'Small Rain' book review: Quotidian of queer
About two decades ago, there wasn’t really enough queer stories to merit a category of their own. Among the first books that brought the queer way of life into mainstream was Garth Greenwell’s debut novel What Belongs To You (2016). It helped one understand how literature, queerness and, of course, sex, can co-exist in a single world. Greenwell is back with his third novel, Small Rain, where he goes deeper into the mundaneness and the unpredictability of queer life.
The unnamed protagonist and narrator is a poet and teacher, and is in a relationship with his boyfriend L, who also happens to work in the same field.
Just six months into the morbid Covid era, the narrator feels a sharp pain in his gut, which he initially endures, but eventually has to be rushed to a hospital, where he is shifted to the ICU.
That’s where the entire story unfolds. He gets diagnosed with a rare heart condition that has led to the thinning of his aorta. Generally found in elderly people, he is told it could be a result of syphilis. Learning this takes him back to his time in Bulgaria; he believes he got it there from a former lover.
Isolation is a theme that is closely knit with the Covid era, and in Small Rain, it acts as a catalyst for our protagonist as he goes through a life threatening ordeal on his own.
He eventually starts digging deeper into his past, including his difficult relationship with his estranged family, and how it was growing up in a household with a homophobic father, and a mother who wished he wasn’t gay.
A life threatening event can have a cataclysmic effect on one’s life. For Greenwell, it was penning this story; for his protagonist, it was re-evaluating his life. The author’s real life experience of going through a medical emergency translates into minute observations around a hospital and inside an ICU.
Whether it is the doctor’s excitement over the protagonist’s rare condition or a mixed encounter with the nurses, all these small but significant portrayals help one visualise the scene in the hospital.
The queer experiences that Greenwell illustrates speak closely to a lot of people from the community, irrespective of nationality, connecting them in their shared grief and euphoria. The body image issues that the protagonist lived with is a reality of many, and so is its fetishisation.
The author has a penchant for blurring the lines between fiction and reality, which is what makes his stories authentic and honest. And, Small Rain is no exception.