Rambling thoughts on Small Rain

When I read a book I have an almost pathological urge to assign it relevancy to my life. I look for the ways its structure or meaning folds into my own: its metaphors overlapping the facade of my own self discovery. Of course it’s not always the case that a novel does reflect one’s own reality. Often, the best pieces of fiction are those that precisely don’t reflect your reality. Instead those pieces transform us, asking us to consider another view, another time, another place. 

I read a lot of Small Rain after the first week of the Trump administration. I was stuck at my childhood home, watching my parents’ dog who had suddenly gotten sick and rushed to the ER while they were on a cruise. She couldn’t be around other dogs and so the sitter (and everyone else around who all had dogs) was out of the question. Out of obligation I headed down, letting my brother watch my dog during the day, my partner watching him at night. My routine was work and wandering. There was nothing to do. I felt the strange ache, in the face of all the horrors, to be back around Zach, to sit on the couch with him, to fall asleep next to him at night. I longed for the familiarity our love brought, hoping that in some small way it could help me through the terrors unfolding on my phone screen.

What I love about Greenwell’s writing is the care he takes to describe love. There’s no doubt to me that he admires love or that he’s fascinated even by the concept of it. He’s not jaded, as some authors are, by its importance nor does he oversell its impact on our life. Still, his stories are littered with small moments of love reflected in ordinary actions: a coffee brought, a house built together, the image of your partner appearing on the phone, maskless so you can see his beard.

Greenwell is certainly concerned with interiority too. He asks us, through his writing, to turn inward and uncover the parts of us that lay hidden but are uncovered slowly by the relationships and places that surround us. He is most certainly interested in the fiction that surrounds a place: the realities and unrealities of its geographical borders. In Small Rain he is focused on the juxtaposition of closeness a hospital can bring. How things and people can exist both simultaneously far from each other but close in proximity and how disease (or the threat of it) can bridge that gap, providing intimacies that otherwise would go unnoticed.

When I first read (or listened to) Frog King, another one of Greenwell’s short stories, I was drawn in by the main narrator’s desperation because, I too, was desperate for a form of love. I did not get the sense that the love reflected in that short story was soon to fail, but I did get the sense that the narrator understood its importance and impact on his life. He understood, how grandiose it felt to him, how mystical and precious it could be. At the end, he knows that his final wishes are to stay here with this man, to kiss him everyday, to be drowned in that sort of love he sees reflected in the promise of a burning effigy.

In Small Rain he recounts another type of love. A desire to return to a simple love, to not be impacted by the change of the world around him. In that love he feels comfort and security but also he must, despite its familiarity, be thrust unwittingly into a new reality. Small Rain is not a love story between two men, but a love story between one man and the world around him. A story that grapples with our obligation to those around us, our sincerity in the face of death, and how our senses of self can be rocked by sudden death and disintegration.

Late at night, in bed, I read the line “It must be something similar, the chemical burst of his presence, the sight of him triggering the same reward center in the brain. He was better than oxy, I thought, looking at him, and it make me smile…” and bawled, thinking of Zach.

I felt stupid. I had only been away from him less than a week, and it hadn’t been a particularly eventual one anyway. Still, I felt the loneliness more acutely—the absence of his presence in my life felt more sudden, more impacting.

There is this thing that Greenwell’s characters do, especially in Small Rain. They fall into retrospection: looking backwards on the world rather than living in the present. It’s a particular sort of genius writing style too. It allows a hashing out of the history of a person without a directly linear approach to storytelling. In the hospital bed, the main narrator associates each new foreign procedure with some past memory, and in doing so he weaves a delicate metaphor for the connectedness he seeks out.

No scene fits this better than the collapsing of a tree branch onto the roof of his house during a storm. During that he describes his fear and shock, then his marveling at the damage caused by the tragedy, then the strange connection he makes with people he didn’t think he would, and finally the surgical and methodical way that experts pick apart the thing ruining this house and patch it back together. During this process people watch and stare but he watches as well. He watches himself, he watches the watchers, and he watches as a community around him offers these small gentle bits of excitement and commiseration during a tragedy.

I am retrospective too. I spend a lot of time looking back and thinking about the parts of my past that fit neatly into the metaphor of my present. Perhaps I cried thinking of Zach because I have been thinking a lot more about the seriousness of relationships. I have friends from college that are getting married and coworkers telling me how afraid they feel in their current marriage. My therapist and his partner are getting married; my brother talks about marriage with his partner that he’s been with for 10 years. Perhaps its about the fear or the complacency, the idea that I am growing and with growth comes a certain sort of desperation for continual attachment, for participating in something settled; domestic; understood.

In therapy I cry when talking about Frog King. I am rehashing to a new person the chronicles of my first big love. I cannot explain to him the entirety of what I feel: how the words I read then felt so apt to me, the story so resonante with what I was feeling and who I hoped to be. When reading Small Rain I feel a lot of the same. It’s not abnormal to imagine yourself as the protagonist, but still I see the similarities in thought and pattern everywhere. I wonder, selfishly, if my first love thinks the same. I wonder if, even slightly, he reads Greenwell’s tender introspection and conjures a brief glimpse of me. Why that seems to matter to me is beyond me, perhaps all of us want to be remembered for our love, not our strife.

I hope too that Zach could read this and see some familiar part of me reflected. I wonder if he would find comfort in the longing for touch, the desire to be loved and cared for. Maybe he would see me more as L: a strange thought to me. He would see me as the one who cooks, who designs the house to perfection, who holds together the delicate anxieties that can lead us both astray. And yet I see in him other parts of L: the joy, the passion, the brightness and warmth that fills a room. 

I don’t have an ending to this rambling. I don’t have a suggestion for what Small Rain is ultimately about. I know it’s a book I loved to read, a book I feel taught me a lot, a book that was woven together like a great work of art. 

I think you should read it and let me know your thoughts too. Next week I’ll share my favorite bits, as I underlined and highlighted a LOT of the book while I was reading it—far too much to include in this long post.