Cleanness

An unbearably wonderful, eloquently sexual, thoughtful, emotional delight of a novel - Garth Greenwell writes like no one else

Eimear McBride

Cleanness is a impressive book: moving, radical, both beautiful and violent, unexpected. Garth Greenwell is a major writer, and his writing provides us tools to affirm ourselves, to exist - to fight

Edouard Louis, author of The End of Eddy.

Cleanness reaches into the relationship between masculinity and violence with more depth than any book I’ve read in a very long time, and it does it by elaborating both the tender and brutal means that men who try to love other men employ to survive the violence they inherited and the violence they still possess. It is, in the best sense, a disturbing book for the simple reason that it speaks the truth

Adam Haslett, author of Imagine Me Gone

So rarely do words make comprehensible the inevitability and confusion of desire as Garth Greenwell’s writing does. His sensibility is akin to James Baldwin’s, and he observes the world with eyes like those of Tolstoy. With shimmering prose and undiluted intensity, Cleanness captures the indefinableness of pain and intimacy, love and alienation, vulnerability and sustainability

Yiyun Li, author of Where Reasons End

It has been four years since Garth Greenwell’s stunning debut, What Belongs To You, was published. I don’t think I have read a better new novel in all that time, so to discover that his follow-up is every bit as exquisite was a mixture of relief and joy . . . Greenwell’s prose possesses the same luminescence, shimmering with emotional truth . . . This is an exceptional work of fiction, which places Greenwell among the very best contemporary novelists.

Independent

In Cleanness, I found an end to a loneliness I didn't know — until now — how to describe. Greenwell maps the worlds our language walls off—sex, love, shame and friendship, the foreign and the familiar—and finds the sublime. There are visceral shocks like I’ve never encountered in print, and they delighted me, again and again. With each plunge we take beneath the surface of life, lost and new worlds appear. This could only be the work of a master

Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

The casual grandeur of Garth Greenwell’s prose, unfurling in page-long paragraphs and elegantly garrulous sentences, tempts the vulnerable reader into danger zones: traumatic memories, extreme sexual scenarios, states of paralyzing heartbreak and loss . . . These stories are masterpieces of radical eroticism, but they wouldn’t have the same impact if they didn’t appear in a gorgeously varied narrative fabric, amid scenes of more wholesome love, finely sketched vistas of political unrest, haunting evocations of a damaged childhood, and moments of mundane rapture. Tenderness, violence, animosity, and compassion are the outer edges of what feels like a total map of the human condition

New Yorker

Garth Greenwell’s sentences are magical and spellbinding. They breathe, and are alive, in completely unpredictable ways. Words are voyages, says John Donne. Greenwell is a novelist whose art makes a poet stand on his toes

Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic

A novel of devastating honesty and beauty. A gorgeous literary line runs from Death in Venice to Giovanni's Room to A Boy's Own Story to What Belongs to You, and, now, Cleanness, and I will follow it to the last word

David Ebershoff, author of The Danish Girl and The 19th Wife

I don't know how Garth Greenwell writes such delicate, profane fiction. Reading this book made me want to sit with my emotions and desires; it made me want to be a better writer.

Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties

Garth Greenwell, whose first book is a masterpiece, amazingly has written a second book that is also a masterpiece. The great enterprise that Joyce and Lawrence began—to write with utter literal candor about sex, grounding one’s moral life and philosophical insight in what that candor reveals about us—finds fulfillment, a late apotheosis, in Greenwell’s work. Cleanness is the act of a master

Frank Bidart

If Henry James were alive in this strange century, if Thomas Mann had been allowed to write raw sex, if Virginia Woolf had slummed it more, if Proust had been born in Kentucky, if they all commingled their blood and brains, we might get something like Garth Greenwell. Cleanness is indescribable, and it is genius.

Rebecca Makkai, author of The Great Believers

The narrator of Greenwell’s debut What Belongs to You returns in this masterpiece of intimacy. An American expat soon to leave his post in Bulgaria, he looks back at his encounters — those rooted in love and those ones where feeling emerged unexpected — recounting, in Greenwell’s seamless, acute prose, the violence and surrender, gestures and codes of love and sex.

Financial Times