Customer Reviews

Mortals

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Mortals is a novel about a lonely man whose only friend is his wife, and what happens to him both psychologically and in his real and adventurous life when he begins to suspect that the wife he adores, and depends on for his feeling of connection with the world, is in love with her doctor, a black American physician living in Africa (as do the man, Ray, and his wife, Iris. The novel takes place in the country of Botswana.) Ray's loneliness becomes understandable to the reader, he is a spy for the CIA. He has no close friends, mostly for this reason. There are other factors that isolate him. His only sibling, his gay brother, Rex, and he hate each other. All this is in the background of the obsessive love he feels for his beautiful, and intelligent, wife. She loves him, also. But... her feelings are more complicated than his--and her doctor fascinates her.

This novel is a story about obsessive love and jealousy, but it is also an adventure story and a political thriller. Rush seems to be interested in many philosophical and political matters, not to mention in literature and its effect on life. In the sections that interest you, you'll want more of this. In the sections that don't, you'll skim. Personally, I skimmed most of the parts about religion. Seemed interesting, but not necessary, in my opinion.

Mortals is worth reading for the prose style alone. It is amazing writing. The perceptions make you want to write things down so you won't forget them. But to me, the exploration of the relationship between a man and a woman was the most fascinating and memorable aspect of Mortals.

One other little thing that I enjoyed was the chapter devoted to "The Denoons" from Rush's previous novel, Mating. You get an update of what the heroine of Mating and her husband, Nelson Denoon, are up to and we (at long last!) learn that she does possess a name--Karen. It helped create a bit of continuity that I appreciated, and satisfaction in knowing what became of the characters.

This is a book that stays with you. It is both an education and a pleasure. I highly recommend it as a wonderful summer read!

Mortals is the product of ten years' work by one of the most erudite novelists of our time. It's no beach book, no weekend read. It's literature for people who enjoy thinking about history, politics, and gender relations.

Yes, it helps to have a bachelor's degree (and thus some exposure to that old chestnut of Lit.One: Paradise Lost)and the willingness to slow down and give passages like the following some time to settle:
"Kerekang was unified with the suffering that had brought these men to his cause. It was more than a matter of pity, which was the limit of the usual feeling evoked by poverty and injustice. It was sympathy, but a different order of sympathy, it was embodied."

I won't give a synopsis of the plot or characters because other reviewers have done it well, though I want to add that I found this book laugh-out-loud and read-to-your-spouse funny, a good balance for the harrowing exploits and serious subject matter in some chapters.

Readers who are looking for a novel that gives great reward for close reading will be very pleased with Mortals.

Several excellent reviews on this site cover the plot and the characterizations. What fascinated me was the writing style. The dialog between Ray and Iris is 5 stars on target: witty, true, anguished, and showing that for seventeen years each has paid total attention to the other's reactions and thought processes. Frequently Ray anticipates exactly what Iris is thinking or is going to say, and in her next utterance turns out to be completely on target or (less frequently) stunningly and unbalancingly wrong.
The word plays and turns of phrase that flood every page convinced me that the author has kept notebooks of arresting phrases he has heard or produced from his own imagination over the last forty years, and has poured two thirds of the contents of these notebooks into this novel, providing a language lover's feast.
The most subtle delight of the book is the author's sense of conversational idiom. Not only the dialog, but the narrative stretches are written the way people really talk. As a result, every few pages you encounter a narrative sentence you have to re-read once or twice to understand, because it's written exactly the way someone would say it (without the benefit of intonation that would make the sentence immediately transparent to a listener rather than a reader). As a result, you sit there and marvel at the complexity of how we talk.
All this makes the book a slow read for anyone who wants to zip through the story and a delightful experience for anyone who just plain loves language. Yes, it's a little too long...and I found myself wishing it were longer.

I didn't read this book at first because of one negative review (it was before the rave reviews started). But friends kept mentioning Mortals, and nagging me about reading it, because they wanted people to talk to about the experience of reading it, a reading experience which is hard to describe, it's so unusual. So I did end up taking it on vacation with me. The thing I'll always remember about my 2003 vacation isn't the beaches and sun of Massachusetts, but the desert and sun of Africa. Forget MA, I was in Africa! The reading of this funny, fascinating, emotional, exciting, suspenseful, deep love/adventure story was an intense and beautiful experience. What an artist Mr. Rush is. I can't believe anyone now writing could do what he did in this book. If you love great literature, read it.

The maze-lie, self-referential mind of Ray Finch, introspective to a fault, paranoid, and full of self-doubt may seem like a dubious place to roam around. However, this articulate, anguished, and witty novel is a delight for literate readers. Its complexity mirrors the modern world, and its hero struggles to do the least wrong thing, as right is not an available option.
The many witty book titles, little jokes, and ironies alone are worth the read. Better even than MATING. Norman Rush has written a brilliant novel (How pleased Ray would be at that adjective!)--too good for most of the hack reviewers to appreciate, alas, but a landscape readers will want to explore through the entire journey.

The reason I read Mortals is because the reviews in Elle and Vogue and the Village Voice were really good and I loved Mating. I like Mortals even more. It has more emotional suspense and made me laugh alot, even when what was happening in the plot was awful. It's sexier than Mating. Here's a quote I liked from the Village Voice review.
"Morel has said that he longs for "a place where the rude fact that we are all dying animals transfigures every part of life," and Ray has reached that place. He has no time to waste. He's accepted the basic logic that if you're going to put marriage first in your life, you'd better have more in your life than marriage. And maybe, just maybe, he can make that logic work."

I felt like I couldn't bear Mortals to end. I felt the same about Mating when I read it, and I have read it twice. (A friend of mine has read Mating four times.) I'm going to wait a month and read Mortals again. IT HAS EVERYTHING. Plot, suspense, deep thought, deep emotion, great characters, hilarious lines on every page. It has "content," too. Ideas. It has a lot of sex, but it's unusual, because it's not just hot affairs, it is all about a couple who love each other, and the sex is very emotional and touching. It has violence, but it's so unusual, the way it's done. Spiritual, almost. It has amazing descriptions of family relations. The main guy, Ray the spy, has a gay brother I will never forget. The African revolutionary is unforgettable. The black American doctor the wife starts going to for therapy (and gets sexually involved with, which drives her husband crazy, just as other things are happening in his life) is also unforgettable. I'd say that the thing that most distinguishes Mortals from any other novel (with the exception of Mating) is that it's so full of the most interesting things that every sentence is a feast. I couldn't put it down, and was so sad when I had finished the last page. It's not "Lit Lite," it's Lit Great, great in every way. There are characters and scenes in Mortals that you will never forget. As you can see, I'm one who loves this book as much as any I have read.

I notice below a lot of unfavorable comparisons to Norman Rush's first novel, Mating. The comparisons are fair to some extent: Mating is a more perfect work of art, more restrained, less baggy.

On the other hand, this is a bit like unfavorably comparing Daniel Deronda to Middlemarch. I say: as long as George Eliot is writing it, who cares? The same goes for Norman Rush, who has to be one of the four or five best living American novelists. If you haven't read Mating yet, then read it first. It's a marvel; there's nothing else like it. After you read Mating, trust me, you'll want more Norman Rush, and Mortals will give you exactly that.

It will indeed give you 763 pages of Norman Rush, and of Ray, the book's hero. Ray may not be as admirable a human being as the narrator of Mating (who makes an interesting appearance in Mortals, by the way), but his flaws make him even more persuasively human. Ray is as real as anyone you're likely to meet in a novel this year, or in life. He's also wise, and interesting, and funny.

Maybe we could have done with a little less Ray during the action scenes in the last third of the novel. A 600 page Mortals might have been a more perfect book. If you feel that way, then do what one of the reviewers below suggests: skip around in that last third. But whatever you do, don't miss the last few chapters, which are beautiful, heartbreaking and true.

I did not put this book "down" at the end. I crawled away, enlarged and tumultuous and in pain and glory at this book. What a book.

Mortals is not for everyone; this is abundantly clear from even the most cursory review of reader opinions. There are some who admire the book and some who despise it; as with any ambitious work of craft, these opinions reveal far more about those who hold them than they do about their subject. Mortals, like all of Norman Rush's work, is ambitious. Rush strives for greatness, and achieves it, though the same method that enables this success renders it inaccessible to readers who lack the patience or the wit to walk a sometimes tortuous path.

Rush writes, without shame and without regard for current fashion, about intellectuals. Not surprisingly, the characters in his novels speak and think as what they are. They are elusive, sometimes contradictory, often infuriating, though one might easily dispense with superfluous adjectives and simply say that they are real. Readers who want books populated by individuals plainly drawn and instantly characterized, by lovable white-hatted heroes and despicable black-hatted villains, might be better advised to read Tom Clancy, or to watch television.

Rush's characters converse, with other and with themselves. These conversations sometimes meander, or are truncated, or seem to lead down dead ends, though again it is easier to say that they are real. Rush lets characters reveal themselves, in their own words, one piece at a time. As with any gradual process, there are times when the picture seems incomplete, and steps in the process that initially seem pointless. Readers with the patience to embrace the journey will be rewarded, those who prefer dialogue in neat blocks, limited to the minimum number of words necessary to directly advance the plot, will fall by the wayside. Mortals is not a TV script: this is praise, not criticism.

Some readers are uncomfortable with the abundance of detailed physical description in Rush's work. The same criticism might be leveled at the Hieronymus Bosch paintings that very appropriately adorn the covers of Rush's works. The viewer who wants to see a cartoon will surely be frustrated by a richly woven tapestry, but that frustration is hardly the fault of the tapestry.

Some reviewers protest that Rush's work is not "about Africa", and that its reportage of Africa is incomplete or uncertain. This in many ways true, because Rush is not a journalist and is not striving to write a documentary about a continent. Rush writes about people, primarily Americans, not about a place. The utterly foreign backdrop to the story serves as a lens enlarging the characters, and forcing the details of their relationships, with each other and with their culture, into a harsh and revealing light. In taking this course Rush walks in distinguished company, and is completely worthy of his place there. His prose cuts to the point with none of the prettiness or pretension of a Greene or a Maugham, and we have to go back to Conrad to find a Western author who walks this terrain as successfully. Conrad, of course, achieved his purpose with far fewer words, and if one may praise with faint damnation, it could be said that Norman Rush's greatest failing is that he is not Joseph Conrad. Neither is anybody else, and against this deficiency we may set the redeeming fact that he is Norman Rush, and that as long as he is writing we can expect a continuing, if infrequent, series of exceptional and challenging works of literature.

Mortals is not for everyone. Readers who are willing to accept its challenge, willing to accompany a great writer on an unusual and sometimes difficult path, will find Mortals and its predecessors infinitely rewarding. Those who are unwilling will not achieve the same reward, and may find their failure frustrating. A climber who fails in attempt to scale a challenging peak will not gain the same reward as another who succeeds. Climbers in this position generally have the honesty to blame such failures on themselves, rather than on the mountain, and readers would be well advised to take the same approach to Norman Rush's work. Those willing to meet the demands of the novel will be rewarded; those who fail to earn the reward should accept that the failure is their own, not that of the novel or the novelist.