Cleanness: an intoxicating blend of porn and art
14 Mar 2020

by Drew Rowsome - photos courtesy of the publisher.

As a great admirer of Garth Greenwell's novel What Belongs to You, I was very eager to read Cleanness. Even before he gave The New York Times the somewhat cheeky quote that stated that his aim was to write “something that was 100 percent pornographic and 100 percent high art.” Greenwell doesn't achieve 100 percent of his ambition, simply because pornography is, to my mind, designed simply for arousal, whereas Greenwell uses explicit sex to probe deeply into the minds and emotional states of his characters. The final result is 100 percent erotica both in the sexually arousing sense and in the sheer seductive quality of the prose and ideas.

Cleanness is less a novel than a series of interconnected short stories that create a incomplete portrait. Narrative is not what is important. An English teacher who aspires to be a writer, is teaching in Sofia, Bulgaria. The first chapter chronicles his meeting with a student struggling to come out and dealing with heartbreak after rejection by his straight object of affection. The second is a vivid account of a BDSM encounter that goes wrong. The third documents the protest movement in Bulgaria and where it intersects with the gay rights struggle. The middle section is a series of stories delineating the narrator's love affair with a fellow ex-pat, a tortured closeted Azorian. Cleanness ends with the introductory chapters echoed in reverse.

It is a clever structure that does not reveal itself until the book ends and one takes time to reflect. While immersed in Greenwell's sensual sentences - long and alluring, fraught with allusions and hesitations - time stops and it is only the present events that matter. Somehow Greenwell achieves an urgency, as if the words are just pouring out, while also revelling in the intricate care that has been taken to place each word, each phrase, each description, in a smooth, exact, and pleasing manner. Deceptively conversational, calmly passionate and a sheer joy to read. 

The narrator is melodramatic, as gay men in lust and love are, and his desire to connect is outweighed by his constant struggle to figure out what other people are experiencing. It is all complicated by the necessity of being closeted in Bulgaria, which inevitably creates the tension that fuelled many great gay novels and that has been drained by the very obstacles to love removed by successful gay visibility and rights. A great love story has to have conflict and a love, a lust, that dare not speak its name was for decades a great device to create longing and thwarted passion.

Greenwell's over-arching question seems to be how much one is willing to give up for love. And/or for being out. And/or for sexual gratification. The three are inextricably wound together in the narrator's original desire to be subservient, to be "nothing" but flesh to be used. The BDSM scene is brutal and beautiful. And brutally honest. As is its echo. And both debate how much of our desire is inspired by porn, the narrator asks himself that question explicitly several times, and how much is real. That throws the central love story into question as much of it is influenced by high art, specifically painting and opera. Greenwell stretches the metaphor even further with the power of the word - poetry and journalism - inspiring the coming out process.

The narrator, tragically, never gets to reconcile or completely fulfill his desires. He never quite comes out and he views his love story, with its hot vanilla sex, as more romantic and real than his penchant for rough sex. He sees it as a split between the mind and the body, the heart and the cock. It is a gay, a human, dilemma, and Greenwell splays it on the page in sybaritic and voluptuous prose that is irresistible. All while Greenwell proves emphatically that pornography and high art can co-exist within the same pages and the result is intoxicating..