It's rather odd that I've felt the need to begin both this and my last review (of Raymond Carter's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love) by referencing Ottessa Moshfegh's short story collection Homesick from Another World. Partially it's because all three books are essentially short story collections (though Cleanness has a single narrator), which inevitably invites comparisons. Partially it's because twice I picked up Moshfegh only to set it aside for another.
Even more so than Carver's collection, Cleanness exists opposite Homesick for Another World, which could probably be subtitled "Dirtiness." There's plenty about Moshfegh that enthralls, but coming off her novel Death in Her Hands, I couldn't handle even more nearly-psychotic narrators, nor her minute and all-consuming focus on the disgusting nature of human bodies and habits. Though Greenwell's novel also focuses intensely on the human body and the inner self, its focus, tone, and style have almost nothing in common with Moshfegh's cynicism.
Greenwell's narrator, a gay American professor living and teaching in Bulgaria, goes through a range of emotions, including depression, but unlike Moshfegh's protagonists, he never feels psychotic--even his tendency toward self-harm is understandable, natural. And though Cleanness contains the most explicit descriptions of sex I have ever read, Greenwell writes in such a way that the acts don't inspire disgust or titillation, nor laughter or grimace; instead, they read as pure expressions of need or love or feeling. So maybe ultimately it's love that's absent from Moshfegh's work and which sets her and Greenwell most apart.
While Moshfegh's characters are usually alone, Greenwell focuses on love--and its mate, pain--through the relationships of human bodies. The explicitness of the sex in Cleanness was what most stood out in the New York Times review that led me to pick up the book, and undoubtedly it's something that could turn off readers (especially the second chapter about a BDSM encounter gone wrong). I thought of a teachers' Facebook group of which I'm a part; in a recent post, a member asked about the acceptability of a teenager using casual profanity in an essay. I was shocked by how many teachers were horrified--it was a sign of lack of intelligence, they bizarrely argued; they would never read anything with profanity. I think English readers as a whole (or maybe just Americans?) have a similar attitude toward sex, particularly in the written word. Sex can exist "off-screen," but any detailed description is pornographic, a sign of smuttiness and poor writing (unclear which is worse).
Greenwell seeks to challenge that assumption, writing about sex in exquisite detail and beautiful prose. For Greenwell's narrator (and Greenwell himself), sex is an essential part of one's true self--to remove sex or to deny sex's role in life is to deny one's humanity (a metaphor that is especially apt for the queer community. Though the protagonist is an openly gay man, he lives in Bulgaria, a country with rampant homophobia that demands his relationships be kept somewhat hidden). In the novel, sex is a vehicle to explore love, hope, heartbreak, and shame in ways that we hide in our day-to-day interactions.
But to focus only on the sex is to do a disservice to the rest of the book, much of which goes beyond sex. The first chapter, where a student comes out discreetly to the professor and the professor finds himself unable to offer the comfort or solace the student seeks, is incredibly heartbreaking, as is "Decent People," about pro-democracy protests in Bulgaria that attack simultaneous LGBTQ-rights protests. The largest section of the book, about the narrator's relationship with R., a Portuguese man, is one of the most moving depictions of love and heartbreak I've read.
In trying to determine what it is about Greenwell that's so moving, eventually I realized it's the prose itself. It's not a surprise that Greenwell started out as a poet--there's a rhythm through his sentences that carries the emotional content. In an interview in The Paris Review, Greenwell describes his syntactical style: "The kind of sentence I'm drawn to, which constantly falls back on itself in correction or hesitation or defeat but is also drawn forward by the demands of rhythm and cadence, feels mimetic of desire to me, even of sex" (yeah, okay, there's a lot of sex; in the same interview, he says "the great human virtue is promiscuity"). I do think that Greenwell's recursive style is part of his appeal, so at odds with the assertive, "masculine" style of an author like Carver or Cormac McCarthy. Maybe I felt reassured that the prose itself assumed a lack of knowing rather than bold pronouncements; that the prose invited one to be washed over by emotions.
Maybe I also felt reassured by the fact that, despites its sadness, Cleanness seems hopeful about love. Moshfegh's characters are hopeless and alone, but Greenwell suggests meaningful connection is possible, even if fleeting.
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