Cleanness by Garth Greenwell, review: an unbearably intimate portrait of gay desire

“What is the life you want?” the narrator of Garth Greenwell’s second novel asks a young, heartbroken student of his. It’s a question refracted throughout this intense, emotional and super-sexy book – which burns with desire and longing.

The nameless narrator, a gay American schoolteacher in Sofia, is the same as that of Greenwell’s debut, the highly praised What Belongs to You. Cleanness, a companion piece, is a series of introspective, elegant vignettes that follow the narrator through a society working out a national identity (Arab Spring-like protests are taking place), while he grapples with the bounds of desire.

Language is the prism through which both longing and belonging are explored: he recognises a “kind of uncanny valley in language… so that however perfectly we speak a foreign language, speaking it too casually feels like imposture”.

In one of the (many) extended sex scenes, he finds there are things, inexpressible in English, that he can say in Bulgarian, “without self-consciousness or shame, as if there were something in me unreachable in my own language”. He feels a sense of separateness, as an American abroad and a gay man in a country where he can’t touch his boyfriend in public.But there’s a disconnect within him, too: “we can never be sure of what we want, I mean the authenticity of it, of its purity in relation to ourselves.”

The boyfriend, known only as R, is at the heart of the novel. The central section tracks the narrator’s doomed relationship with the young Portuguese man, the ebb and flow of feeling so intensely and precisely rendered by Greenwell that it feels almost indecent to be privy to something so intimate.

It’s in those moments that he no longer feels apart: he revels in the gift of cliché, proof of the “commonness of my feeling; I felt some stubborn strangeness in me ease, I felt like part of the human race”.

Cleanliness is published by Picador at £14.99 (ebook £8.99, audio available)