Cleanness

I loved Greenwell's first book, What Belongs to You, the elegant and intense story of an American's desire for a Bulgarian man, and I love this one too. It's also the story of a young American in Bulgaria, it's also a story of desire, and it's also elegant and intense. But, as a set of connected stories, it's more diffused, and, with a three-story centerpiece called "Loving R.," it's more open to the possibility of joy. Greenwell writes about desire and physical intimacy with a jaw-dropping candor and intelligence, but the most striking thing in this book are the sentences: cascading series of comma splices that (in a manner that might remind readers of Cusk or Sebald, though Greenwell's style is his own) create both an intimate engagement and a melancholy distance for the narrator and ourselves. This feels like life, breathed and lived, and stylishly recalled.