Cleanness: Moral fastidiousness and S&M in city of Sofia

“[W]hen he spat on me it was like a spark along the track of my spine, who knows why we take pleasure in such things.”

Garth Greenwell’s second novel – which, like his 2015 debut, What Belongs to You, is narrated by a gay American man living in Bulgaria – is centrally concerned with the problem of pleasure. I use the word “problem” advisedly: if you’re of a sadomasochistic persuasion, getting your fix entails no small measure of risk.

Early on in Cleanness, Greenwell’s narrator (who is unnamed throughout) meets a man off the internet for kinky sex (he tells him “I want to be nothing”) but has to extricate himself when the experience turns nasty: “the will-lessness I had assumed . . . had carried me now past anything I might want”.

Later on, he plays the dominant role in an encounter with another man, who advertises himself on a hookup app as a “No limits whore”: “He wanted it rough . . . his only demand was to be fucked bare, he wanted as many loads as he could get.”

In-between these two trysts, he has an emotionally fulfilling but doomed romantic relationship with a young Portuguese man known to us only as R. Here we see a different side to him, a tender and affectionate partner who wants to cover his lover in kisses but is rebuked for for being “cheesy”. When they break up, he defaults to seeking out “something brutal . . . I wanted to go back to what R had lifted me out of.”

Prudish readers be warned: the sex scenes in Cleanness are unhurried and officiously thorough.

English teacher

The narrator is coming to the end of a seven-year stint as an English teacher in Sofia. His provenance has afforded him a certain purchase in the sexual sphere: R boasts that “My sister would be so jealous, she’s always wanted an American boyfriend, and I got one first.”

Conversely, the run-down charms of the Bulgarian capital have a fetishistic glamour for the melancholic ex-pat. He describes one of his former students as having “a kind of earthy old-world grace” – the kind of thing perhaps only an American would say.

The city is an unhappy place: the young people he interacts with are invariably looking to leave, heading westwards to find work; a local taxi-driver waxes nostalgic about the communist era, when “we were all fucked but we had solidarity”; blood-and-soil nationalists hark back pathetically to Bulgaria’s medieval heyday.

Greenwell writes with great acuity about interpersonal chemistry, from the thrill of holding hands in public spaces (in a country where homophobic attacks are not uncommon) to the ritualism of S&M, which is rendered here as a kind of performance – a dance of self-negation and withholding.

He refrains from using speech marks in dialogue, and frequently deploys comma splices where others might have gone with a semi-colon or a fresh sentence. (“We wouldn’t stay the night, the hotel in Bologna was paid for, we would spend a few hours exploring and then come back.”) Such gimmicks can often feel contrived, but Greenwell’s storytelling is so consistently engaging, and his sentences so immaculately weighted, that they succeed in imbuing the prose with a sense of suppleness and momentum.

Sexual shame

The novel’s title signposts its preoccupation with moral fastidiousness. R’s smile “poured a kind of cleanness over everything we did”; R longs to live “somewhere in the north, a clean place, a country where things worked like they should”. This fixation with dirt is a cipher for sexual shame. In one of the most moving passages in the book, R opens up about having been sexually abused as a child, an experience he fears may have been fundamentally formative: “What if he [his abuser] made me this way, how can I be proud of it then . . . how can I march in some fucking parade.”

The narrator shares this anxiety: we learn that his father beat him when he was a child; he believes “we can never be sure of what we want, I mean of the authenticity of it, its purity in relation to ourselves.”

We’ve seen this trope elsewhere, in novels like Sally Rooney’s Normal People and Eimear McBride’s The Lesser Bohemians: a character who likes it rough, or is otherwise sexually atypical, is revealed to have been a victim of physical or sexual violence.

Readers of such books must grapple with a similar dilemma to that faced by Greenwell’s characters: by treating this cause-and-effect formulation as a self-evident existential truth, we implicitly reinforce reactionary notions of sexuality that pit the normal (wholesome, clean) against the deviant (damaged, defective, squalid), perpetuating stigma and shame.

Cleanness explores this bind with bracing candour, and comes down – just about – on the side of a generous agnosticism: “There’s no fathoming pleasure . . . nothing we can imagine is beyond it.”