BmoreArt

In the book’s core section, Greenwell subjects the narrator to the pleasures and inevitable pains of another whirlwind affair, this time with a Portuguese exchange student called R. In the titular story, the narrator confides that “sex had always been fraught with shame and anxiety and fear” but R.’s smile “poured a kind of cleanness over everything we did.” This entanglement with R. is the closest he has ever gotten to a romantic partnership. However, their clandestine arrangement and the narrator’s insatiable sexual appetite doom the relationship. Elation offers momentary hope only to calcify into ambivalence.

As in What Belongs to You, Greenwell depicts sex candidly in Cleanness, but at greater length and in more vivid detail. His sex scenes are sustained negotiations, the taking and surrendering of power as sport. In these quarters, sex not only engages the senses, inviting arousal or repulsion, but interrogates worldly sensibilities, drawing memories of the narrator’s botched conversion to Christianity and of his Southern father’s threats to tan his hide. Sex here is also messy, in turns loving and resentful, brutal and tender. R.’s confession of teenage sexual abuse by a family friend prompts the narrator to relinquish his bottom role and tepidly attempt barebacking R. This act of consolation flip flops from being selfless then cruel, bold then pathetic, captivating then grotesque.

The bookend sections detail the narrator’s eventual separation from R. The two most captivating stories of the bunch contain the most intense sexual encounters yet. Third and seventh in line, they fall in fearful symmetry. In “Gospodar,” which means master or lord, the narrator comes to the apartment of a sadomasochist. Again, sex is a liminal playground. Gospodar chains him up and whips him around, then softly whispers “kuchko,” or “bitch,” into his ear. Kneeling in submission to forceful head, the narrator arrives “in some recess or depth where I had never been,” then finds himself “saying again and again I want to be nothing, I want to be nothing.”

In “The Little Saint,” the narrator assumes the dominant role. He revels in the aggression he enacts upon a younger man who describes himself on hookup apps as a “no limits whore.” As the narrator takes The Little Saint from behind and presses his face down onto the mattress, the younger man echoes the narrator’s pleas from that other place in time. “Please, I’m nothing, I’m nothing.”

It’s not a self-destructive plea, not entirely. For the narrator, it’s a yearning to be freed from the shackles of himself: his grief over another lost love, or the all-encompassing malaise he feels about teaching the hopeless youth of the crumbling city that has never quite felt like home. It’s a revelation that comes to the narrator when pushed to his limits and brought to the place where reasons end. Only there, where the soul is laid bare, is he closer to knowing, and maybe even loving, himself.

“The whole history of queer art is taking shame and stigma and turning it into style,” Greenwell said during an appearance at Brooklyn’s Center for Fiction around the initial release of Cleanness. Further, “queer eros is taking stigma and making it productive of pleasure.” Far from the blanket sentiment of “same love,” the best queer stories acknowledge pleasure’s colorful origins, unflattering or otherwise.

Cleanness is clearly not about love, at least not in the obvious romantic sense. It’s about what love means to someone, be it affirmation, companionship, or gratification. Greenwell takes the reader to the river’s edge, to stare into the abyss that is human desire. The waters are murky. There’s no telling how deep it goes or what might surface. Let’s call it love, the quest for this elusive thing, and wade in.