Cleanness by Garth Greenwell
Published 2020 · 66,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace
How hard is Cleanness to read?
Cleanness scores 54 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 58 out of 100
- Precise rather than rare; the difficulty is in placement, not obscurity.
- Sentence structure: 72 out of 100
- Very long, carefully suspended sentences, some running most of a page.
- Abstraction: 58 out of 100
- Physical experience examined at a high level of reflection.
- Information density: 52 out of 100
- Unhurried; little happens per page by design.
- Narrative indirection: 45 out of 100
- A watchful narrator who reports his own feeling accurately but incompletely.
- Symbolic density: 52 out of 100
- Restrained symbolism; the book prefers direct statement.
- Ironic distance: 45 out of 100
- Some distance between the narrator's self-account and his conduct.
- Resolution withholding: 68 out of 100
- Most of the encounters are left without conclusion.
- Structural complexity: 45 out of 100
- Linked stories arranged in a mirrored sequence.
How Cleanness is regarded
Cleanness holds a literary regard score of 61 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.