“With great force he spat into my face” is the start of it. An American teacher in middle age arrives at an apartment to meet a man who is older, overweight, unhandsome, a brute. Yet perhaps, in a world that feels freshly broken, there is a renewed desire to be brought low.Įarly in Garth Greenwell’s incandescent second novel, “Cleanness,” there’s a sex scene between two anonymous men who’ve met online. In Toni Morrison’s “Sula,” to pick just one example, the protagonist “went to bed with men as frequently as she could” because “it was the only place where she could find what she was looking for: misery and the ability to feel deep sorrow.” These are hardly new themes, in literature or anywhere else. One thinks, “This is how we were going to do it from now on.” In Alan Hollinghurst’s recent novel “The Sparsholt Affair,” sex gives way to commentary about “the slight invalidish luxury of having been had.” The participants recognize something feral in each other.

The intensities of submission are a theme in Ocean Vuong’s novel, “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.” There’s a hair-pulling and hair-raising sex scene.

Marianne, in Rooney’s “Normal People,” desires to be “subjugated and in a way broken.” In Sally Rooney’s impeccable novels, women yearn to be tied or beaten or choked or otherwise degraded for intricate reasons, they feel they deserve no better. There’s been a lot to absorb about submission. “Physical love is unthinkable without violence,” Milan Kundera wrote in “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.” Some of the most essential recent fiction has surveyed the pain and pleasure of being on the receiving end of violent physical expression.

Cleanness garth greenwell