Greenwell appears to read from and sign copies of second novel, Cleanness. Credit: ORIETTE D’ANGELO
Greenwell appears to read from and sign copies of second novel, Cleanness.
Greenwell appears in conversation with Christopher Frizzelle at Elliot Bay Book Company this Saturday. ORIETTE D’ANGELO

A lot of contemporary literary fiction does nothing for me. It doesn’t attach to my brain. It’s fine. It’s not intense enough.

My favorite novelist, Virginia Woolf, once wrote in an essay that “moments of great intensity” are what matter most in life and in fiction. After a funeral, she wrote in a letter that she hated “the lack of intensity; the wailing & mumbling.” In 1940, the year Germany bombed London, she wrote in her diary, “I live in intensity.”

Intensity is also the novelist Garth Greenwell’s subject. The word itself appears twice on the first page of his second novel, Cleanness, a subtly ironic title for the dirtiest novel the New Yorker has excerpted in ages. (None of the dirtiest passages appeared in the magazine.)

Christopher Frizzelle was The Stranger's print editor, and first joined the staff in 2003. He was the editor-in-chief from 2007 to 2016, and edited the story by Eli Sanders that won a 2012 Pulitzer...