Marie Cuvelier explores how the temporal logics of hospitalisation are subtly resisted in Gareth Greenwell’s 2025 novel Small Rain.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the unnamed narrator in Garth Greenwell’s Small Rain (2025) is hospitalised with a sudden critical illness. There, the patient hovers between agency and depersonalisation, reduced to a body to be monitored and measured, “a medical puzzle” stuck in ‘institutional time’ (Gotlib 2021, 204). Institutional time is often understood as something to endure: repetitive, empty, and stripped of “physical and narrative control” (Ibid, 198). The experience of suspended time can emerge as an individual crisis of illness and/or as a collective temporal disruption.
Epidemic literature, such as COVID-19 novels, tend to foreground how illness reorganises time into waiting, uncertainty, and isolation, while intensifying the need for connection and care (Nilsson Skåve 2024). Yet, Small Rain shows that even when medical institutions depersonalise the relationships between patients and others, relational care is attainable. The novel refuses to treat the depersonalised hospital stay as empty time. Instead, through fleeting gestures of touch, acknowledgement and repetition, Greenwell shows how endurance can thicken in relational time, so that suspended hospital hours become moments where recognition, attachment, and subjectivity persist.
In this piece I analyse suspended time, drawing on José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of disidentification, which describes how minoritarian subjects navigate dominant structures by partially identifying with them while simultaneously reworking their meaning from within (1999, 11). Combining disidentification with Lisa Baraitser’s account of ‘suspended time’, I suggest that Small Rain reconceives disidentification as a temporal practice of care. By inhabiting suspended time rather than dismissing it, the narrator reworks the hospital’s depersonalising routines. What emerges is a “time of mattering”: not cure or progress, but the slow, affective persistence of relation in conditions designed to erase them (Baraitser 2017, 75).
Touch, Repetition, and the Reworking of Institutional Time
Disidentification is both survival and resistance and “require[s] an active kernel of utopian possibility” (Muñoz 1999, 25). Hospitalisation represents a regime of normativity as it assigns roles and regulates time according to a particular institutional logic. Positioning disidentification alongside care and hospital temporality reveals it not only as a strategy of identity formation but as a temporal practice–it enables patients and caregivers to inhabit institutional structures without being fully determined by them. Reflecting Anna Gotlib’s demand to reconfigure medical care in ways that acknowledge “being-with and witnessing of another’s suffering as an essential part of care”, the increased human need for connection during states of vulnerability and its ability to counter the de-humanising effects of hospitalisation is emphasised (2021, 207).
In Small Rain, the narrator recalls how his nurse Renee “placed her hand on [his] ankle” (Greenwell 2025, 33). The gesture has no “medical purpose, no measurable end but comfort” (Ibid, 34). In the hospital, a space structured by monitoring, Renee’s touch produces no data, yet it reorients time from mechanical repetition to what Baraitser calls ‘repeating’: when time thickens with meaning (2017, 75). Baraitser argues that time does not unfold teleologically but rather in suspended temporalities. ‘Maintaining’ is the repetitive, durational, and invisible labour of care “that keeps ‘things’ going”, such as checking vitals (Ibid, 49). ‘Repeating’ marks the core of care and the value that emerges from endurance and labour. Through Renee’s touch, maintaining becomes affectively charged and time “comes to matter” (Ibid, 76, emphasis in original). The narrator describes the touch, the first non-instrumental contact he “had had in months”, as a “shock” (Greenwell 2025, 33–34). The hospital’s institutional temporality is briefly shifted. Through her gesture, Renee performs disidentification, reworking her role as a nurse by introducing a form of medical care outside of measurement or rigid clinical function.
The importance of minor gestures in retaining identity is evidenced by the narrator’s reaction: “I felt tears spring to my eyes” (Ibid). He realises the intense need for “the daily unremarkable corporeality” that suddenly became impossible during the pandemic as “there had been no hugs, no shaking of hands” for months (Ibid). The narrator frequently returns to this moment, marking it as a “time of mattering” (Baraitser 2017, 75), a small utopian rupture (Muñoz 1999, 25), constituting an instance in which institutional structures are reoriented towards another way of being, this time marked by relationality. The narrator elaborates on the gesture’s importance:
“…all the precise data they collected from my specific body, had nothing to do with me, [they] left the crucial me unseen, untouched (only the first day, only Renee’s hand on my ankle, that had been the only actual touch).” (Greenwell 2025, 183)
He has become an object of inquiry rather than a subject. Nevertheless, putting emphasis on the statement through brackets, the narrator excepts that Renee’s touch “had been the only actual touch” (Ibid). The persistence of this memory underscores how the gesture continues to signify, and how its relational charge endures as a trace of recognition even as his body remains increasingly objectified. The gesture matters because it reasserts relationality and identity within an institutional temporality designed to erase them.
Staying-With: Repetition, Futurity and Care Beyond the Ward
When the narrator leaves the ward, he reflects on his relationship with Alivia, another nurse. He is “struck” by the “asymmetry” of the patient-caretaker relationship, yet his reflection also reveals care’s asymmetric temporality (Ibid, 235). For Alivia, care is an ongoing professional rhythm, she continuously “shepherd[s]” patients “through whatever crisis” (Ibid). Her relation to the narrator is part of maintaining as she routinely “deals with states of dependency”, performing the ongoing, repetitive labour required to sustain patients whose needs persist over time (Baraitser 2017, 53). Yet, for the narrator, Alivia’s care thickens into repeating: “she was singular, she had cared for me in a way no one ever had” (Greenwell 2025, 235). He recognises that the purpose of the care he receives is its own disappearance, claiming “the sign of its success was its ending” (Ibid). The prior choice of the word “shepherd” emphasises the goal of medical care as a linear temporal movement and positions Alivia guiding her patients from illness to discharge (Ibid). This risks flattening patients into a collective flock rather than singular subjects, reinforcing how medical care tends to operate efficiently at scale rather than affectively at the level of individual attachment.
The hospital’s temporal economy depends on a cycle of admission and discharge. The narrator, however, refuses to read the fact that their relationship “had transience built in” as a negative, rather viewing it as having “engendered intensity” (Ibid). By acknowledging that “it wasn’t a personal relationship though it had felt personal,” he allows both impersonality and attachment to coexist (Ibid). Thus, he performs an act of disidentification; he inhabits the limits of the institutional structure in which he received the care (that of the hospital, with transient caregivers), while re-inscribing them with affective significance. The hospital’s temporal economy and the suspended time that a patient must endure become the very condition for the time of mattering.
This temporal logic where repetition accrues affective meaning within institutional constraint extends beyond the ward to the narrator’s partner’s visits. Each day, L brings a fresh pair of underwear, washing and folding the previous day’s pair despite the narrator saying that “he could bring several at a time” (Greenwell 2025, 161). The language used to describe this exchange is plain, “washing,” “folding” (Ibid). This ritual offers continuity. This is care as maintaining: the durational, often invisible labour that keeps life going (Baraitser 2017, 49). This repetition and mundanity transform it into a form of temporal care, allowing the gesture to accrue meaning–each pair of underwear becomes a material bridge between the hospital’s suspended time and the world beyond it. They represent a micro-utopia of contact within separation.
Contact becomes condensed into an object passing through L’s caring hands. L’s gesture embodies maintaining, the steady labour that keeps life going, and gestures toward futurity, the faith that “[m]aybe you will come home tomorrow” (Greenwell 2025, 161). His refusal to bring multiple pairs anchors hope in the ongoing present: “bringing multiple pairs would be a betrayal of hope” (Ibid). L’s insistence becomes amplified by the COVID-19 context, as contact between patients and loved ones became scarce. The restrictions of proximity and future intensify the need for connection. Even ordinary gestures carry an increased emotional charge as the only certainty remaining is that they “are just here, together, now” (Awdish 2020, e17). Care, therefore, encompasses “standby” as “a way to ‘stay with’ as a form of care for the future” (Kemmer et al. 2021, 23).
The repetition resists depersonalisation by reworking the hospital’s temporality through tenderness. Disidentification operates temporally as L works within the suspended time of the hospital but recodes it as the time of ongoing relation. L does not overcome institutional restraints but by refusing efficiency, bringing each pair of underwear one by one, he anchors hope in the present rather than a deferred future. Time matters not because it advances, but because it is lived together. Care becomes a strategy of staying-with rather than moving beyond. Suspended time is neither empty nor solely endured; it is folded as repetition accrues affective density.
Conclusion
In Small Rain, disidentification functions not only as resistance but as a temporal practice of care: it re-configures the repetitive temporality of hospitalisation into relational time. Greenwell reframes care as a mode of living-with crisis, rather than as something needed to overcome suspended time. Even within institutional depersonalisation with routinised structures of care and patients as medical puzzles, this novel posits that care still occurs and matters such as through Renee’s fleeting touch and L’s refusal of efficiency. Through its use of repetition, Small Rain discovers the time of mattering: the slow, affective rhythm through which relation endures.
About the author
Marie Cuvelier is a Literary Studies rMA student at the University of Amsterdam. She holds a BA in English Studies from the University of Luxembourg, where she recently held a workshop on plague and COVID-19 texts. Her work predominantly explores epidemic literatures through the lens of suspended time.
References
Awdish, Rana L.A. 2020. “The Liminal Space.” The New England Journal of Medicine 383 (4): e17. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMp2012147.
Baraitser, Lisa. 2017. Enduring Time. Bloomsbury Academic.
Gotlib, Anna. 2021. “Power, Identity, and Liminality in an American Hospital.” In Applying Nonideal Theory to Bioethics, edited by Elizabeth Victor. Springer.
Greenwell, Garth. 2025. Small Rain. Picador.
Kemmer, Laura, et al. 2021. “Pandemic Times. A Conversation with Lisa Baraitser about the Temporal Politics of COVID-19.” Ephemera 21 (1): 21–30.
Muñoz, José Esteban. 1999. “Introduction: Performing Disidentifications.” In Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. University of Minnesota Press.
Nilsson Skåve, Åsa. 2024. “’Until It Suddenly Isn’t’: Two Novels on Life after a Pandemic Disaster.” Humanities 13 (2): 1-9. https://doi.org/10.3390/h13020060.
