Garth Greenwell Wants Us to Stop Policing What Stories Are ‘Relevant’
By: Mitchell Kuga
Tags: Garth Greenwell, Art, Books, LGBTQ, Writing

In 2014, when Garth Greenwell was an MFA student at The Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a professor he revered — “and continue[s] to revere,” he says — dismissed a short story he’d written about cruising for sex, saying that it “read like a sociological report on the practices of a subculture.” Greenwell was shocked, in part because the critique seemed to pivot on a loaded question: What makes a piece of art “universal”?

“To this professor, something like Congregationalist ministers in rural Iowa” — as Marilynne Robinson explores in her novel Gilead — “did not feel like a subculture, but instead was representative of universal human experience,” says Greenwell “in a way that gay men having sex with each other in a bathroom did not.” He has been writing urgently against that proposition for his entire career — including in his sophomore novel, Cleanness, out January 14.

Greenwell’s 2016 debut novel What Belongs To You was critically celebrated, winning the British Book Award for Debut Book of the Year and longlisted for the National Book Award. It opens with a man cruising for sex in a public bathroom in Bulgaria, beneath Sofia’s National Palace of Culture. The novel is told from the perspective of an American abroad, an unnamed English teacher who pays for sex with a hustler named Mitko. That transaction sparks a murky relationship rooted in profound inequities, providing a particular lens into the politics of contemporary Bulgaria as it stumbles out of its recently communist past. It also urges the narrator to examine how growing up gay in the South informs his current relationship to desire, shame, and belonging.

Cleanness is a kind of sequel to What Belongs to You, finding the American abroad in a more conventional relationship, with a Portuguese exchange student he refers to as R. Greenwell once again examines the pageantry of sexual dominance and submission with frank, tensile precision. “I was interested in how we use the idea of cleanliness as a concept,” he says over the phone from Iowa, where he’ll teach a fiction course at the Writers’ Workshop this spring. In chat rooms, for instance, “Are you clean?” is a way of asking prospective partners about their HIV status. Greenwell had come to regard cleanliness as a “devastating ideal.” Before he was a novelist Greenwell studied poetry; the word “cleanness” is an allusion to a medieval poem written in the late 14th century that interprets the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, or what Greenwell calls “the nightmare version of cleanness.”

“It does seem to be a fact of human life that we long both to be clean and to bathe in filth,” he says. “And what I hope the book leads to or suggests by the end is the possibility of a life that can accommodate both urges in a way that doesn’t require the eradication of a huge chunk of ourselves or our desires.”

Greenwell belongs in the ever-evolving canon of gay literature, a canon that has significantly expanded since he discovered queer writers like James Baldwin and Jeanette Winterson in his youth. He found their work “lifesaving,” allowing him to reject the presumption that the “only possible shapes for my life were being a child molester and dying of AIDS.”

“My serious, firmly held belief about art is that any human experience can open the door to all human experience.”

Some might find it limiting to be thought of as a “gay writer” writing “gay fiction.” But Greenwell accepts the designation. Instead of constricting his work, he considers it a key part of its expansion. “Art achieves universality through devotion to the particular,” he says. “My serious, firmly held belief about art is that any human experience can open the door to all human experience.”

Greenwell has been ruminating on the concept of “relevance” lately, particularly as the word gets thrown around on Twitter, as a colloquial and often catty form of critical discourse. In writing about gay sex, he himself somewhat benefits from the current hunger for stories from underrepresented voices. Other writers find themselves out of vogue. Greenwell recalls hanging out with his friends at Prairie Lights, his local bookstore in Iowa City, and casually shooing away a novel based on its jacket copy: “Do we really need another story about a middle-aged guy who’s thinking about cheating on his wife?”

But he rejects his own impulse to dismiss the book in question. “That is as false as what that professor at that writing workshop said to me,” says Greenwell, calling such judgments “anti-art.”