View from the hospital bed | Review of ‘Small Rain’ by Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell's "Small Rain" explores pandemic anxiety, art, and human relationships in the midst of COVID-19 crisis.

In Small Rain, author Garth Greenwell’s nameless narrator grapples with pandemic anxiety as a pain in the gut forces him to go to the hospital, a place he feels is the most unsafe amid the COVID-19 crisis of 2020. His inner turmoil mirrors the collective anxiety of people around the world. The narrator thinks of colleges reopening as the number of active COVID-19 cases rises: “It’s like watching a car drive straight off a cliff, a friend said, but slowly, deliberately, a slow-motion suicide.”

The emergency trip to the hospital is going to alter the narrator’s life in ways that he cannot foresee. Pushed into situations that are painful and scary, he turns to art to find solace. Soon, it becomes a bridge between him and a nurse when they find common ground in ‘Westron Wynde’, a song with roots in medieval poetry. This is where the book derives its title from. 

Greenwell creates a narrator who has dedicated his life to art and poetry, and art gives him his life back while he is isolated in hospital. He makes meaning of life through art and he experiences longing for his partner through art. Poetry becomes his object of devotion. “All art is a message, we want to communicate something but not entirely graspable something, maybe there’s a kind of sense only non-sense can convey; so that the poem becomes not just a message but an object of contemplation, of devotion even, inexhaustible,” the narrator says.

The author places his character inside layers of brokenness: the narrator lives with his partner inside a house that is damaged, in a country that is falling apart under the pressures of the pandemic and divided along fault lines of race. The country is a part of a broken world that is being ravaged by a climate catastrophe, where bird species are fast disappearing.

As with Greenwell’s other novels, Small Rain is also concerned with human relationships. The narrator is struck by the asymmetry between patients and caregivers at hospitals. He becomes emotionally attached to his favourite nurse, Alivia. Her actions carry deep meaning for him while for Alivia, the narrator is just one of many patients she cares for as a part of her job.

The time spent at the hospital transforms the narrator’s life. It changes how he thinks about his body, his work, and it changes his relationship with art, which gains a new spiritual dimension. At the end of his hospital stay, the narrator comes to care for his body that he has loathed for most of his adult life. Somewhere in the humdrum of daily life, he had also forgotten to appreciate the small joys of a romantic relationship. However, now, he cannot wait to return to his partner, L. Small Rain is a compassionate work of literature about life, love, and art in the times of a global pandemic.

The independent reviewer and editor is based in New Delhi.