The Literary Fiction you should be reading this week: Garth Greenwell, Louise Erdrich,

SMALL RAIN by Garth Greenwell (Picador £16.99, 320pp) 

Greenwell’s previous novels, What Belongs To You and Cleanness, about an unnamed American writer in Bulgaria, explored gay desire in beautifully fluid sentences.

Small Rain might be the third in a series. The narrator, back in the US, is laid up in hospital after a sudden bout of pain turns out to be caused by a potentially deadly tear in his aorta.

What ensues is a patient novel about the experience of being a patient, its energy lying in the movement between the nitty-gritty of healthcare and the free play of the narrator’s mind as he roves over the state of American politics, memories of sex, and the tyranny of his father.

‘Pure life’ are the last words of the novel – no spoiler – and that’s what we get here. Greenwell’s best book, with the framing medical crisis a useful outlet for his tendency to solemnity.

THE MIGHTY RED by Louise Erdrich (Corsair £20, 384pp) 

Native American author Erdrich, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2021, returns to familiar ground in this tale of hardscrabble life in North Dakota (the title references the Red River flowing through it).

With a tangle of subplots, the story takes in the sugar industry, the environment and a cross-class love triangle during the 2008 financial crash.

It kicks off when an 18-year-old school leaver, Kismet, is caught between two suitors like chalk and cheese. 

There’s the jock, Gary, an American football player who is the son of the wealthy farmers employing her mother; and then there’s Hugo, a geeky outcast intent on saving money to run away.

As we toggle between a crowded cast of supplementary characters, Erdrich unspools her pacy social panorama with the urgency of a thriller, in which Kismet’s dilemma is the catalyst for a capacious plot exploring everything from fraud to fracking.

PLAYGROUND by Richard Powers (Hutchinson Heinemann £20, 400pp) 

An air of anticlimax hangs over this novel’s publication now, given it was longlisted for the Booker Prize in the summer but left off last week’s shortlist. Shame, but I’m a bit surprised it was ever nominated to begin with – and I adored Powers’s last book, Bewilderment, about a widowed astrobiologist amid a climate crisis. 

Playground, another environmental drama, turns on an American trying to build floating cities on the South Pacific island of Makatea. 

Key to the complex action are two science-loving childhood friends from Chicago: Rafi, a teacher who is black and had a precarious upbringing; and Todd, a wealthy white tech mogul now struck by degenerative disease.

The ingredients are supremely intriguing but the novel is less than the sum of its parts; as the story builds to the question of whether the islanders should allow the ‘seasteading’ project, Powers’s breadth of vision is let down by creaky dialogue and characterisation.