![]() ![]() The narrator, never identified, tells his story as he remembers it - disordered events, reaction and reflection - with the unreliability of memory. Characters are unnamed, designated only by first initials. Greenwell instead arranges his chapters to mimic the tangle of lives lived and love lost. There is no clear narrative arc of exposition, rising action, climax, or resolution. Though it often reads like a collection of linked stories, Cleanness is a novel that forgoes many of the form’s traditions. ![]() The work is filled with stunning poetic prose alongside spare, cutting exposition. ![]() He continues the story of an American teacher, living and working abroad in Sofia, Bulgaria. ![]() He shows us our own soul as we bleed.Ĭleanness is Greenwell’s second novel, following his award-winning debut book, What Belongs to You. The author is a holy man from ancient days, fist raised to the the gods, eviscerating bodies, cutting through gut and breath to extract a still beating heart. If fiction exposes truth through the imaginary, Garth Greenwell’s novel Cleanness is a reimagining that splays open his characters’ secret selves, denudes them of pretense to tell hard, beautiful, human truths. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020) ![]()
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