Mating

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You can find yourself liking someone who appears intellectually normal and then have him let drop that his favorite book of all time is ‘The Prophet. Literally--I finally just started keeping a list of the words I didn't know, because cracking the dictionary every time got to be chore.

Mating reminded me a bit of Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland in that it took me fifty or so pages to realize that the unnamed narrator was supposed to be female, and only then because she spent a page or so lamenting the width of her hips. Midway through this rereading, I am struck not so much by how much richness Rush devotes to developing character (though the characters are indeed fully-wrought, at once ample and supple), but to the mission of the novel itself, which seems to be constructed as carefully and with as much openness as Tsau, the utopian outpost where the two main characters come together. His protagonist is a memorable female character: a continually shifting prism that revolves from dashing to needy, from witty to morose.She was following me because I was American and seemed so at home and she was looking for someone she could impose on for something. Ergo: “And not to venture too far into the underside of our household humor, he also laughed inordinately when I was getting into bed and slightly farted and he said Is that the way you greet me?

From my own experience, when I encounter such combative, talkative people, my tendency is to quickly run in the other direction. Knopf editor for Mating, Ann Close, commends Rush's "facility in conveying the voice and sensibility of his amusingly self-absorbed narrator, a feminist anthropologist whose pursuit of a famous social scientist is a timely riff on a perennial theme, What do women want? Rush's Mating is like those first vegetarian meals from the 1970s; overly chewy, with lots of bulk, weird, crunchy things, and in the end, difficult to swallow. As one would expect, the heart of the novel takes place in Tsau and focuses on Nar's relationship with Nelson Denoon. I have been to Botswana, and I know it to be a strange place compared to other African venues, but the main setting of this book is very, very unusual.

Equilibrium or perfect mating will come when the male is convinced he is giving less than he feels is really required to maintain dependency and the woman feels she is getting more from him than her servile displays should merit. 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. One attractive thing about me is that I'm never bored, because during any caesuras my personal automatic pastime of questioning my own motives is there for me.

I can hardly think of Nelson as clueless, although he wasn't great at picking up on social/interpersonal cues in Tsau either). has gotten the narrator into this grand house under the expectation that there is a chance that Nelson Denoon—the man who, as my compatriot Popkey puts it, “has been hovering on the novel’s margins since its very first pages”—might be in attendance. Then begins the heart of the story, which details her infatuation and love affair with a boring, quasi-messianic, intellectual narcissist. She adds her “own emendation, a less pessimistic one”—the “jagged and belated but definite rise of women into positions of political authority.Owing to Rush’s sometimes claustrophobic first-person narration, he is entirely refracted through her mind. And keep your dictionary handy as you'll come across vocabulary worthy of Vladimir Nabokov - several examples: passim, anti-makhoa, cinéphile, douceur, omphalos. What follows is an insanely good introspective and analytical narrative – not just on her love, but on so many other things.