Review: Garth Greenwell’s mystical novel ‘Small Rain’ teaches the art of living from a hospital bed
The unnamed narrator of Small Rain enters the dire space of an American hospital where he will spend weeks in recovery. So many tubes and wires; so much waiting. But there is also a strange gift in being a patient. (iStock)In the mystical tradition of the desert dwellers, there is a key moment—a movement, really—when the spiritual seeker withdraws from the chatter and noise of the world in order to devote attention to God and the soul. The ancient Greek word for this withdrawal is anachoresis, from which we get the notion of the anchorite, the hermit who retreats to the desert or to a cell in order to quell the distractions of the world and do battle with the flesh and the Devil, all in search of divine love.
In the life of St. Ignatius Loyola, we see that such moments of anchoritic disruption are not always voluntary. Sometimes a retreat from worldly absorption is enforced by illness or injury. The cannonball that shattered Ignatius’ legs required months of recuperation. The bedroom of his convalescence became a veritable desert of spiritual encounter. He entered the room as a patient; he left it as a monk.
In this sense, Garth Greenwell’s Small Rain is a mystical novel, a story of anachoresis in which illness becomes an occasion for a new attention to one’s life and loves. After a searing episode of inexplicable pain, the unnamed narrator enters the dire space of an American hospital where he will spend weeks in recovery. His anger and frustration with the U.S. healthcare system is visceral and understandable. So many tubes and wires; so much waiting. But there is also a strange gift in being a patient.
“I felt weirdly detached,” the narrator admits, “engrossed by pain and also by a strange relief, the relief of being a patient, of being passive.” A patient suffers rather than acts, undergoes rather than accomplishes. But such passivity can also be a mode of receptivity. Sometimes when a life is interrupted in this way, we become open to gifts otherwise hidden by our agency, activity and accomplishment.
As the story unfolds, the malaise of the hospital is unsettled by two channels of grace: people and poetry—or, more broadly, by art and the art of caring. While there are cold, aloof doctors and disappointing (overwhelmed) nurses, the tiny world of the narrator’s hospital room is a site of visitation by people who embody the art of caring—like Frank, an E.R. nurse, and Alivia, an I.C.U. nurse. Each of them are drawn as marvelously human characters, with their own quirks and hopes, who give the narrator something irreducible: recognition. These otherwise invisible professionals see him suffering, see his fear, see his loneliness, and respond with warmth and care that is humane and humanizing. To them, he is not just a “case.”
Being seen becomes the condition for seeing anew, which is what our patient receives from art. The narrator of Small Rain is a poet and a teacher at a local college. He studied music and loves literature. There is a beautiful, touching moment early in the story when Frank, the E.R. nurse, shares a story about his jazz band playing gigs at the college. They begin trading stories about their shared love for early choral music and, when talking about his latest enthusiasm, the Renaissance composer John Taverner, Frank pulls up his “Westron Wynde Mass” to play it on his phone. The scene is intimate, tender: “Frank had come close to the bed, aiming his phone at me, and he leaned toward me, too, bending his head so we could listen together. I was surprised by how well I remembered the tune; it had been so long ago that I had sung it, and I had come to think of the words free of music.”
What follows is a beguiling reverie of music criticism, taking us into the narrator’s memory and his incisive, critical mind, inviting us into the beautiful complexity of the poetry and music. Then we bend back to Frank:
I heard it in a new way, listening to it with Frank, I felt my eyes fill with tears. After the tenor solo the mass proper begins, the tune in the sopranos first, with the words not of the poem but of the Gloria, Et in terra pax. Frank let it play for a moment, the Renaissance polyphony that always sounds to me like petals opening, a rose blooming in time-lapse photography; I’m embarrassed by the image, it was something I felt as a teenager and I still feel it now.
Such meditation on art suffuses the rest of the story. In his hospital “cell,” the narrator turns to the poetry he has brought with him. He describes a poem by George Oppen, “Stranger’s Child,” as “a prosthetic consciousness—which is something poems can be, they can create new spaces in our interiors sometimes.” The poem itself is an act of patient attention, and the narrator’s explication of it is like a frame-by-frame act of devotion that yields a maxim for living: that “to recognize another means to imagine them in relation, to conjure for every stranger the stranger to whom they are dear.”
Art here has a moral, even spiritual function. “[T]he disciplined attention of art is a moral discipline,” the narrator concludes. “Whole strata of reality are lost to us at the speed at which we live, our ability to perceive them is lost, and maybe that’s the value of poetry, there are aspects of the world that are only visible at the frequency of certain poems.”
Art—poetry, in this instance—is a form of attention, but we need more anachoresis in our lives to give ourselves over to what it offers. “Probably I wouldn’t have seen Oppen’s poem in this way anywhere other than that bed,” the narrator admits. Here, again, is a mystical move: Sometimes you have to retreat from the world to get it all back, shining in its glory. Here, too, is a mystical, almost monastic aspect of the novel: the way art serves a spiritual function in our lives.
Greenwell’s prose is enchanting—quiet, sensitive, gentle. Everything and everyone is held for attention with tender hands. The structure of the novel, even of individual paragraphs, is characterized by a kind of porous sense of time. While there is a chronological spine that takes us through his illness and recovery, time also bends—back to his childhood, meeting his partner, his schooling, a prolonged season of home renovation. Within a single paragraph, Greenwell—in the space of the narrator’s mind and imagination—seamlessly takes us across time and around the globe.
This is how our minds work, isn’t it? In the blink of an eye, without a jolt or hiccup of consciousness, our minds wander from zucchinis to a market in Rome to memories of a day fishing with grandpa. In a feat of craft, Greenwell gets this experience of consciousness down on the page in a way that is fluid and feels natural. Given that the narrator is from Kentucky, I couldn’t help thinking of Thomas Merton’s revelation on that street corner in Louisville: “There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.” But a novel like this isn’t a bad way to try. Small Rain is its own artistic testament to the cosmos of consciousness that is every stranger we pass, every cashier at their register, every enemy we loathe.
In this way, too, Small Rain, in its very form—its prose, its pacing, its quiet attention to concrete particulars, what Gerard Manley Hopkins prized as haecceity—invites the reader to become contemplative. To retreat from the world into this novel is its own spiritual experience.
This story embodies the way anachoresis, withdrawal, becomes a condition for seeing ourselves and the world—and maybe even God—anew. But the price of that illumination is suffering. The mystical path is, unavoidably, an ordeal of purgation. “Why should only suffering be a vale of soul-making?,” the narrator asks. If anachoresis yields a new form of attention, even, ultimately, wonder, that is because such retreat peels back the accretions and comforts that blind us because they distract and absorb us. Purgation, in the mystical tradition, is not punitive; it is liberative. Here, paradoxically, is a loss that leads not to deficiency but to an awareness of abundance. So it is not a question of whether we will suffer, but what we will do with our suffering. What can we receive in our loss?
Like St. John’s Dark Night or St. Teresa’s Interior Castle, Small Rain is, ultimately, a love story. Tuned to the frequency of care-full attention, the narrator begins to consider what feels like an Augustinian question: “Why do we love what we love, why does so much fail to move us, why does so much pass by us unloved.” The ultimate epiphany, the gift given to the patient who undergoes and suffers, is the realization that he is beloved. His partner, named simply L., is the sacramental conduit of this tender grace.
At home from the hospital, on the long road of recovery, the narrator considers “what sickness had shown me.” He reflects: “Maybe it wasn’t true that there were no arts of living, with L’s hand in mine it seemed that maybe there were.”
Small Rain might help one imagine an art of living, the art of living gratefully, letting oneself believe, at least in our best moments, that grace is everywhere.
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