“… a novel that’s so absorbing, so fully realized that it draws you out of your own constricted situation and expands your sense of possibilities. He catches you up so effortlessly that you feel you are in the hands of one of those animals that anesthetizes you before devouring you.” Greenwell offers restraint in service of release. This writer’s sentences are so dazzlingly fresh that it as if he has thrown his cape in the street in front of each one. You begin to wonder how his humorlessness will wear over time … Yet there are no failures of equilibrium. It’s as if, while other writers offer data, he is providing metadata … This novel’s second half is not quite the equal of its first. Every detail in every scene glows with meaning. It’s a novel in search of ravishment … Greenwell is a sensitive writer about the student-teacher relationship … Greenwell has an uncanny gift, one that comes along rarely. You intuit its seriousness and grace from its first pages. In bed is where Greenwell’s men work out and reveal the essences of their personalities … Carnal moments are accelerants they’re where Greenwell’s existential and political themes are underlined, then set ablaze … a better, richer, more confident novel. You pick his novels up with asbestos mitts, and set them down upon trivets to protect your table from heat damage … There’s a moral quality to these extended sessions. “… incandescent … Anyone who read Greenwell’s first novel, What Belongs to You (2016), knows that his writing about sex is altogether scorching. Listen to Garth Greenwell read from Cleanness here

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