Mating: A Novel (Vintage International)

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Newsweek reviewer David Gates, on the other hand, is not so captivated by the narrator. He says that the novel "is state-of-the-art artifice: she [the narrator] talks, she introspects, she even suffers. But she never quite comes to life. Maybe that's the point—we are talking narcissism—but despite the work that went into her, we can't take her to heart." [7] Fittingly, her first glance at Denoon occurs at a boisterous political debate. The topic? Whether Africa, in the 1980s, ought to pursue a capitalist or a socialist development model (the destruction of the Berlin Wall and Nelson Mandela’s release from prison are a decade away). Denoon’s opponent is a sneering young Botswana Marxist. In an interview with Norman Rush and his wife Elsa for the Paris Review, Joshua Pashman describes Rush's first novel as "Both an adventure story and a 'novel of ideas,' Mating is also a microscopic, Lawrentian examination of an embattled courtship. [11] One of the most hypnotic reading experiences I've ever had... every feminist would be proud to claim this extraordinary novel as her own

This novel is set in Botswana, about Botswana, but it is not of or for Botswana. It has been written for Americans and is more about America and American perceptions of the world than Africa. (...) Mating is, in reality, a giant short story, right down to its O'Henry-ish ending, and it might better have stopped as a novella." - Sheldon G. Weeks, Africa Today How can Norman Rush's 1991 Mating rank among the great 20th-century novels? Let me count the ways. With all respect to Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, Isabel Archer, no modern male has imagined a female protagonist as vivid and complex as Mating's unnamed lover-anthropologist-adventurer. Few if any white novelists have written so easily about the underrepresented turf of Africa Writer Lauren Oyler said she read it on the recommendation of critic Christian Lorentzen, who gave her a beat-up copy a few years ago. Other recent converts include Blair Beusman, a social media editor at The New Yorker, and Sophie Haigney, the web editor at The Paris Review and a freelance writer, who said she counted the book among those like Shirley Hazzard’s “Transit of Venus” or Nancy Lemann’s “Lives of the Saints,” which are part of a “network of recommendations and rediscovery” online and in group texts. A complex and moving love story... breathtaking in its cunningly intertwined intellectual sweep and brio Champagne, the startup employee, said she found the narrator persuasive — so much so that she struggled to imagine recommending “Mating” to a man, because it seemed to be a “girl’s book,” in her view.

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Exhilarating . . . vigorous and luminous. . . . Few books evoke so eloquently the state of love at its apogee.”— The New York Times Book Review

A novel of real, original ideas about feminism, love, politics, race and anthropology... This is a story with blood in its veins. And the narrator is the best female character created by a male author I have ever come across Does the narrator make the right choice by leaving Denoon and Africa? Is she correct in thinking Denoon had suffered a nervous breakdown and become "insanely passive," an "impostor," after his ordeal in the desert? Or did Denoon have a genuinely mystical experience? Z offers the narrator one electrifying nugget: Nelson Denoon, a lapsed 47-year-old American scholar who has established a secretive women-run community, Tsau, in the Kalahari Desert, will soon present himself at a debate in Gaborone. She exclaims: “So it was none other than Nelson Denoon!” He’s a luminary in anthropology who reviles academia, a figure who has managed the elusive feat of putting theory into practice, a man at the level of “Paulo Freire or Ivan Illich, but nonreligious, totally, therefore not dismissable as a mystic.”

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Well, I tend to say I wrote nothing as an undergraduate. But, in fact, I sat there in most of the lectures I went to, which weren’t many, writing this novel very obsessively and extremely slowly. And knowing it was no good, and knowing I didn’t want to write a novel about a young woman at a university who wanted to write a novel, and equally knowing I didn’t know anything else, and hadto write that sort of novel . . .

The best rendering of erotic politics…since D.H. Lawrence…a marvelous novel, one in which a resolutely independent voice claims new imaginative territory…The voice of Rush’s narrator is immediate, instructive and endearing.” –The New York Review of Books Gates, David (21 October 1991). "The Novelist as Ventriloquist". Newsweek.com . Retrieved 22 February 2016. The narrator’s politics are more conventional: “I think probably we should all be liberals.” And yet her own utopia is even more utopian than Denoon’s: “nobody lying … lie to me at your peril.” The clash of these utopias contributes to the novel’s dynamism, as well as to its enduring relevance in a period when the positions of liberals continue to face strong challenges from the left. If the narrator allows Denoon to expatiate on world-historical themes, she won’t allow him to romanticize Africa’s poor. After eight nomadic Basarwa families establish a camp on the edge of Tsau, barter arrangements ensue with the newcomers. Denoon is irked: “unequal exchange, as a general thing, disgruntled Nelson.” That is piffle to her, and she hastens to affirm the complexity of human behavior and the limits of rationalist discourse; Rush seems to be telling us that it is women who must rescue men from the schemes they’ve hatched on the precipices of rationality . She has read V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River and lives by its first six words: “The world is what it is…”:Does the narrator make the right choice by leaving Denoon and Africa? Is she correct in thinking Denoon had suffered a nervous breakdown and become “insanely passive,” an “impostor,” after his ordeal in the desert? Or did Denoon have a genuinely mystical experience? My story is turning into the map in Borges exactly the size of the country it represents, but I feel I should probably say everything. that they could give up their American citizenship and stay on in Tsau permanently, the narrator obviously experiences uncertainty. Real difficulties for them arise with the manipulations of Hector Raboupi, a troublemaker who runs a string of male prostitutes, the “night men,” who offer themselves to the women. When Hector mysteriously disappears, his woman, Dorcas, raises a great row, accusing Denoon of having done away with him. In the middle of this, Denoon—against the rules—appropriates one of Tsau’s two horses and heads north on a quixotic mission to found a sister colony. He is brought in after two weeks, near death from a fall from his horse. His recovery is uneventful, but his passivity alarms the narrator, who takes him to Gabarone to see a psychiatrist. I wore myself out collecting enough wood for a ring fire, got us all set up inside it, went into my tent, and closed my eyes, and immediately there were lions in the neighborhood. There may have been only one. I heard a roar like no other sound on earth. I felt it in my atoms. This is my reward for taking precautions, was my first thought. I made myself emerge. I peered around. My [donkeys] were standing pressed together and shaking pathetically. I looked for glints from lion eyes out in the dark but saw nothing. In the morning I found it hard to eat. There was terror in me. I could die in this place, it was clear.” All of this is presented in an allusively freewheeling first-person narrative that provides exhilarating evidence of an impressive intelligence at work and play. Readers receive a palpable sense of having their education sternly tested -- and expanded -- by Mr. Rush's novel. Geography, history, political science, economics, literature, biology, popular culture and utter trivia -- the narrator and her beloved Denoon hash everything out, and in doing so are encyclopedic in the extreme, segueing from bats to Boers to Borges to Botswana. (...) Mr. Rush has created one of the wiser and wittier fictive meditations on the subject of mating. His novel illuminates why we yield when we don't have to. It seeks to illuminate the nature of true intimacy -- how to define it, how to know when one has achieved it. And few books evoke so eloquently that state of love at its apogee" - Jim Shepard, The New York Times Book Review