For Your Reading List  Credit: FSG, Bill Adams Cleanness by Garth Greenwell Garth Greenwell’s highly anticipated follow-up to What Belongs To You — longlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction in 2016 — once again situates us in Sofia, Bulgaria where an American teacher is working and living abroad. Told through a series of vignettes unconcerned with identification (characters are referred to by their first initial) or linear convention, our narrator invites us to be a fly on the wall as we observe his treacherous encounters with students and anonymous men on hook-up sites. Through this process, we begin to understand (in lockstep with the narrator) the inherited traumas that metastasize from one queer man to another within a deeply homophobic country.
Greenwell’s superpower is writing sex scenes that, while at once unsettling and vividly detailed, avoid the feeling of being gratuitous. Instead, each passage serves to interrogate bigger ideas of shame, submission, and self-discovery. We start to feel like we are observing not just the person but also their baggage. A “slow burn” isn’t exactly the right phrase for a work of fiction like Cleanness that wastes no time throwing you right into the flames, but you’ll understand exactly what I mean when I say that the individual parts, as scattered and opaque as they may initially seem, add up to something quite profound. Get your copy now. — Colin Gorenstein
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