Cleanness

I read a lot of acclaim for Cleannesss but was sorely disappointed. This book was described as collection of linked short stories and as heavily autobiographical, but it fails as both fiction and memoir. The stories have very little depth, and despite the fact that each shares the same first person narrator, I came to the end of its 200 pages with no sense of his inner life. At its best, this approach yields some moments reminiscent of Hemingway, not only because of the sparse prose but also the subject matter: an American expatriate and no dearth of suffering. Hemingway, however, was not bound by reality in the way the Greenwell apparently was here, and could create settings, characters, and plots. Without the ability to do likewise, Greenwell has delivered something that reads more like a middle schooler's “How I Spent My Summer” essay than literary fiction.

The stories barely interested me at all, and what interest they generated was derived from the idea that they may have actually occurred; if presented as works of pure fiction, most would have been complete duds. This failure goes back to the book's lack of depth and introspection. Some of my favorite books in recent years have been described by their detractors as “tedious” (Elif Batuman's The Idiot), “boring” (Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle: Book One), and “a protracted, pointless exercise in nothingness” (Lydia Davis's The End of the Story). I genuinely love books in which authors write about mundane things, but that writing must go deeper than the events themselves, as this book does not.