CLEANNESS. By Garth Greenwell. Norton. 223 pages. $26.
“Cleanness,” Garth Greenwell’s second book, takes up where “What Belongs to You,” his first, left off. The narrator of the story cycle is the same, an unnamed expat American teaching English to high school students in Sofia, Bulgaria. He is essentially lonely.
In lean, uncluttered language, Greenwell tells messy, lush stories. No one gets what he wants, but fulfillment isn’t really the point. Our narrator is facing the fact that he will have to make compromises to survive: he might settle for “a life lived beneath the pitch of poetry, a life of inhibition and missed chances, perhaps, but also a bearable life.”
The cop-out (or compromise) of surrendering to a bearable life clashes in these stories with ambitious but dangerous alternatives. He admits that he “feels no end to what I could want and the punishment I would seek.”
The stories the narrator hears, many of them from his students, act as relays to emotion. In “Mentor,” the opener, when a student tells him about being passed over by a boy he loves, the narrator feels as if he’s trapped by the story, as if he’s falling into the narrative and the feeling. He tells G. (no names, just initials), “Other people have felt it,” and gets all choked up.
It could be argued that every story is really about the narrator. He is our filter for all the other perspectives, and his narrative shapes theirs. Memory and art are making something durable out of experiences most notable for comings, goings and chaos.
The mentor advises his bereft student to take control, not of the experience itself, but of the narration: “This is a story you’re telling yourself, a story you’ve made up that will make you unhappy.” The solution is simple: “You can choose a different story.” Perhaps the story will be smaller, less operatic. The student might, in time, wear himself “down to a bearable size,” as his mentor has.
At the center of Greenwell’s book, which he divides into three parts, is a trio of stories that hint at passionate, happy love. R., who made an appearance in “What Belongs to You,” is back. In “Cleanness,” the title story, the two meet at a restaurant. R., who is not “out,” caresses the wood of the table, and the narrator knows, “It was me he wanted to touch.”
He decides to let things happen, whatever they will be. It’s a signal moment when the guarded, hyper-vigilant narrator decides to ride out an emotion, whatever it is and whatever it might become.
The triplet of R. stories is a test case for the narrator’s signature mix of love and cruelty.
A thread of sameness runs through all his encounters, or maybe it’s more fair to say that he plays out versions of the same old drama, his brand. In interior stories like Greenwell’s, when something startling occurs in the external world, it registers.
“Cleanness” ends with such a moment. The lovers lie in bed when there comes a crash and a gust of cold air as a window bursts open. The narrator has already said that R. makes him feel clean. Then, the circulating air seems to anoint the scene. It’s temporary. He knows their love is a “makeshift shelter,” but the narrator closes with a promise to R.: “I love you, anything I am you have use for is yours.”
“The Frog King,” the second R. story, occupies the exact midpoint of the book (and its emotional center). In “What Belongs to You,” the narrator explains his move to Bulgaria: he wants to “feel new in a new country.” Amid all the transactional relationships, the calculations of pain and pleasure, the loneliness, he comes closest to achieving his goal in “The Frog King.”
He and R. are on New Year’s holiday in Bologna. The narrator feels as if his heart would burst — an uncharacteristically hackneyed phrase, as he admits. The Frog King statue of the title stands in the center of the Piazza Maggiore, huge and green. The tradition is to burn it down with the old year at midnight, which is where the story ends, with a big conflagration and with 12 raisins each, one to wish on for each month of the new year. Americans love a fresh start.
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