Cleanness by Garth Greenwell review: a new star in the canon of great gay writers

One habit of so-called gay or queer fiction is that of addressing the darkest, dirtiest terrain of sexual activity in prose of Olympian poise, shameless clarity and meticulous detail – it is here that both Edmund White and Alan Hollinghurst have made their reputations. Garth Greenwell follows in their wake in this respect, but there’s nothing derivative or imitative about his writing, and his second collection of stories is enthralling.

Their setting will be unfamiliar – Sofia, capital of Bulgaria, where Greenwell, a poet from Kentucky, spent several years in his early 30s teaching English. Cleanness follows What Belongs to You, published to wide acclaim four years ago, in charting his experiences and his inner life during this period.

Although there are several passages of lyrical scene painting and vivid reportage – notably a brilliant description of the ebb and flow of a protest rally – the focus is on Greenwell’s movement through the city’s homosexual underworld and the emotions that his encounters provoke. His motive is not pornographic sensationalism: sex for Greenwell is simply the area in which one is most aware, most alive, most vulnerable, and there’s nothing comfortable about the exposure it entails. He is drawn as much to mine the “shame and anxiety and fear” it involves as to its momentary pleasures and elusive rewards.

Two sadomasochistic hookups are described in giddying extended close-up that most of us will recoil from, but what impels one to read on isn’t the exhaustive charting of every physical manoeuvre so much as the Proustian ability to analyse ambivalences. “We can never be sure of what we want,” he insists. “I mean of the authenticity of it, of its purity in relation to ourselves.”

Running away from a violent situation, bloodied and humiliated, he reflects: “I knew that having been shown it I would come back to it, when the pain had faded and the fear, maybe not to this man but to others like him; I would desire it, though I didn’t desire it now, and for a time I would resist my desire but only for a time.”

That sentence gives an idea of the almost incantatory rhythm that informs Greenwell’s writing, the punctuation used with wonderful sensitivity to create a sense of restless ruminative intelligence. He also has a poet’s gift for the sharply illuminating image: a wind “worrying every loose edge”; cigarette smoke as “abrasive as sand”; Venice full of “capillary water and sinking stone”. This never becomes floridly decorative or vacuously pretentious: the honed economy of the language is as striking as its psychological richness. Greenwell’s readiness to be candid comes with a melancholy tenderness too – the temperature is more warmly intimate than it is in Hollinghurst’s majestically contrived novels.

At the collection’s centre, running over four of the nine stories, is an account of his loving relationship with a Portuguese exchange student identified only as R (Greenwell has a slightly irritating penchant for withholding people’s names). Here he finds the “cleanness” that gives its title to the collection in a brief episode of joyous romantic fulfilment. Of course, it doesn’t last: circumstances force the pair to separate geographically and the relationship crumbles. Did Greenwell ever altogether believe in it? “I wanted to go back to what R had lifted me out of,” he admits. “I wanted to ruin what he had made, what he had made me, I mean, the person he had made me.”

You may be disturbed by what Greenwell has to tell us, but there is no denying that he deals in the truth about what Kant called “the crooked timber of humanity”, expressed in prose of chaste beauty and elegance.

Cleanness by Garth Greenwell, Picador, £14.99, ebook £8.99