Small Rain

Garth Greenwell is two days younger than me, and we seem to share a love of language, music and being gay, so I seem to be an ideal reader for him. Though some of his long paragraphs can be a little long-winded, it is astonishing how much detail he can wring from a situation. He might just have read his share of Thomas Mann. "Small Rain" follows a poet, who lands in the hospital because of an aortic rupture. Garthwell looks at fear of dying, the American healthcare system but also at the humanity that can be found in all places and at the people who make our lives better. Apparently Garthwell wrote two earlier novels about the same protagonist, and that protagonist's lens of poetry gives the novel an interesting perspective, even though poetry frequently does not particularly reach me. "Small Rain" won the 2025 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, so it is worth checking out for anyone who is looking for literature in their lives, but Percival Everett's "James" (Pulitzer Prize) or Fiona McFarlane's "Highway 13" (Story Prize) were stronger recipients of literary awards in 2025. I was also reminded of William Finn's semi-autobiographical musical "A New Brain" about a musical-theater writer with a brain aneurysm. That is one of my favorite musicals though, which makes for an unfair comparison of course.