in solidarity (though Greenwell is not a patch on that other old codger Samuel R. Delany when it comes to perversion.)

If anyone has any doubt that sex scenes are among some of the most difficult to write, and that any author does so at his or her own peril, one only has to have a ghastly chuckle at Literary Review’s yearly Bad Sex in Fiction Award. Greenwell goes one further though, bookending the nine vignettes in Cleanness with two depicting sexual encounters that are quite extraordinary in their detail. I don’t want to give too much away here, as this is very much a book for the reader to discover and experience.

I must admit to not liking Cleanness when I started it. The opening vignette is written in the third person, keeping the reader at a distance. An English teacher meets a student in a bar to listen to a rather jumbled and please-would-you-get-to-the-point confession that both he and the author are very dismissive of. Everyone is referred to by an initial only, while there are no speech marks, and the text often runs on for what seems like pages.

Then I read that second eyebrow-raising vignette, followed immediately by the third recounting a student protest march in Sofia. Up to this point I liked the third the most, as it gave a bit more insight and context into Bulgaria and its culture. And then … I just quietly fell in love with the book.

It actually revolves around the end of a major love affair for the main character. This seismic event is an upheaval in his life, both pre- and post-breakup, which is reflected in the text by the nine vignettes not actually being in any order. The reader has to work out quite carefully what is going on, and to whom, and in what chronology.

Ah ha, Greenwell you whippersnapper, you have actually written a slyly postmodern gay novel! The Bulgarian setting, where homosexuality is frowned upon (I am unsure if it is outlawed) allows Greenwell to focus on the minutiae of his story: How his lovers not only communicate with each other in a public setting, where any same-sex intimacy or contact is frowned upon, but how the entire gay community is inevitably moulded by the lurking online presence of American pornography and hook-up sites.

This is a pretty despicable bunch of characters by any account. Being gay in a non-tolerant society, you would perhaps expect them to behave much more humanely towards each other … But this is one of the most important points that Greenwell is driving here, that any encounter between two people, be it anonymous or in the context of a relationship, is a power dynamic.

How you behave towards any partner in such a context, especially when you lose control and unleash any number of inner demons is, ultimately, what shapes your identity and maybe even your destiny. (The main character calling his hook-up a ‘dirty gay whore’ in the second sex vignette reveals how he himself has internalised that society’s prevailing homophobia.)

What I found extraordinary about Greenwell’s writing here is how effortlessly he conveys a sense of intimacy between his nameless characters, even in the most extraordinary (and sometimes repulsive) circumstances. We feel and breathe as they do, we are aroused and revolted, we are able to get into their heads and deep into their skins, which is a murky terrain often elided by the sex act itself.

A lot of this has to do with the precision of Greenwell’s writing, its rhythms and cadences, his attention to detail, and his utter mastery of voice. The book is fairly easy to read, despite its deceptive postmodernism. Here again Greenwell reminds me of Hollinghurst, an equally distinctive writer. I suspect it is a kind of writing style that has gone out of fashion in our fast-paced social media world. Greenwell favours long sentences with lots of commas, a tactic that essentially forces the reader to slow down, and to become entranced by the cadences of the story.

For me, great writing always transcends itself, especially the simpler it appears on the page. You just know that every single word has been carefully chosen. It is the kind of writing you want to quote huge chunks of at everybody in the vicinity, or read aloud just to taste its ebb and flow on your tongue.

I think it was a masterly decision by Greenwell to revisit What Belongs to You in Cleanness, which he says was partly written in tandem. There is an assuredness and a deftness to the writing here, combined with a sense of relentlessness and fearlessness in plumbing the depths, and the heights, of his characters’ journeys into darkness. There is a pervasive sense of melancholy and alienation in the book that culminates in a truly devastating ending that struck me like a blow to the solar plexus. In the end, Cleanness is all about self-discovery:

Don’t be like that, he said again as I put my arms around him. Do you see? You don’t have to be like that, he said. You can be like this.

[Larry H · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars.

Poetic and powerful, Cleanness is demonstration of a writer at the top of his game.

In his second novel, which is more a collection of interconnected short stories, Garth Greenwell continues his exploration of sexuality, intimacy, desire, and the connections we make and lose.

In Sofia, Bulgaria, the unnamed narrator, an American teacher, prepares to return home after a number of years abroad. He reflects on encounters and memories which affected him—the confessions of a student about his own sexuality and feelings about a friend, an experiment with sadomasochism, memories of a lost love, and connecting with another expatriate.

Greenwell’s writing is lyrical, almost poetic, and sexually frank at times. He provides such an authentic sense of time and place. His words evoke passion, love, loss, and eroticism.

"They could make a whole life, I thought, surprised to think it, these moments that filled me up with sweetness, that had changed the texture of existence for me. I had never thought anything like it before."

Greenwell’s first novel, What Belongs to You , was also powerful and beautifully written. He is definitely an author worthy of recognition, but more importantly, worthy of being read.

Check out my list of the best books I read in 2019 at https://itseithersadnessoreuphoria.blogspot.com/2020/01/the-best-books-i-read-in-2019.html.

Check out my list of the best books of the decade at https://itseithersadnessoreuphoria.blogspot.com/2020/01/my-favorite-books-of-decade.html.

See all of my reviews at itseithersadnessoreuphoria.blogspot.com.

Follow me on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/the.bookishworld.of.yrralh/.

[Ron Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

Four years ago, Garth Greenwell published a debut novel about an American teacher who falls in love with a gay hustler in Bulgaria. “What Belongs to You” might have withered unnoticed in the weeds of literary fiction. Its plot was cramped, its setting dank, its characters obscure. But none of that mattered. The book smoldered with lust and regret across pages of hypnotically gorgeous prose. Critics and other readers responded with awe to Greenwell’s unnerving insight into the tangled desires and betrayals of the heart.

Now Greenwell is back with “Cleanness,” a collection of stories that revisits that teacher’s experience in Bulgaria, a country the author knows from his own stint as a teacher at the American College of Sofia. Three of these nine stories have appeared in the New Yorker — and almost all of them are extraordinary. Although the form is smaller, the scope is broader, and the overall effect even more impressive than his novel. Greenwell’s style remains as elegant as ever, but here it’s perfectly subordinated to a fuller palette of events and themes. . . .

To read the rest of this review, go to The Washington Post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entert...

[Blair · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some books are like dreams that vanish from the memory once they're finished. Others are more like physical places: I can call their geography to mind, I feel I could step back into them if I wanted. Garth Greenwell's What Belongs to You, which I read in 2016, fits into the latter category. I've retained a strong impression of the setting, the authorial voice, the general ambience of the book; I liked it a lot at the time, and this sense of gravity has solidified my idea of its greatness. So I was keen to read this follow-up – not quite a sequel, but rather a 'continuation' of Belongs. Though the narrative never explicitly confirms it, all the details suggest this is the same protagonist, and most of the book is once again set in Sofia, Bulgaria.

Cleanness starts strong. In the first chapter/story, 'Mentor', the narrator meets a student, who makes a halting confession and tells a story that is familiar to the narrator from his own adolescence. It's compelling and affecting. The second and third – 'Gospodar', about a sexual encounter, and 'Decent People', about attending a protest march – are overlong, rambly, and anticlimactic. It is clear by this point that Cleanness is made up of separate scenes, loosely connected, if they are connected at all. Yet there is a throughline: at the (literal) centre of the book is the narrator's relationship with R., which has come to an inevitable end, leaving the narrator unmoored. Part 2, subtitled 'Loving R.', is dedicated to sketching out this relationship in more detail. Then we're back to disparate scenes: a night out with a group of writers, another hook-up, a night out with former students.

It's disappointing to have to write that I just didn't get much out of Cleanness and don't have much to say in conclusion. Greenwell's writing is beautiful – of course. But the book feels so thin. (Figuratively, I mean.) The connecting thread of the narrator's relationship with R. isn't enough to imbue the other scenes with meaning. I liked the prose; the rest left me cold.

I received an advance review copy of Cleanness from the publisher through Edelweiss.

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[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such expressive and detailed writing! Greenwell's meticulous descriptions work beautifully outdoors walking through cities in Bulgaria and in Italy, as well as in restaurants, relationships, and in the bedroom. Each scene is constantly being updated, yet the story keeps moving.

“Once this was Greek, there are still many Greeks here, they build many little churches we still have, and it was true, everywhere you looked there were tiny chapels, places to pray for fisherman out at sea. There was one of these across from our hotel, facing the water, and I had entered it very early that morning, as I set off to stroll through the town on my own\. It had been restored, every inch of the walls had been covered in bright blues and golds, portraits of the Virgin, the saints, and on the ceiling a large, intricate painting of the sun, multiple spoked disks laid atop one another like a complicated set of gears. The remnants of candles stuck up from trays filled with sand in front of the image of the Virgin; a pile of these candles, very long and thin, sat next to a donation box at the door. There’s a feeling such places accrue, a residue of use.”

We are constantly reminded of the beauty and greatness that lies in the history of Bulgaria. Buildings and statues are described, but within the same sentence we learn of the disrepair.

“We had agreed to meet at the fountain in front of the McDonald’s in Slaveykov Square. … Really it wasn’t a fountain anymore, it had been shuttered for years, since faulty wiring stopped a man’s heart one summer as he dipped his fingers into the cool water there.”

The book has nine chapters. While you can see them as chronological, they don’t flow linearly into one another. Each one can be read as a stand-alone mini-story. I do not want to spoil any of the stories for you.

I noticed a beautiful use of the Bulgarian language throughout the book, so I will pick key Bulgarian words, and a couple of key sentences to ‘review’ this book.

If you haven’t read the book yet, you will get an idea of each of the nine chapters here. If you have read the book already, these key words and a couple sentences should flood your memory with a movie directed by Garth Greenwell called “Cleanness”.

1. “Mentor”

G. B.

“That’s the worst thing about teaching, that our actions either have no force at all or have force beyond all intention, and not only our actions but our failures to act, gestures and words held back or unspoken, all we might have done and failed to do; and, more than this, that the consequences echo across years and silence, we can never really know what we’ve done.”

“I don’t want it to feel it less, he said, I don’t want it to stop, I don’t want it to seem like it wasn’t real. It would all be for nothing if that happened, he said, I don’t want it to be a dream, I want it to be real, all of it. And who else could I love, he asked, his voice softening, we grew up together, in the same country, with the same language, we became adults together; who could I meet wherever I go next who could know me like that, who could love me as much as he could love me, who could I love as much” What life could I want except for that life.”

2. “Gospodar”

Gospodar – Master or Lord
Kuchko – Bitch
Ela tuka – come here
Dolu – Stay Down

“I had been lucky and must learn from that luck; I wouldn’t go back to such a place, I thought, this would be the end of it. But how many times had I felt that I could change, I had felt it through all the long months with R., months that I had spent for all my happiness in a state of perpetual hunger; and so at the same time I felt it, I felt too that my resolution was a lie, that it had always been a lie, that my real life was here.”

3. “Decent People”

Ostavka – Resignation
Mrazya vi – I Hate You

“I thought it would be different here, I thought these were the good people the better people, they say they hate the Nazis from Ataka but they’re all the same … I hate this fucking country”

4. “Loving R. - Cleanness”

Skupi – dear, or ‘of great price’
Zapovyadaite – here you are
Da vi e sladko – may it be sweet to you

“Listen, I said, wouldn’t it be better, isn’t it what you want? … I want you to be happy, I said, really happy, and you can’t be happy when you have to lie so much.”

“I didn’t want it but I let him do it, I guess, I mean I didn’t fight him and I never said anything, I let it happen.”

“Anything I am you have use for is yours.”

5. “The Frog King”

Ela tuka – come here
Porta-te bem – behave yourself (Portuguese)
Feliz ano – happy new year

“Even annoyance was part of the pleasure we took in each other, we were that early in love.”

“There was a kind of presence in the painting, I felt, I could sense it humming at a frequency I wanted to tune myself to catch.”

“I can't believe I'm here, he said, it's like a movie, I'm in Venice with my American boyfriend. He Laughed. My sister would be so jealous, she's always wanted an American boyfriend, and I got one first.”

Pages 126-131 A kissing sequence from toe to tears! Incredible! TOO much to copy.

6. Valediction

Zapovyadaite – welcome
Mnogo sots – very socialist
Bulgaria na tri moreta – Bulgaria of the three seas
Spektakul zvuk I svetlina – spectacle of sound and light

“I sensed, just past the edges of what we felt, a hovering dread. It wa a habit of mine, to rush toward an ending once I thought I could see it, as if the fact of loss were easier to bear than the chance of it. I didn’t want that to happen with R., I struggled against it; he was worth struggling for, I thought, as was the person I found I was with him.”

“We have an idea that the things we make will last, but they never do, or almost never; we make them and value them for a while and then they're cleared away. There's no metaphysics in it.”

“I must have been fourteen when I bought the CD … I remember falling asleep to the soldier’s arias … as I listened to him I imagined the life my own voice would lead me to, scrubbed of shame. … I felt hope again.”

7. “Harbor”

Selski aksent – a village accent
Spasenie – salvation
Nazdrave – cheers (toast)
Dobur vecher – good evening
Edno I sushto – one and the same
Iskash li – do you want it
Prekrasno – fine, or beautiful

“But Skups, I said, using my name for him, our name for each other, that’s what we’ve been doing, we’re figuring out our lives, you are my life, I didn’t say, but I thought it, for two years he had been my life.”

“I know I can’t fix it, he said, I know it’s too late, we can’t go back.”

“My hands shook as I undid my belt at the urinals, out of excitement or dread, I felt I could hardly breathe.”

8. “The Little Saint”

Svetcheto – the little saint
Blokove – blocks
Mnogo hubavo beshe – that was good
Sladurche – sweet (boy)

“I called him Svetcheto, the little saint. It made him laugh, both because it was bad Bulgarian, he told me, no one who actually spoke the language would say it, and also because he liked it.”

“People always lie, he would say to me later, why bother to ask, why should I believe them, why should I care.”

“Everybody thinks they’re good at sucking dick but they’re not.”

“I don’t want to live forever, I’d rather live ten years the way I want than live forever and be miserable, I want to be happy.”

“Finally he laid his head on my chest. Don’t be like that, he said again as I put my arms around him. Do you see? You don’t have to be like that, he said. You can be like this.”

9. “An Evening Out”

Chalgoteki – tassels
Gospodinut – Sir
Chesitito – congratulations
Neshtastnitsi – the poor
Kopele – bastard
Lichni karti – ID Card
Bankomat – ATM
Gaidi – bagpipes
Izvinyavaite – pardon me
Suzhalyavam – I’m sorry
Nazdrave – cheers!
Mnogo si slab, be – you are very weak
Ne se chuvstvam dobre – I don’t feel well
Nyamam nishto – I have nothing
Obicham te – I love you
Mahai se – go away

“I think he should do what he feels called to do, I think he should study what he wants.”

“Gospodine, maybe in America what you say is true; you try something there and if you fail it is no problem, you try something else, Americans love starting over, you say it’s never too late. But for us it is always too late.”

“I don’t have any idea what I’ll do after college, I’ll probably have to come back here and be a bum.”

“Then Z. said something else and again I didn’t understand, so he took his phone out of his pocket and typed, holding up the screen for me to read. This is a great night, he had written, and I looked up and said Yes, and we raised our glasses, clinking them before we drank.”

“It’s a kind of performance, of course, all teaching is pretending; I had stood before them as a kind of poem of myself, an ideal image, when for a few hours every day I had been able to t hide or mostly hide the disorder of my life.”


I numbered the nine chapters above as 1..9, but the book is broken up into three sections (I, II, III) with three stories each.

I started this book in February 2020. A week vacation in Boston stalled me on the book. I returned to a March that brought COVID and my concentration on this book was lost for another month. I resumed in April by re-reading from the beginning. I read this book all outdoors while walking (aka exercising) my sparsely populated 2.0 mile loop in my neighborhood during quarantine.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cleanness is a sparse and melancholic novel about an American man living in Bulgaria.  His sexual encounters with other men - some of these encounters loving, some purely transactional - mostly take center stage in this story that unfolds across nine vignettes, in which the narrator reflects on the time he's spent living and teaching in Sofia.

Greenwell's linguistic prowess is this book's greatest strength; I think On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is an obvious enough comparison, though they vary in subject matter - but these are the kind of novels that won't appeal to anyone who grows weary of lyrical prose and introspection, who instead need a diverting plot or a strong attachment to characters.  (I have to wonder if I'm becoming such a reader, because my only qualm with this book was a certain lack of narrative cohesion that seemed to be beside the point entirely.)  But the writing is worth the price of admission alone:

"But none of this was right, I rejected the phrases even as they formed, not just because they were objectionable in themselves but because none of them answered his real fear, which was true, I thought: that we can never be sure of what we want, I mean of the authenticity of it, of its purity in relation to ourselves."

The narrative mostly centers on the protagonist's relationship with a man he calls R. - his ideal, pure image of R. in stark contrast to the degrading sex he seeks from other men after his relationship with R. crumbles.  This tension between cleanness and toxicity underscores his interactions, and the alienation he feels as he grapples with shame and desire can be acutely felt.  Cleanness is a challenging, sexually explicit book that isn't going to be for everyone, but I found it fascinating for its insight and the prolonged sort of aching sadness it sustains. 

Thank you to Netgalley and FSG for the advanced copy provided in exchange for an honest review.

[Doug · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5, rounded up.

Those who were entranced (as I was) by Greenwell's first novel What Belongs to You, nominated for the NBA and numerous other book prizes, have reason to celebrate, since his new book is not even really a sequel as much as it is a continuation of that first book. The narrator/protagonist would seem to be identical: that is, a youngish gay American teaching literature and English in Sofia, Bulgaria. It more or less picks up where the previous book ends, and continues the adventures, professional and romantic, of said individual, who would appear to be at least semi-autobiographical. [No worries if one HASN'T read the first book, since although knowledge of it would probably enhance one's experience, it is by no means necessary for enjoying this one.]

The book is divided into three sections, each three chapters long, which can roughly be designated as before, during, and after the central relationship depicted, which the narrator has with R. (all characters in the book are only designated by initials, which I found a slightly irritating tic, but let go quickly). R. is a younger student from Lisbon, who is restless and rather aimless, but provides the narrator with a focus he himself needs and desires. The 2nd and 8th chapters depict in graphic, almost pornographic detail, pick up encounters of an S & M nature the narrator has with anonymous strangers, in the first of which he is willingly passive, and in the latter of which he assumes the unfamiliar dominant role, and I am sure these will both garner lots of attention and be polarizing for many. But they are absolutely justified in delineating the growth of the protagonist, which would seem to be the author's intent, rather than mere prurience.

My only other (minor) quibble is that, since six of these stories were published previously as stand-alone short stories in various magazines and literary journals, they don't have a strong through line, but these short story collection/pseudo-novels seem to becoming more the norm these days (see: All That Man Is; Girl, Woman, Other; Disappearing Earth, etc.). And in an odd way, it also reminded me of Rachel Cusk's recent trilogy, in that one finds out much about the central figure through both internal thoughts and interactions with others.

I have a feeling this book will be an even bigger success for Greenwell, and probably go on to be nominated for, and possibly win, many book awards in 2020.

My sincere thanks to Netgalley and FS & G for an ARC of this book in exchange for this honest and enthusiastic review.

[Elyse Walters · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having been in ‘aw’ from
Garth Greenwell’s book...
“What Belong’s To You”...
I knew I wanted to read this follow up.
His writing is tender, bold, thoughtful, compassionate....
unadulterated truth!
Breathtaking language.

I was on the San Francisco library/ ebook overdrive waitlist for months....
Finally my turn arrived.
Then....
I inhaled this book.
It can be read in a few hours....
But the lasting experience should last at least a few years.
Gorgeous writing....
....love, gay sex, intimacy, desire, loneliness, shame, seduction, sadomasochism, voyeurism, vulnerability, poetry, protests, secret confessions...
a teacher, a student, a foreigner....
An American teacher in Bulgaria....

The teacher speaking:
“Think of what he wants to do in that poem, I said, and when the country was at war with itself, absolutely broken; he wants to make an image of America anyone can buy into.
Like that miraculous section, and I used that word miraculous, I was getting excited, I was getting swept up in Whitman as I always did, it was what I loved about him and what I mistrusted, too, The feelings he could arouse that could swamp judgment. That section where all he does is name things, I said, well, not things, people, it’s just a list, he wants it to include everyone, he wants to find a place for everyone. An
equal place, I went on, though I was talking too much now, and a place in his affection, too. There are those wonderful moments he puts in parentheses, like a whisper, do you remember where he tells us he loves the person he’s just named.
That’s what he thought democracy was, I said, a poem that named things and made an occasion for you to love them; he wanted to stitch America up, I said, he wanted to break all the divisions down. There’s only one time he does the opposite, it’s in the same list, where he puts a prostitute right next to the president, do you remember? None of them did, but they were paying attention, less interested maybe in the poem or what I was saying then in my excitement, which they observed like some freakish natural phenomenon, I thought. There’s a crowd making fun of a prostitute, I said, and that’s the one time Whitman separates himself, he says they laugh at you, but I do not laugh at you. And that’s the problem, I hurried on, that’s the problem with democracy, The danger of crowds, it’s the problem with the protests, too: how do you take a crowd and turn it into a populace, how do you take a voice of a crowd and turn it into a vox populi, The voice of a people”.

Reading Garth is a treasure - reflective...
A flair of happiness...
A little dread...
A little relief...
A little wounded...
A little silly and ridiculous...
A little discomfort...
A little caution...
A little eager for something new, fresh, and clean...
A little singing in the streets...

Garth Greenwell personalizes and anthropomorphizes sexuality, intensity of desires, art, music, depths of beauty, and humanity.....
both aggressively and tenderly.

Beauty, loss, sorrows, hope...
A bittersweet experience.

Energizing and powerful!!

[ivanareadsalot · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've so so many feelings. All great ones. I definitely enjoyed Cleanness more than What Belongs To You, and I know that this work ended in a way that leaves us with enough room to continue exploring the protagonist's raw eroticism and variance in expressions of intimacy, but after being suffused by Greenwell's addictive and mesmeric narrative, I really really wanted a different ending for this installment.

But that's on me. Romantic, fluffball, butterflies in my tummy me.

I've been waiting for this work, this author, to next level and carve me right open. Cleanness led me to the doorstep of something rending, but still kept me bubbled, and wanting.

So, for now, I am settled and quite pleased. Immensely pleased to have discovered Garth Greenwell and his burgeoning power to arrest the reader from the get-go, and then dominating all senses in a narcotic stream following the first word. And, of course, massively pleased with the feeling of anticipation for what is still yet to come.

Thank you to Edelweiss for providing me with this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

[Erik · Rating 5 out of 5]

In yet another book that just "gets" it when it comes to queer experiences in 2019, Greenwell's latest book, "Cleanness," is a remarkable take on the darkness - and lightness - of queer being.

Written in much the same ethereal style as his other past works, "Cleanness" follows the narrator as he navigates his time teaching English in economically depressed Bulgaria. With chapters engaged with BDSM themes and chapters engaged with the complications and beauties of gay love and romance, Greenwell's book doesn't shy away from asking readers to consider their own relationships to themselves and what this personal relationship means about their ability to love others and accept love. The setting and pace - in what feels to be a cold and post-communist Eastern Europe - helps code the story in a fog that ties in deeply with the melancholy of the book. This melancholy, though, is far from resembling the sadness that happens often in gay books. Instead the mood captures something essential about gay life: we form bonds with ourselves because in a society where we are outcasts, life certainly isn't light and easy but it certainly can be beautiful.

A book about being clean and accepting dirt, about disease and love, "Cleanness" is yet another example of why Greenwell is the best gay writer of our generation.

[nastya · Rating 1 out of 5]

Wow I think I’ve read gay erotica with more plot and character exploration and less sex than this book. My question is what was the point. Except to show how backwards Bulgaria is I suppose.

All Bulgarian architecture is ugly, it's cold, every Bulgarian has ugly crooked teeth, every Bulgarian man he has sex with is a pervert. His Portuguese boyfriend says that our hero likes to live in sad places and this is what Bulgaria is for Garth. It's not a country with a culture, he doesn't care about it. He is there to punish his emo self, the same way he lets himself being humiliated and drinks piss from a Bulgarian Dom's dick. Poor Bulgaria, what did it ever do to you, Garth?
Just a few beautiful thoughtful and very deep observations:

Bulgaria had a storied history in opera, it had produced some of the best singers I had listened to in my bedroom as a teenager, my hoarded recordings; but musicians too were fleeing westward, now that they could, leaving behind them anyone whose talents couldn’t buy them a ticket out.
****
Everybody thinks they’re good at sucking dick but they’re not, usually, they don’t cover their teeth or they make the same single motion again and again or they can’t take it deep enough or there’s something half-hearted about it, even guys who claim they love to suck, who pride themselves on it.

[Lyn❤Loves❤Listening to Real Voices Only!!!!❤️🎧📚 Addict ON HIATUS · Rating 3 out of 5]

Audio - 5 ++++ The author narrated his own book!!! And daaammmnnn did he do an amazing job!! I'm so impressed. I usually don't bother with fictional books narrated by the author. The few I've sampled were not good. But Garth Greenwell was fabulous!

Story - 3 Stars

At first, I was confused because I didn't realize this book was a series of short stories. I kept wondering who the new characters were. My bad.

The stories were interesting. There was good amount of kinky erotica.

Between the exquisite writing and audio performance (the author is seriously gifted), I have no regrets about this book.

[N · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading Garth Greenwell's follow-up to his sorrowful "What Belongs to You" presents itself as a series of interlocking vignettes about how our narrator, an American English teacher, in Sofia, Bulgaria is always looking for love: when he comes close to moving towards the hope of a successful relationship, usually the the next step of initial flirtation or casual sex, sadly, he sabotages it through not having been able to process his own hurts, heartbreaks, and fear of intimacy brought on I would say from his father, and lover Mitko, from "What Belongs to You".

“Mentor" is a bittersweet dinner in which our narrator listens to a former student who feels smitten and empowered after admitting his affections to his lover.

Sentences like "he knew nothing about me, about those aspects of my life there's no reason for my students to guess at, even though I'm more open than is usual for my vocation, or for my trade. He knew nothing about me, about the appetites that sometimes shame me, and yet I still feel indicted" creep through our Narrator's mind as he listens to G talk about his experience of love, as his loneliness comes creeping back in: "I was lonely, in a way I had never been before, not just alone, but incapable of being not alone".

G's desire, of longing permeates this chapter by "If I could kiss him just once, that would be enough. I wouldn't want anything more". Break my heart, Mr. Greenwell.

The most heartbreaking section of the novel is the doomed romance that our Narrator has with R. Trying to achieve intimacy and risking rejection, they both make love, drink cheap wine, and talk about R returning to Portugal, but would like to visit our Narrator, who is preparing to leave Sofia after seven exhausting years.

The two of them take a train to Bologna, then Venice, Italy where it seems that the couple seems to be trying to find a way to sabotage their relationship instead of being present for each other.

Mr. Greenwell writes these sections with a heavy heart, and with empathic feeling for both characters. The two chapters concerning R and the Narrator could be a stand-alone novella if it could.

In two chapters, our Narrator ventures into being dominated during sex; and the other, dominates a young man during sex where it ends with the possibility of temporary love that's not meant to be.

Written with longing, with a heaviness that lingers, where the search for love in many places seems to be the motif of the vignettes, Mr. Greenwell succeeds in being truthful about the complexities of relationships, of how difficult it is to find that elusive thing called commitment, "We don't get to choose anything, we think we do but it's an illusion, we're insects, we get stepped on, or we don't...I did make it worse, whether I got angry or sad or tried to make him feel my own happiness, the happiness I felt so often just looking at him, as he slept or read, or stared into the screen of his laptop. It was an immovable force".

A character in the last vignette declares, "it's a way of loving you, and he sighed and looked away from me", Mr. Greenwell knows we have all been there, felt feelings of longing, rejection, and the bittersweet and melancholic aftermath of the pain of love.

[Darryl Suite · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Cleanness, we follow a gay American teacher, who works abroad in Bulgaria. The crux of the novel centers around our unnamed protagonist’s love affair with R. and their eventual undoing. Now let’s address the elephant in the room: THE SECOND CHAPTER. Let’s talk about that, friends. The second chapter revolves around the complexities of a consensual violent sexual encounter. It’s unabashedly frank, graphic… and thought-provoking. It examines the notion of wanting to be sexually controlled, and is an inside look at one man’s hunger to be physically and mentally mistreated all for the sake of pleasure. It’s the kind of provocative literature designed to make every part of your body engage with the text. This will be the make it or break it chapter for readers, folks.

Cleanness feels voyeuristic because we’re peeping into someone’s deepest and most sacred thoughts. We might feel like we have no right to bear witness to such emotional nakedness, but that is where the power of Cleanness lies. It feels very real, startlingly real. It is a multifaceted and unapologetic exploration of queerness. Queer love, desire, identity, even the unwanted murky baggage that can sometimes come along with it: confusion, self-loathing, displacement, fear, estrangement, suffering, heartbreak (sigh, that’s a tough one in this novel), longing.

Oh my, let me leave you on a high. Let’s talk about “The Frog King,” a chapter that is bewitching and downright romantic. It concludes with a euphoric moment where a character comes to the realization that he is loved, truly loved. It is an eruption of unbridled elation, and the swiftness of this revelation is both moving, tender, and unforgettable. It is definitely my favorite moment in the book. I have a feeling it will be the same for you. Ah, love at its most stunning.

Cleanness is a powerful force. It unnerved my senses, engulfed my heart, obliterated my emotions,  and tapped into my soul even when I didn't want it to. I’m still trying to catch my breath over here.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B7rsiIOAe...

[Maria Lago · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found Cleanness quite dirty, hohoho

[Tiernan · Rating 5 out of 5]

just as good the second time 🥰
video review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uN3nN...

[Mark Ward · Rating 2 out of 5]

*Spoilers throughout*

In 2016, I read a library copy of What Belongs to You and loved it so much, I bought a copy shortly after, and read it again. It was a perfect little novel, really. I know there are people who prefer the novella Mitko (which is an earlier version of the first section of WBTY) but I read WBTY first, and I thought it was all absolutely necessary, perfect even. Beautifully written, it told the story of the unnamed narrator’s relationship – no, experiences – with Mitko, with a middle section that told of the narrator’s childhood, and told us, really, everything we needed to know about the narrator. It was all right there in its pages.

Which is why, when I heard that Cleanness featured the same unnamed narrator in the same setting (Sofia, Bulgaria), I was worried. Greenwell had written a, frankly, brilliant novel in WBTY, why would he go back to that world so soon? But then, I thought, he had written a brilliant novel, maybe Cleanness would be just as good.

Split into three sections like WBTY, but in Cleanness each section has three chapters within it, giving us a book of nine stories. And firstly, the format needs addressing: Cleanness isn’t a novel, and it isn’t really a book of short stories. It feels like it’s in that murky world of the fix-up novel, where existing stories are slotted around new ones to make up a book, but by all accounts this book was planned. Sure, there’s overlap and reference within but the stories feel like remote islands separated by hundreds of miles of empty sea.

Immediately, in the first section, I knew this was not WBTY (and look, that’s okay, it could be something else, and I would get on board, but…) and I went from being excited to, at times, hating this book. One reviewer said that you could read Cleanness independent of WBTY, but I can’t imagine how (or why) you would.

This first section contains three pieces, 'Mentor', a bland and relatively boring section about the narrator and a gay student looking for advice. It’s a piece that thinks it’s more meaningful than it actually is (this is a world where gestures seem imbued with earth-shattering meaning). And things that in the first book I didn’t mind, such as only calling characters by their initial, in 'Mentor' with a much larger cast of classmates that the student was discussing, often became confusing. (Also, for all the fact that the second section is called 'Loving R.', it is more than telling that the only person named in either of the two books is Mitko, and not R. the young man the narrator spent years with). The next piece, 'Gospodar', is where I started to despair. Greenwell has spoken a good bit recently about the purported "radicality" of this book, how he wanted to write something sexual but ‘art’. Well, unfortunately, throughout the book, Greenwell writes about sex as if he’s the first person to ever write about it, and it grates. This section, in which our narrator is a sub in a dom/sub scene, turns violent at the end, and disturbing (it is never mentioned again outside of this section and the ramifications of the rape are never explored). I feel that Greenwell purposely wanted to write ‘sexy’ BDSM lit prose that turned into something darker, and whilst it shocked (and that was certainly part of the point), it just felt nasty and stuck out like a sore thumb. The third piece, 'Decent People', about rallies in Sofia escaped my memory entirely (to the point that I had to look it up).

The second section, the only one with a title – 'Loving R.' – fares better as it has a unified subject, but at times it feels, well, amateur. In the collection’s title story, the narrator and R. have a stormy conversation whilst a literal storm takes place outside the restaurant. I really feel that Greenwell is capable of much better than this hamfistedness. I was vaguely surprised to learn that R., who is briefly mentioned in WBTY (and I’m curious to investigate where Cleanness sits temporally in relation to WBTY), was young (perhaps this was mentioned in WBTY, but I had forgotten?). But then, the whole book, both of them really, is about the narrator’s attraction to young men, yet it is a largely unexamined attraction, which is curious considering that many of the men (outside of the sex-based stories) are his current or former students. I’m not saying a character in a novel has to be a paragon of virtue – one of my favourite novels is Lolita – but the narrator lives a rather unexamined life, which is odd for someone who writes about his life so much. The relationship with R. inevitably ends – and perhaps aside from the narrator’s predilections, this is why he was a student: to give a definite end date – but this leads us back to the freewheeling morass the first section had been in, where the narrator either dreams his way through his life or is violently, sexually, granularly there.

The third section opens with a piece called 'Harbor', a gathering of American and Bulgarian writers, of which the narrator is one, and it made me curious, what does the narrator write? I don’t think the narrator is the author of these novels, i.e.. the narrator hasn’t written WBTY, he is a character in it, but I would like to read something of what he has written, something external from his always-on-the-run-brain. But perhaps the narrator's writing is terrible, or worse, mediocre, and best avoided. The second piece, 'The Little Saint', is the companion to 'Gospodar', except in this story, the narrator is the dom. Again, Greenwell writes as if this is earth-shattering, but it isn’t (as evidenced from the even-keel of the sub), but perhaps that’s the point, perhaps the narrator is over-dramatic, wracked on the cross of his own emotions, constantly running unexpressed in his head. Greenwell also tries to write sex whilst aware of the clichés of writing sex, leading to an all-too-knowing commentary on dialogue that, while appreciated, doesn’t quite work. Maybe, overall, it’s the character of the narrator that I’ve grown to dislike. The last section 'An Evening Out' tells of the narrator, again with students (former ones this time), one of whom he surreptitiously hits on, before he leaves Bulgaria and teaching forever. Why? Teaching, because he’s fed up with it (fair enough). Why is he leaving Bulgaria? Presumably because he is no longer teaching? What will he do now? No one cares enough to say, or that it is so meaningless as to not even be mentioned. The book ends with him, drunk, curled up with a street dog that after all his years there, he finally lets into his house (and if that isn’t a backhanded reference to Mitko, I don’t know what is).

More than anything, this book, not only does it just not work as a narrative for me – too “this x makes you feel y, doesn’t it?”, too not the sum of its parts, nor its parts operating singularly – but it feels, plainly, unnecessary. Sure, Greenwell can write, and writes beautiful prose at that, but the story should have ended with WBTY. Cleanness adds nothing new, and for all of its talk about sex, and shame and gay men’s interaction with both, it adds nothing really new there either. Cleanness feels like an afterthought, the ghost of a lost love stuck wandering where it died, forever.

[Flo · Rating 4 out of 5]

The writing is elegant and intimate.

The story is so fragmented that it almost feels like a collection of short stories.

Two chapters are very graphic. Yes, you can see some sort of elegance in the writing of them, but 90% of those chapters are explicit descriptions of very particular sexual activities.

Just like with his first novel, what I liked the most was his presentation of gay life in Bulgaria. He lived in it, you can see that he loved and understood it, and is able to present it with a delicate warm that shows both the difficulties and the beauty of it.

[John Anthony · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5*

Here I am in Bulgaria again with Garth Greenwell. I feel to be getting to know them both quite well! This is a series of longish short stories which tend to relate to each other. Equally, it could be described as a novel in the form of short stories. I rated his debut novel, “What Belongs To You”, highly. This, no less so. He is a huge talent. The writing is sublime. Docked half a star for some overlong sentences being a mean bastard and reluctant to award 3 x 5*s in a row!

[Paris (parisperusing) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Garth Greenwell's Cleanness is an erogenous, esoteric, hurt-so-good of a novel that outlines the poignant encounters of a gay American professor visiting from the south who forges bonds, both sexual and sentimental, with various men while teaching abroad in Sofia, Bulgaria. Although the focal point of the narrative peers from the most private localities of the speaker’s emotions — his clemency for a closeted student; the distress of filthy, fleeting affairs; the betrayals of true love coming to its bittersweet end — Cleanness speaks volumes to the ways shame and solitude make queer men prisoners to their own desires.

Written in a similar vein as Greenwell’s lauded debut novel, What Belongs to You, Cleanness unfolds like a triptych of three parts. It’s opener, “1.” introduces the character G., a closeted gay student who, left licking his wounds after his first brush of unrequited love, sequesters to a smokey bar with his instructor, who imparts affection and empathy as the young man recalls the heartbreak he experiences after confessing his love for a childhood friend.

“If I could just kiss him, he said, his voice stripped now and small, if I could kiss him just once, that would be enough, I wouldn’t want anything more,” G. confesses to his mentor, who, like all gay men come to realize, that a life of contentment is in fact no life at all. The notion itself is an ageless lie, one of the first gay men internalize until nature has its way. It is the first flame of a slow-burning life.

Cleanness takes a sharp, sweet turn in “Loving R.,” perhaps the most hardcore and beguiling section of the novel, one that chronicles the speaker’s beautiful and torturous affair with a student called R. Neither seems to expect that, over the course of a single winter vacation, what would come of it is a blissful, seismic love. With marvelous prowess at rendering the benevolence and brutalities of gay ardor, anyone with an appetite for erotica will take tremendous delight in not only the paradisal backdrop Greenwell draws out for his lovers, but even more for the sensual, galvanizing prose that whets, as Greenwell so perfectly describes, “the G-spot of the story.”

“I held on more tightly to R. and drove into him more fiercely, drawing from him those noises of pain and of need, noises maybe of pleasure too. I wanted to root into him, even as the wind said all rootedness was a sham, poor harbors, I love you, I thought suddenly in that rush that makes so much seem possible, I love you, anything I am you have use for is yours.”

As most gay love stories, Greenwell remains faithful to the real-life fluctuations of intimacy and emotion that often precipitates an unhappy ending. Such is the case when the couple’s spree of pleasure and passion ebbs into the story’s finale, “III.,” wherein the speaker leans into the crushing blow of heartbreak and desperation after their two-year romance comes to an end. Longing without R., the narrator finds himself back in the clutches of loneliness, setting him off in search of when who, much like him, are plighted with subduing desires. “Like a flame submerged in glass, sealed off as always when I feel desire I shouldn’t feel,” the speaker says in describing not only himself but the unbearable pain of containing these compulsions.

In the years after R., those of groping through the darkness in search of a connection — from online dating chat rooms to the clandestine stalls hidden beneath the cold country above — what unfurls from that sensation is at once a feeling of intensity and rage — but is desire not equal parts both? Told with pure compassion and fervor, Cleanness is an arresting novel of dominating intimacy that is by turns heavy to bear and delicate to touch — a gorgeous story with a beating heart at its core.

If you liked my review, feel free to follow me @parisperusing on Instagram.
(Thank you, FSG, for sending me an early copy in exchange for a review.)

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a tough book, in this pandemic year, I could not read it straight through, had to do it a story at a time. But well worth the slowness. The emotional rigor of this book--in the hands of a poet like Greenwell--was breathtaking. A novel in linked stories, Cleanness is "about" about a gay, 30-something American teacher in Bulgaria, his involvement with his students ("Mentor"); his deep, ground-note pull towards chaos and intensity and his own inchoate depths, pain and humiliation and intense desire expressed in S&M (those who have trouble with manifestations of these extreme aspects of sexuality should approach the stories "Gospodar" and "The Little Saint" with care); his fellow-traveling the Bulgarian protests of 1989 ("Decent People"); and his grand love affair with the student R. who is Portuguese and has not come out to anyone but the narrator ("Cleanness," "The Frog King," "A Valediction"). Then his loneliness, acted out at an academic conference ("Harbor"); ending with a night out with his graduating students as his tenure in Bulgaria comes to a close ("An Evening Out.")

The most difficult chapters are also the most amazing--that he can take us through such intense, strange experiences and make us understand the narrator's drive, his pleasure and his compulsion and how he feels about it, the 'cleanness' of the honesty I think is the point of this. The narrator's craving for the intensity of an extreme sensual experience in the two S&M stories reminded me so much of the Consul in Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano and his craving for the mescal bar, which he calls "the paradise of my despair." In the hands of Greenwell, there is a clarity in this extremity which allows him to understand things about himself that he cannot experience in other ways. When he is with R., he experiences other things--love, tenderness, responsibility, the possibility of an enduring relationship--and yet there is this other side of him, which is equally valid and compelling--and we understand how they fit together inside this one individual.

His deftness in capturing evanescent emotional states and his demand for depth and honesty is intensified by the sheer deftness of his language, a pleasure as intense as the content. Looking at the four students, the narrator says, "I see them as no one else sees them, my profession is a kind of long looking..." In a sexual situation: "There were things I could say in his language, because i spoke it poorly, without self-conscious or shame, as if there were something in me unreachable in my own language, something I could reach only with that blunter instrument by which I too was made a blunt instrument..."

Also, the randomness of the encounters and relationships in the book felt so real to me--I think the novel in stories worked very well for Greenwell here, because a continuous novel would have demanded more narrative cohesion, and the randomness and even awkwardness of being a foreigner, and a gay foreigner in a homophobic country, requires that randomness to feel true.

This is not a "read" in the sense of something you're going to toss off--this is an encounter with a brilliant writer who is asking questions about life. So glad I kept returning.

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 4 out of 5]

An early morning Instagram chat with Hardcoverheartsblog helped me solidify my feelings about this book. Much like Garth Greenwell's last novel, What Belongs to You, which I admit I never finished, the narrator feels like the author sharing stories from his time teaching English in Bulgaria. In a few he is quite young, some are during revolution, and in some he is older (but the narrator is the same.) His (very explicit and often challenging) sexual encounters, relationships, and friendships are only with first initials, shrouding all stories in a layer of secrecy that suits the plight of a gay man in Bulgaria. The limits he pushes in risk-taking behavior, violence, and so on also manage to show how perhaps Americans also aren't as free as they think they are, and how deeply we internalize homophobic narratives and more.

I had a copy of this book from the publisher through Netgalley and it came out January 14.

[Jin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sehr gerne lese ich Krimis, unter anderem auch die, die sehr brutale Szenen beinhalten, die detailreich darstellen wie z.B. jemand ermordet wird. Es ist provozierend, schockierend und nagt an meinen Nerven, so als würde man einem Unfall beiwohnen. So ähnlich haben sich manche Szenen in diesem Buch angefühlt. Die aufgeladenen, detaillierten Sex-Szenen waren intensiv, nicht nur wegen den expliziten Beschreibungen, sondern auch wegen den Emotionen, die mit diesen Szenen verbunden waren. Man fragt sich zwar, ob es unbedingt notwendig war, dass man so explizit Dinge beschreiben muss, ob es dann überhaupt noch Literatur, also eine Kunst, oder vielleicht doch nur vulgär war. Aber das muss wohl jeder selbst für sich entscheiden.

Für mich hat alles zueinander gut gepasst, es war überzeugend diese sexuellen Szenen mit einzubauen und darüber zu sprechen. Der Autor nutzt sie um die Zerbrechlichkeit und Intimität darzustellen und schafft damit auf verschiedenen Ebenen Dissonanzen. Es fängt schon mit dem Protagonisten an, der nicht Zuhause ist, aber auch seine Heimat nicht als sein Zuhause zu empfinden scheint, Er ist in der Fremde, bei fremden Personen und beobachtet nicht nur wie er sich selbst verändert, sondern auch seine Außenwelt. Alles scheint in flüssiger Bewegung zu sein, sich zu ändern und weiterzuziehen. Aber das Ganze wird so klasse und gefühlvoll, literarisch meisterhaft beschrieben, dass ich das Buch ohne Pause durchgelesen habe. Ich glaube das Buch bietet unglaublich viel Gesprächsstoff und Interpretationsmöglichkeit, dass es definitiv was für Literaturliebhaber ist. Manche Stellen fand ich zwar etwas langatmig, aber trotzdem war die Erzählsprache sehr schön zu lesen und es war insgesamt ein tolles Leseerlebnis!

** Dieses Buch wurde mir über NetGalley als E-Book zur Verfügung gestellt **

[Conor Ahern · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kind of a weird structure to this book--we start off with an unsettling BDSM encounter, then move into the majority of the plot--the narrator's relationship with "R," an Azorean beau living an unhappily repressed life with the narrator in the Sofia of probably the early 2000s--and then it ends with a drunken night out with two youths the narrator had taught in the year before he left to return to the United States.

I'm not sure what to make of it, honestly. But it sure was pretty and quite smutty at times.

[BookChampions · Rating 5 out of 5]

No surprise over here that Garth Greenwell has written one of the most erotic books I've ever read; what makes this book so essential, for me at least, is the way he smashes taboos of sexuality while exposing how our sexuality is tangled up in the snares of human shame.

*Cleanness* is far from being a downer. In fact, the three middle chapters are about as soul-crushingly honest and tender as you can get. The last lines of each of these chapters rang inside me with a beautiful clamor.

I know I'll need to reread the book again, but upon this first reading, I've come to see the book as a bit of a nesting doll. The novel is broken up into nine interlocking stories, with the very middle (and fifth) story being the most vulnerable and free of emotional and psychic blockage. It is the yoke of the egg, the one holding a beautiful promise for our unnamed protagonist.

The first and ninth chapters, the outer shell, explore protagonist as a queer teacher (both mention this vocation of education as a "role" he plays)--in both cases he feels compelled to police himself and his feelings. These chapters struck me as sad. The second and eighth chapters are the most explicit, where the protagonist's sexual hunger is described in fascinating detail. Yet they are also tinged with unease (dis-ease--in both cases he worries about unprotected sex). What could arguably be described as pretty raw exposure of unadulterated self, I saw as still quite guarded and performative.

Those middle chapters about R., though, they are where the character takes flight. It held a promise for both men that resolution was possible, though not easy. That these are the center chapters and not the final ones challenges readers, especially queer men, to find a balance between our desire, our love, our duty, and our self.

*Cleanness* is not only a must read but a must reread.

UPDATE: I told you I was going to reread this one. Definitely one of the best books I read this year. It's gorgeously written, still, and there were so many notes I left in my copy. It's also a pretty emotionally harrowing read for me—not *A Little Life*-level, but it had its moments. I love this so sad, so honest book.

[Jessica Woodbury · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book slowly, taking in just one or two of its 9 vignettes at a time. Some of the stories are slow, meandering, meditative. Others are intense and urgent. Me being me, I have to work a bit at the former and breeze through the latter. Luckily I'd read Greenwell's previous novel and knew that even if it took me a while it would be worth it. And it was.

All that said, what elevated this novel above WHAT BELONGS TO YOU for me personally was its absolutely perfectly written sex scenes. It's not just that they were written well, but the two of them that occur make up almost the entirety of a chapter/vignette each. I am trying to remember the last time I read a sex scene that went on for 10, 20 pages, and that had any sense of momentum, not to mention momentum that's sustained over such a long time. And, on top of that, there is such emotional openness here, a willingness to discuss sexual activities that are vulnerable but also dangerous, a willingness to explore the emotional state of a person who participates in risky sexual behavior with empathy. Greenwell is not trying to justify anything, nor is he writing with regret. It is just the moment and the feeling and even if the characters may feel pain or shame or confusion, we navigate through all those difficult waters with care. These two chapters were, by far, my favorite. They are everything writing about sex can be.