Garth Greenwell Wants Us to Stop Policing What Stories Are ‘Relevant’
His new novel ‘Cleanness’ challenges what it means for a story to be ‘universal’
In 2014, when Garth Greenwell was an MFA student at The Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a professor he revered — “and continue[s] to revere,” he says — dismissed a short story he’d written about cruising for sex, saying that it “read like a sociological report on the practices of a subculture.” Greenwell was shocked, in part because the critique seemed to pivot on a loaded question: What makes a piece of art “universal”?
“To this professor, something like Congregationalist ministers in rural Iowa” — as Marilynne Robinson explores in her novel Gilead — “did not feel like a subculture, but instead was representative of universal human experience,” says Greenwell “in a way that gay men having sex with each other in a bathroom did not.” He has been writing urgently against that proposition for his entire career — including in his sophomore novel, Cleanness, out January 14.
Greenwell’s 2016 debut novel What Belongs To You was critically celebrated, winning the British Book Award for Debut Book of the Year and longlisted for the National Book Award. It opens with a man cruising for sex in a public bathroom in Bulgaria, beneath Sofia’s National Palace of…
