Garth Greenwell Comes Clean

You might even feel, for a moment, that you’re still reading his 2016 debut novel, “What Belongs to You.” After all, they seem to share its unnamed narrator: a gay American man teaching in Sofia, Bulgaria.

“I opened it up at first and thought, Oh, more of the same,” said Edmund White, an elder statesman of gay literature. “But then I thought, Well, nobody ever complained that Proust was more of the same.”

Yet “Cleanness” — out Tuesday from Farrar, Straus & Giroux — is not quite more of the same. While it bears surface-level similarities to “What Belongs to You,” it is not even really a novel, nor is it a story collection.

“It’s a lieder cycle,” Greenwell said, borrowing a term from classical music. “That’s what the ideal, platonic version of the book is in my head.”

Indeed, the nine stories of “Cleanness” have the cohesion of a song cycle, the genre of Schubert’s “Winterreise” and Schumann’s “Dichterliebe.” While they don’t appear in chronological order, there is a symmetry to their organization, with a life-altering love affair rippling out from the center.

Greenwell, 41, has taken a long time, and tried out different roles, to find the artistic environment in which he has truly blossomed: prose, for which he has garnered widespread critical admiration, including a spot on the longlist for the National Book Award. But growing up in Louisville, Kentucky, he began as a singer, which earned him a spot at the Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan and, later, the prestigious Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York.

While there, in the mid-1990s, he befriended people who are now luminaries in contemporary classical music — including Alan Pierson, the artistic director and conductor of the ensemble Alarm Will Sound, who described Greenwell as “fiercely devoted and very intense,” with a literary approach to singing.

But he was also self-critical and unsure of his future in performance. “Garth always wants to be the best,” Pierson said, “and he always felt a little inadequate as a musician.” Finding himself increasingly interested in poetry and literature, Greenwell decided to study them full time.

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Frank Bidart, a mentor of Greenwell’s and one of his teachers at the New York State Summer Writers Institute, recalled someone who was “serious and ambitious in a way most students aren’t.” Greenwell’s poetry, he added, always aimed for more than mere description and “tested the idea of what poetry should be.” Pierson, who keeps the poetry Greenwell has sent him over the years in a treasured Google Drive folder, said it contains “really beautiful language mixed with something deep from Garth’s experience mixed with profound observations about human nature.”

Greenwell followed his poetry practice to a Ph.D. program at Harvard but left in his third year to become a high school teacher in Michigan and, eventually, Bulgaria. All the while, he continued to work on his poems, assembling what was shaping up to be a collection.

But Greenwell began to write prose, and, he said, “it destroyed my poems.” Bidart felt as though Greenwell has found what he had been aiming at all along.

Greenwell wrote about topics that were rife with complication: desire, Bulgaria, privilege and at times a confluence of all three. It came together in a novella, “Mitko,” which was published in 2011. That little book, he recalled, sold only a few hundred copies, but it fell into the hands of gay writers like White and Peter Cameron and was a Lambda Literary Award finalist.

“Mitko” would later become the opening section of “What Belongs to You,” which expanded on the story of an American teacher’s fraught relationship with a hustler picked up in a public bathroom. Greenwell added a second section — an extended paragraph about internalized homophobia, shame and the narrator’s father — and a third to provide closure on the novel’s initial plot.

The book was a career-maker in the United States, and a firecracker in Bulgaria, where homosexuality remains taboo and is extremely rare in literature. Greenwell expected scathing reviews and hate speech, but they never came. The first printing sold out within two days.

“For me, it was the literary event of the year,” said Dimiter Kenarov, a journalist in Bulgaria who has become a close friend of Greenwell’s. “Sometimes when foreigners come in, their vision of Bulgaria is very skewed, and the place is either romanticized or demonized. But Garth’s writing presents the city I live in and the culture I live in so objectively and so humbly, with a real sense of depth. It’s almost like I’ve been asleep in a city that he awakens me to.”

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By the time “What Belongs to You” was published, Greenwell had already completed four sections of what would become “Cleanness.” From the start, he said, both books were “one project,” although the world of his newer one is more expansive.

Physical gestures are enormously significant, each movement a germ of drama and scrutiny. “He’ll make an assertion,” White said, “then question it and turn it over and massage it.” These passages in particular evoke Greenwell’s former lives within his current prose: poetic lyricism, and comma splices deployed like musical phrasing.

Two chapters in “Cleanness” recount sexual encounters with unrelenting candor and earnestness. Greenwell said that he doesn’t often give himself assignments but that here he wanted “to write something that was 100% pornographic and 100% high art.”

Often, he said, pornography goes to great lengths to “expunge personhood” from people’s bodies. He aimed to do the opposite, to show intimacy while exploring the ways in which S&M encounters make representations of power visible and therefore malleable.

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Greenwell’s frankness in writing about sex has made for uncomfortable encounters with fans. Because he bears a resemblance to his protagonist, they often assume his writing is autobiographical. (It’s not.) Someone once showed him a Facebook profile and asked whether it was one of his characters, and he has been sent explicit photos on social media.

In reality, Greenwell doesn’t volunteer conversations about sex. He presents more modestly and lives a settled-down life with his partner, poet Luis Muñoz, who runs the Spanish-language MFA program at the University of Iowa.

“If you would ask me seven years ago whether I would ever own a house, I would say no,” Greenwell said. “I certainly would not be in Iowa City. And I certainly would not be in a life that had an affective center based on one person. It’s been an interesting, pretty wondrous thing to be in a life that is different from anything I imagined for myself.”

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His next book won’t be set in Bulgaria, but in Kentucky, where Greenwell has rediscovered Louisville and become fascinated by its gay history. So he isn’t done writing about queer lives.

To some degree, that’s because he doesn’t buy into the dated belief that gay literature can’t reach a wide audience — a criticism once popular among critics and publishers. “That’s just homophobia,” he said, “and I refuse to treat it seriously.”

“If there is a gay ghetto,” Greenwell added, “then that’s where James Baldwin is, and Thomas Mann is, and Virginia Woolf is, and that’s the only place I would ever want to be. And that’s not on the margins of the literary tradition: That’s right at the heart of it.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .