I had heard of Garth Greenwell’s work, but somehow I had never read any of it until September 2019. I received a galley of his second book, Cleanness, just weeks after I returned to New York from a year of living in Paris, where, as research for my own novel in progress, I had spent months seeking out books that took love and sex as their subject (for example, in philosophy,  Plato’s Symposium; in psychology, Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving; and in literature, books by writers such as D. H. Lawrence and Annie Ernaux). To read Cleanness after such a search—and particularly after having spent a year as an American abroad (something Greenwell’s narrator also does)—felt like a wish fulfilled: I hadn’t known quite what I was looking for, but I knew I found it when I read Cleanness.

Garth Greenwell’s first novel, What Belongs to You, was published in 2016 to a wave of praise. Reviewed glowingly in countless publications, the novel was named one of the best books of the year by more than fifty publications in nine different countries. The praise for Cleanness has been, so far, even more rhapsodic. The book is a masterwork of form and function: it’s written in three sections, each containing three stories, or chapters, that stand alone but also speak to, over, and through one another. At its center is a profound love relationship (between the narrator, an American high school teacher in Sofia, Bulgaria, and a man named R.), the loss of which reverberates through the book. Full of explicit and extended sex scenes that, in their patience and attendance to detail, exceed the boundaries of any American literary sex writing that I have yet to read, Cleanness has the same landscape and narrator as What Belongs to You but a much greater emotional range. Even on the sentence level, the book seems to map for its reader the landscape of desire, moving us quickly toward moments of great intensity and then slowing our attention to take them in.