Small Rain by Garth Greenwell

Friday, May 29, 2026--San Antonio

Small Rain by Garth Greenwell was longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction.  It is a very detailed novel during about a period of days changed the life of a 45-year-old professor of poety (and former high school teacher),  Severe pain occurs in his belly.  Five days later the pain has not gone away and he heads to the Emergency Room at the local hospital.  Most of the book covers his experiences, interactions, and wandering thoughts during the 10-11 days at the hospital--at the emergency room on the first day and then in thein the Intensive Care Unit.  The protagonist had a dangerous situation related to a tear to the inner lining of his aorta and there were indications of inflamation that could be the cause.  Multiple teams of doctors were involved to try to search for the cause of the inflamation so they could treat it while they were giving him heavy doses of antibiotics intraveneously in hopes that they would take care of whatever the cause was if they could never noarrow it down through their lab tests, scans, etc.  The author is obviously a good writer, but the story goes into so much detail about the hospital experience and veers off at one point for many detailed pages about poety that I found myself wishing to move on.  I did start skipping pages about poety; the topic was not interesting to me and it had nothing to do with moving the story of his situation forward.  I often notice that an author is so interested in his specialty topic that he ends up writing too much about it in a novel--providing far more information than either the story needs or reader needs or wants.  In this case I, therefore, downgraded my rating to 3 1/2 stars out of 5.