Greenwell’s unnamed protagonist, an American educator in Bulgaria, is adrift across a set of stories and landscapes, alienated not only by culture and sexuality and circumstance but by his struggle to identify himself as an agent capable of meaningful engagement with the world. Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness is a novel the sentences of which are particularly engaged in grammar as a function of meaning-making.
These are all writers of prodigious ability and they are all writers who use sentence structure and its grammar(s) in very specific ways for very specific reasons. Even a casual comparison of the prose styles of Yiyun Li, Rachel Cusk, Lauren Groff, Julie Otsuka, or Z.Z. It is a subtle art, or can be, and the many brilliant writers who use grammar in this way do so to very different ends. And yet grammar is the key to much of what makes sentences sing.
We think of grammar as strict and harsh, something punitive, prescriptive. Discussions of prose style very seldom concern themselves with the actual grammar of sentences.
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