Mating: A Novel [Paperback]

Norman Rush (Author)

Book Description

Release date: September 1, 1992

The narrator of this splendidly expansive novel of high intellect and grand passion is an American anthropologist at loose ends in the South African republic of Botswana. She has a noble and exacting mind, a good waist, and a busted thesis project. She also has a yen for Nelson Denoon, a charismatic intellectual who is rumored to have founded a secretive and unorthodox utopian society in a remote corner of the Kalahari—one in which he is virtually the only man. What ensues is both a quest and an exuberant comedy of manners, a book that explores the deepest canyons of eros even as it asks large questions about the good society, the geopolitics of poverty, and the baffling mystery of what men and women really want.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Had Jane Austen been in the Peace Corps in Africa in the 1980s, Mating is the book she might have written. Set in Botswana in the days before the end of apartheid, Norman Rush's novel is, essentially, a comedy of manners played out in Austen's approved milieu: a country village. Granted, the village in question, Tsau, is a utopian society created by the great American anthropologist Nelson Denoon, and run largely by and for disenfranchised and abused African women. Still, the issue that interests Rush (and the one that fueled Austen's novels) is the age-old question of who mates with whom, and why? The unnamed narrator is a 32-year-old postgraduate student in anthropology whose dissertation has just gone south on her. Drifting around the edges of the expatriate community in Gaborone, the capital of Botswana, she first meets Denoon:

He was smiling at Kgosetlemang--the event was to be considered over with, clearly--and I could tell that his gingivae were as good as mine; which is saying a lot. I attend to my gums. People in the bush don't always attend to their oral hygiene, not to mention other niceties. There was no sign of that here. I of course am fanatical about my gums because my idea of what the movie I Wake Up Screaming is about is a woman who has to keep dating to find her soulmate and she's had to get dentures. I have very long-range anxieties.

Entranced by this potential soulmate, our heroine strikes out into the Kalahari Desert with a couple of donkeys and follows him to his utopia where sexual attraction, regional politics, and social experimentation make for very strange bedfellows, indeed.

Mating is a fiercely intelligent, hugely ambitious novel that takes on feminism, socialism, political corruption, foreign-sponsored rural development projects, and, yes, male-female relations in ways that are simultaneously hilarious and disturbing. Certainly Rush's language is a big part of what makes the novel work: the narrator's combination of elevated vocabulary and wacky non sequiturs is inspired. When, for example, Denoon explains to her that most of the women in Tsau are celibate and therefore so is he, she reflects that "of course the spiritus rector of a female community would need to be a sexual solitary, at least during the foundational period." She then wonders if "this situation was the analog of western series on television where the female watchership shrank to nothing when the producers let the marshal get married." Mating is remarkable for its wit, its acuity, and its ability to satirize without demeaning; it's also a heck of an entertaining story. Jane Austen would have been proud. --Alix Wilber

From Publishers Weekly

Readers of this National Book Award-winning novel, a BOMC alternate in cloth, will be captivated by Rush's narrator, a self-absorbed feminist anthropologist who pursues a famous social scientist in the Kalahari desert. Author tour.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 496 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (September 1, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 067973709X
• ISBN-13: 978-0679737094
• Product Dimensions: 5 x 0.9 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (92 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #212,703 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

86 of 97 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Stunning, but not for everyone December 28, 2000

By Matthew Cheney VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

I took forever deciding whether I should read Mating, whether I wanted to commit my time to such a long and apparently difficult book, whether it would be worth it in the end. I thought about buying it a number of times, but couldn't get up the courage -- what if it just gathered dust on a shelf? I borrowed a copy from the library, finally, and promised myself that if I hated it (as a number of my friends had) I would abandon it quickly.

Now Mating is one of the few books I would want to have with me on a desert island. I can easily, happily say it was one of the great reading experiences of my life so far. But it's also a book that seems tailor-made to my sensibilities, as if somebody asked me, "What would you like a big novel to contain?" and then set out to write it.

There's a compelling narrative voice. There's tremendous erudition, so I felt like I learned something about the world on every page. There's a careful attention to language, and yet the language is free and full to bursting. There's all sorts of talk about politics, the history of leftist political movements (particularly anarcho-syndicalism, my own favorite), and utopia. There's a love story, but it's written about without mushy romantic spewings. There's an exotic locale. I'm a happy reader!

But you won't like this book if you're looking for a standard storyline and if you don't have patience for intellectual dialogues scattered throughout the action and if you want clean and unambiguous answers to everything. You also won't like it if you demand that first person narrators be always appealing. I found the narrator often annoying, but in the end was quite glad to have known her.

To have known her -- yes, by the end you speak of the narrator and her obsession and love, Nelson Denoon, as people you have known. (Or perhaps I shouldn't use the second-person here, since I know people who do not agree with me, who found the characters simply exasperating. So let me rephrase: I felt like I had known them.)

If you're fairly well-read, you can test whether you're going to find this book stunning or frustrating by playing a cross-referencing mindgame of this sort: Imagine that James Joyce finished Ulysses and was annoyed that his writing hadn't tackled all of the problems of human civilizations. Just then, a time warp appeared, and Paulo Freire and Emma Goldman stepped out and lectured Joyce for 40 days and 40 nights. He was thrilled. He began to write and discovered that a small part of his talent had been taken over by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and another part by Don DeLillo. Ben Okri had found his way in there somewhere, too. Writing was hard with all those different voices pulling at him, but he got through, and the book he produced was Mating.

If the names above are unfamiliar to you, then ask yourself how you felt while reading it. If you made it through to this paragraph, and you're not mad at me for inserting the above (in fact, you found it piqued your curiosity), then you'll do just fine with Mating, and you may be deeply grateful, as I am, that Norman Rush had the courage and genius to write it.

30 of 35 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Oddly uninteresting February 28, 1999

By Rick Hunter

Format:Paperback

Although it won the 1991 National Book Award and was recipient of many glowing reviews, Norman Rush's novel Mating left me scratching my head and wondering, "what am I missing?" Written in the first person, Rush's novel tells of the somewhat predatory courtship between a single anthropologist woman and Nelson, the charismatic founder of a seemingly utopian community for African woman desert Botswana. The writing of this novel is consistently literate and intelligent; I found myself regularly turning to the dictionary (or wishing the dictionary was nearby) as the erudition of Rush's narrator poured forth. Nonetheless, the book as a whole, although containing many fine parts and much excellent writing, did not hold my interest. I think, in essence, that, while well-drawn and convincing characters, the two lovers did not appeal to me. I simply did not like them, and did not enjoy their company. Given the favorable press and awards this novel has received, however, many readers must love this book . I hope other readers have a more favorable reaction.

23 of 28 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Not for the Faint of Heart October 12, 1999

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

I understand people's irritation with certain passages in this book--there's no doubt that some of it is indulgent, even bloated--but I'm baffled by their complete inability to find the accompanying humor. Not to mention how they conflate the main character with the author. It's the character who is snobbish, judgmental, overly self-aware, difficult--and also funny! This book is a delight for the way it captures the very strange turnings of the mind. Abandon hope all ye who enter here for adventure! The action is minimal, although the author does wonderfully recreate the political and social milieu of Botswana. It's really a book about love and manners, a comedy about the absurd lengths to which we go to feed our obsessions with other people. Many critics have compared Mating to the work of Jane Austen. Norman Rush does indeed relentlessly understand, as did Jane Austen, the madness and delight of human relationships--and he dissects it for 500 pages. Now you know what you are truly getting for your money. Enjoy!