Genre: Literary Fiction
Published: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, September 2024
My Rating: 4.5/5 stars rounded up
“Try to remember this, I admonished myself, since I knew it would fade. All happiness fades, or does for me; misery digs deep gouges in memory, sets the course of the self, I sometimes think, it lays down the tracks one is condemned to move along, whereas happiness leaves no trace. Remember this, I said to myself. Why should only suffering be a vale of soul-making, why shouldn’t the soul be made of this moment, too, this unremarkable moment, remember this.”
This is one of those difficult to review books, where I feel like I can either be honest or fair, but not both at the same time. Reviewing this book honestly would do a disservice to the fantastic objective quality of the work. Reviewing it fairly would mean discounting my own experience with it; I did not enjoy reading this at all.
For that reason, this is going to be (again) one of those reviews in two parts: what I think about the book, and what I felt.
Review
Small Rain is an intimate character portrait that describes our narrators experience of a life-threatening health crisis that upends his life against the background of an already strained medical system during the start of the COVID-pandemic. Our unnamed narrator suffers a sudden and unbearable pain in his abdomen, which turns out to be a rare medical event (aortic dissection) that lands him in the ICU for weeks with an unsure future. Through intimate “small scenes” of his life in this medical bubble, we don’t only get a glimpse into a well-realized character’s life, but a little window into the lives of the medical staff and the larger crisis of the COVID-pandemic happening in the background.
Garth Greenwell shows himself an expert writer, wordsmith and basically observer of the small moments in life that have big meaning. I love when an author can do this; capture “big feelings” in “small pictures” and Greenwell nails. His prose is striking and I truly admire his skill of portraying this experience in a way that felt genuinely authentic. I’m unsure if there’s an autobiographical element to this book, but throughout my reading experience I often felt like there almost had to be.
In an objective sense, I’d highly recommend this book as a fantastic (and medically as well as “humanly” accurate) character portrait and piece of literature. It’s a book about illness, health, body, queerness, “midlife” and human connection. From the depth of our narrators relationship with L, to his fleeting but strangely profound contacts with the hospital staff; it struck a chord of reality that I can’t deny.
A note on my personal experience:
As far as that reality-chord; that’s where I struggled, to the point where I almost DNF-ed the book. I’m a medical doctor and began my career at the start of the COVID-pandemic on an ICU-ward. A lot of this (very true-to-life) story was my daily bread and butter for quite some time. It diminished my enjoyment of the book for 2 reasons, both of which I’m slightly ashamed to admit.
1. None of this was “new” to me. From the elaborate description of day-to-day actions on the ICU (the arterial line, the transport to the CT-scan etc.) to the profound realizations the protagonist has from this life-altering experience; I’ve seen it many times before. Reading about them can’t help but feel like a faded photocopy of seeing the real-deal play out in front of you. That made this a “not-for-me-book”.
2. It really brought back the vibe of those early COVID-times working at the ICU. And boy, did I not want to relive those… Reading Small Rain, despite the story itself being so familiar, made me realize how much those days affected and shaped me as a physician. It wasn’t a fun experience, but it was a strangely welcome one regardless…
Thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and MacMillan Audio for providing me with an (audio-)ARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.
You can find this book here on Goodreads.
