Mating: A Novel (Vintage International)

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She goes "slightly decadent" for a while, trying out a variety of lovers, among other things, but what eventually really catches her eye is the legendary Nelson Denoon, the "acme of what you could get out of academia", able to do his own thing: NEW YORK, NY .- Katherine Champagne had never heard of “Mating,” the award-winning novel by Norman Rush, until one afternoon in 2020, when she popped into a random room on Clubhouse in the early days of that social media app. Bruns” anchored Rush’s 1986 collection, Whites, which featured six stories set in Botswana and was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize. Perhaps the praise it received—from Nadine Gordimer, Alice Munro, Joyce Carol Oates and Leslie Marmon Silko, among others—gave Rush the confidence he needed to compose a long novel entirely in the voice of the young anthropologist from “Bruns.” “Hubris made me do it,” he told the New York Times Book Review in 1991. “I know it sounds absurd, but I wanted to create the most fully realized female character in the English language.” Brilliantly written…utterly sui generis!…Rush has alerted us to the transfiguring power of passion…He deploys the narrative voice with…brio…wit and persuasiveness.” –Mirabella 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.

Her attempts at positioning herself -- her efforts at 'mating', from the pure sexual release to the complications of "intellectual love", as well as finding a place in Tsau -- are quite interesting -- though she does remain quite at sea. A. S. Byatt lives and writes in her handsome west London house and, in the summer months, in her house in the south of France. Both are filled with art, predominantly by her contemporaries, libraries of extravagant, Borgesian range and curiosa of many kinds, hinting at her unusual fecundity of mind: exotic preserved insects, the intricate examples of Venetian millefiori glassware and objects rare and fascinating of all imaginable varieties. The impression given by her houses is confirmed by her conversation, which moves confidently between literature, biology, the fine arts, and theoretical preoccupations and displays a mind turned always outwards. She is not a writer one can imagine being tempted to write a memoir: solipsism is not in her nature. I would hear again that in Tsau we had everything we have a right to demand in a continent as abused and threatened as Africa: decent food and clean water, leisure, decent and variable work, self-governance, discussion groups on anything, medical care. 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 ReviewHe won the U.S. National Book Award [2] and the 1992 Irish Times/ Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize for his novel Mating. This novel is one of the most unusual I have read. It is a novel of ideas and philosophy. It explores intimacy, love, history, politics, economics, feminism, and justice. It is a little drawn out in the beginning, recounting several of the protagonist’s relationships in Gabarone, but once she starts her trek across the Kalahari, it is entirely engrossing. She is searching for the “ideal” romantic relationship. The narrative is filled with intellectual sparring and literary references. Topics include commune life, capitalism, socialism, Marxism, apartheid, and the geopolitics of southern Africa. As an added bonus, it is guaranteed to expand the reader’s vocabulary, even if it is already vast.

Rush said the gender of his narrator did not invite much criticism at the time, to his knowledge; he remembered only one “protest movement” among book clubs in Canada, which, he said, had objected to his appropriation of a female interiority. The writing is strong but quite relentless; the fact that the narrator is not very sympathetic -- and so often a manipulator -- makes it difficult to empathize with her -- and at a more neutral distance her story simply isn't that engaging. Exhilarating . . . vigorous and luminous. . . . Few books evoke so eloquently the state of love at its apogee.”— The New York Times Book Review Dizzyingly readable... has that feeling, rare and unforgettable in contemporary fiction, of everything being at stake - ethically, emotionally and imaginatively... The best novel published this year, and doubtless for some to come Exhilarating…vigorous and luminous…Few books evoke the state of love at its apogee.” –The New York Times Book ReviewI think, for obvious reasons, heterosexuality is not particularly fashionable — indeed, it’s highly suspect,” said Hermione Hoby, the author of the novel “Virtue.”“So in some ways it makes sense that this book from 30 years ago should now find that talismanic force. It reads almost like a blueprint.” There is an intriguing psychological component, where questions arise as to the reason Nelson wants to remain in Tsau. This part gets into philosophy, such as that of the Tao Te Ching, and transformations caused by near-death experiences. Is the change real or fabricated? Rush and his wife worked as co-workers for the Peace Corps in Botswana from 1978 to 1983, which provided material for a collection of short stories he published as Whites in 1986, and for which he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His Botswana experience was also used in his first novel, Mating, which won a National Book Award for fiction in 1991, and in his second novel, Mortals. But he's elusive, difficult to find and approach -- and then, she realizes, likely to be difficult to hook. More recent mention of Mating appeared in relation to Rush's more recent books. John Updike, reviewing Rush's 2003 novel, Mortals, in The New Yorker said "There was much of this claustral pillow talk—self-consciousness squared—in Rush’s previous, prize-winning novel, Mating, but there the point of view was that of the nameless female protagonist, a thirty-two-year-old anthropologist engaged in a courtship pursuit of an older, married utopian activist, and this male reader, through whatever kink in his gendered nature, was comfortable with their orgies of talk." [10] Updike preferred the female narrator in Mating, over the male protagonist in Mortals.

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…”: For a novelist, Rush has an unusual fascination with history, power struggles and left-wing ideology; he once remarked to Granta that “Spanish anarchism,” eradicated by Franco, was “the best lost cause.” As a reader, he is drawn to long novels in which ideas are deeply embedded: Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Conrad’s The Secret Agent, Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. In interviews, he comes across as a peculiar hybrid: old-school socialist intellectual circa 1914; bearded radical archivist; hyper-articulate literary critic; and voracious autodidact. “Too much reading and drinking, and too much perfectionism”—that’s how Rush defined his younger self to the Paris Review. 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. Korby Lenker, a singer-songwriter, artist and writer in Nashville, Tennessee, said he was introduced to the novel through his godmother, who thought it might help him expand his vocabulary. In a review on his YouTube channel, Lenker, 46, described it as a “funny, smart love story about two people trying to discover what love between equals might look like.” Weeks, Sheldon (First Quarter 1993). "A Disappointing Novel". Africa Today. Indiana University Press. 40 (1): 78–79. JSTOR 4186892.Gates, David (21 October 1991). "The Novelist as Ventriloquist". Newsweek.com . Retrieved 22 February 2016. In 2003, Rush published an even longer novel set in Botswana, Mortals, but the wizardry was gone. Mating’s intimate first-person narration was jettisoned in favor of a leaden third-person account of Ray Finch, a CIA agent and Milton specialist, who has a tempestuous relationship with his wife. The narrator of Mating makes a brief appearance and is finally named: Karen Ann Hoyt. Her future, and Tsau’s fate, are revealed.