Book Review: "Small Rain" by Garth Greenwell

It's currently May 2025 at the time of writing and I am glad to say that not a lot of interesting things are going on right now. I'm not really sleeping well but what's new? I spent the last day or so mulling over this book because it is dripping with raw emotion. Have you ever just read a book where you've finished it and thought 'woah, that was a bit of a trip', have you!? Well, that's exactly what I thought when I finished this book I'm going to review today: Small Rain by Garth Greenwell is a beautifully written book that I find not enough people talking about...

We've got a narrator who is probably having the worst pain of their life. A poet and a teacher, the narrator's pain seems to defy language itself. I happen to love it when writers almost run out of language to describe something and then get really abstract about it. The writer does it through describing the violent feeling associated with the pain of being 'turned inside out' and failing to do it over and over again. Even though he doesn't particularly like seeking medical attention, he's ultimately diagnosed with and infrarenal aortic dissection. This is where we get a character who has their life turned upside down by medical uncertainty. It sort of reminded me of the book When Breath Becomes Air about that doctor who got a life-threatening illness.

Ah yes, we have yet another book about the horrors of the medical world. As I read in A Very Easy Death by Simone de Beauvoir in which this isolation was happening to her mother, the narrator here experiences depersonalisation of themselves in the hospital environment. It's the height of COVID-19 and they are isolated, ruminating constantly, and noting the systems lack of compassion towards the patients. I have to say that is what often stops me from seeking medical attention - often egotistical and unsympathetic doctors who literally do not care whether you are alive or dead. To them, you are just a statistic. But more than anything, this book reveals how broken the healthcare system really is - and that's not sad, that's scary.

The narrator reflects on his relationship with L. and how it has been interrupted by hospital restrictions during the pandemic. This is happening whilst he remembers and contemplates poems he remembers and how well their can articulate his experience. Obviously, one thing that the writer is trying to tell us here is something I've been telling people for a very long time: when the chips are down who did you turn to for compassion and solace? It is basically asking these people who think studying the arts and humanities is pointless about who was entertaining them during the pandemic - I can tell you it wasn't the mathematicians.

Long sentences, stream-of-consciousness paragraphs and a lack of straightforward plot are three things that make me feel that there is definitely something more Virginia Woolf about this novel than we are investigating. This modernist style is often interspersed with introspection, bending at the whims of memory ad nauseum and completing the cycle of imitating the actual human experience. We remember random things at times of great distress, some that comfort us and some that don't.

The healthcare system across the western world is something to behold. I think everywhere we can admit that it isn't exactly great and yet, it is probably the best it's going to be for a while. The emotional toll of being treated as a case study rather than a person is one that is universal and divisive. There's something to be argued for compassion in healthcare and I don't think we will have that if healthcare as a system is increasingly as overwhelmed as it is - not forgetting how overwhelmed it was during the pandemic. It is something being attacked from both sides and the narrator of this book definitely shows us how that disadvantages us all from the patient, to the nurse, to the doctor.

All in all, I thought that this was a fantastic book filled with back and forths about memory and art, a brilliant and intense look at a man trapped in the healthcare system's worst nightmare: the pandemic. It was a wonderful read.