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I’ve been looking for a way to describe the superabundance of sex in Garth Greenwell’s work, and I think it would be hard (impossible) to improve on what Elizabeth Hardwick once wrote about Philip Roth: ‘And sex, anywhere in every manner, a penitential workout on the page with no thought of backaches, chafings, or phallic fatigue Indeed the novels are prickled like a sea urchin with the spines and fuzz of many indecencies’   In Greenwell’s case, I would add: little fatigue of tongue, fingers or the blood throbbing always in our narrator’s groin and vast heart His mouths do not kiss or meet, but tend to greedily suck at each other, tasting themselves Windpipes are taut, anuses are silky, flesh is relentlessly sniffed, and pages are heavy with sweat    Cleanness is Greenwell’s second novel — or ‘lieder cycle’, as he’s called it — after What Belongs to You, his celebrated debut from 2016 The nameless narrator from the first book has returned: he is still in Sofia, Bulgaria, and remains a teacher at a prestigious American school, but he can no longer bear the rote work of teaching and his world has become much more sharply Manichean The bathrooms under the National Palace of Culture from the first book — where he goes to cruise and eventually meets the hustler Mitko, whom he adores and dotes on — appear in the second as an infernal temptation, drawing him back (‘Draw’ is a keyword in Greenwell’s universe; as in to be ‘drawn out of’,  ‘toward’ — the lure of something dark moving characters with a force that is not will or choice) But outside the subterranean bathrooms stand salvation and R: a Portuguese boyfriend who brings the promise, or taunting impossibility, of a health-giving wholesome love    The nine chapters in Cleanness never coalesce into a conventional plot Instead, each is a story sketched from a different coordinate inside a citywide memory theatre The narrator meets with students, attends a protest, loves and has sex, and periodically reminds you that this is what