It would be a mistake simply to conflate this sexually submissive, culturally dominant narrator with Greenwell himself.

The narrator’s sexual arrangements with these men are consensual the linguistic ones continually shade into cultural domination. The tool of this control is the English language, whose elegant phrases hold his Slavic subjects captive like the spiked dog collars with which these men throttle him. What creates this parallax? Greenwell’s narrator wants to be swept up in his Slavic environments yet he also wants to control the terms of his submission to them. But as a Slavic queer of the kind the novel depicts, I see myself depicted with great awe but also muted, caught in a tableau whose terms I have not been allowed to negotiate. As an Anglophone gay reader, I am moved by the ways Greenwell’s novel offers a profoundly, precisely introspective meditation on the vulnerability of desire. To read it and What Belongs to You as a queer Slav is to find oneself in a hall of mirrors, in which the Slavic reader becomes both the sadist to the narrator’s masochist, and an inadvertently dominated, naive Sadean Justine. How does desire undo me? Greenwell asks, with a searching, taboo-breaking frankness that places him in a genealogy reaching back to the Marquis de Sade, Georges Bataille, Pauline Reage, and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch.Ī wall of cultural and linguistic otherness separates Greenwell’s narrator from his Slavic lovers in Cleanness. The aims of this exploration of desire and sex are epistemic, ontological, and hedonistic. Locating the inner sources and conditions of this enjoyment, and carefully staging their unraveling, are more important in Greenwell’s hypnotic fictions than the specifics of his narrator’s lovers. He limns the desiring self and the half-chimerical, half-real world in which this self finds its enjoyments.

Within this setting, Greenwell works in a genre of erotic realism. The stories collected in Cleanness, and those in Greenwell’s earlier What Belongs to You (2016), all take place in present-day Sofia, Bulgaria, where the narrator, a recent college graduate, is employed as an English teacher.

How does desire undo me? Greenwell asks, with a taboo-breaking frankness that places him in a genealogy reaching back to the Marquis de Sade.

Cleanness by Garth Greenwell