Small Rain makes a splash
Award-winning American novelist Garth Greenwell debuts in Montreal with his third and latest work, Small Rain
On the evening of Friday, Oct. 18, De Stiil bookstore in the Plateau-Mont-Royal borough hosted a book launch for the highly-anticipated novel Small Rain, the third and latest work of award-winning American writer Garth Greenwell.
The event consisted of a book discussion between Greenwell and Allan Hepburn, a professor of 20th-century English literature at McGill University. The discussion was followed by a brief Q&A and concluded with a book signing session.
Greenwell has long been a critical darling of the literary fiction genre. His debut novel, What Belongs to You, broke out in 2016 and was feted with awards and widespread acclaim. Since then, Cleanness and Small Rain have further established his reputation as a distinct contemporary voice in American gay fiction.
Though it features the same recurring narrator as in Greenwell’s two other books, Small Rain represents a marked tonal shift from its predecessors. As an acute health crisis completely upheaves the life of our unnamed narrator, he is forced to make sense of this life-altering illness while meditating on his relatively “disappointing,” mundane life with his longtime partner, L.
While Greenwell’s oeuvre situates itself conscientiously within a long queer literary tradition, it seems also to cross the boundaries of the genre in its own idiosyncratic way. Gay writers seldom engage with the intricacies of domestic life to the extent that Small Rain does. Hepburn remarked that the genre is mostly saturated with activist or coming-out fiction, while “there are not that many gay American authors who write about queer couples.”
Greenwell’s style is infused with both his musical and linguistic backgrounds, as well as his prominent poetic sensibilities. He conveys both pain and beauty not merely through the medium of language, but also by highlighting its limitations: he is fond of the comma and the semicolon, of unique syntax and punctuation, of inserting untranslatable phrases in Bulgarian and Spanish.
Greenwell articulated how the book is also an exploration of how “brokenness”—be it physical, mental, political or environmental—can be a state which allows for care to pour in. And that the very drudgery that state entails is something that is itself worthy of being cherished—worthy of being written about.
Small Rain’s understated portrayal of the narrator and L’s relationship triumphing through this hardship adds unexpected warmth to its bleak subject matter; through their love story emerges a tribute to domesticity, to the ordinary, to the unremarkable acts of care and service that are vital to the human condition.
Greenwell’s presence at De Stiil created a splash among the local anglophone writing community. Throughout the discussion, the intimate space of the bookstore was filled with spellbound fans, publishers, booksellers and authors alike. Despite the city’s world-famous cultural cache, it is still considerably rare for American authors of Greenwell’s calibre and renown to mingle in Montreal’s thriving Anglo-literary scene.
The book launch’s chief organizer, Braedan Houtman, hopes that this event will springboard many more to come, and that these can help foster a deeper, tighter-knit connection between the local literati and their neighbouring American counterparts.
“Writers do want to come to Montreal,” Houtman said, “it’s just about figuring out ways for it to happen.”
Rachel Lachmansingh, an event attendee who was visiting from Toronto, gushed about the prospect of meeting her favourite author.
“I’ve reread his previous books at least five or six times,” she said. “I’m still only halfway through Small Rain, though. I want to savour this reading experience.”
