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Cleanness garth greenwell review6/11/2023 ![]() Windpipes are taut, anuses are silky, flesh is relentlessly sniffed, and pages are heavy with sweat.Ĭleanness is Greenwell’s second novel - or ‘lieder cycle’, as he’s called it - after What Belongs to You, his celebrated debut from 2016. ![]() His mouths do not kiss or meet, but tend to greedily suck at each other, tasting themselves. In Greenwell’s case, I would add: little fatigue of tongue, fingers or the blood throbbing always in our narrator’s groin and vast heart. Indeed the novels are prickled like a sea urchin with the spines and fuzz of many indecencies.’ I’ve been looking for a way to describe the superabundance of sex in Garth Greenwell’s work, and I think it would be hard (impossible) to improve on what Elizabeth Hardwick once wrote about Philip Roth: ‘And sex, anywhere in every manner, a penitential workout on the page with no thought of backaches, chafings, or phallic fatigue. ![]()
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