Small Rain finds great intimacy amid medical isolation

How has the Covid-19 pandemic shaped literary fiction? American novelist Garth Greenwell's turn from two erotically charged novels set in Bulgaria to his latest – a pandemic novel set in the sexless emergency ward of an Iowa hospital – offers answers.

- Shawn Hoo

SMALL RAIN By Garth Greenwell Fiction/Picador/Paperback/ 320 pages/$34.95

In Small Rain, an unnamed narrator – a poet and teacher in Iowa City – experiences a shot of pain in his groin and spends close to two weeks in emergency care amid a bed shortage.

His partner of seven years, Spanish poet and teacher L, is allowed only an hour a day with his lover – leaving the narrator, a double for Greenwell himself, in the sometimes cold and other times comforting care of the medical staff.

In Greenwell's two earlier novels, his protagonists are invariably gay men with multiple lovers, teachers in Bulgaria who court new permutations of desire abroad. Now, Small Rain's narrator, who also used to teach in Bulgaria, has settled down.

He finds himself complacent about the rhythms of domesticity, in a house "more beautiful than anywhere I had lived, full of little graces that were L's graces".