Mating: A Novel (Vintage International)

Product Information

Naturally, utopia does not remain an idyll; the narrator's deceit and manipulation are, of course, one of the problems (and it is not surprising that deceit is also part of what ultimately undoes her).

The lure is simply too powerful. Denoon is her man. Fast forward past Nar's extensive research and many reflection on society and culture, bondage and freedom (on one level, Mating is a book of ideas) and Nar is off on her expedition to cross one hundred miles of Kalahari Desert on foot, solo, with a donkey, to reach Tsau. After all, what man, even a man like Denoon, wouldn't be impressed with such an bold, death-defying venture?

Customer reviews

Mating shouldn't work on any level. A first person narrative about a young failing female anthropologist falling in love with an older American man who has founded an egalitarian feminist commune in the heart of Southern Africa is just too cutely exotic, too cheaply high concept to work. Norman Rush is 87, at work, in his perfectionist way, on another novel. He need not agonize over it; he has already given us the best of himself. In her introduction to Juan Rulfo’s 1955 novel, Pedro Páramo, Susan Sontag wrote: “Everyone asked Rulfo why he did not publish another book, as if the point of a writer’s life is to go on writing and publishing. In fact, the point of a writer’s life is to produce a great book—that is, a book which will last—and this is what Rulfo did.” It’s a towering standard that Rush, too, has met in his intoxicating treatise about romance, community-building and causes lost and won. Yes, I did. In fact, I wrote a lot, most of which I burned before I left boarding school. Somebody I went to school with wrote me a letter from Canada the other day saying she remembers me reading aloud a whole adventure story I was writing, which I also remember writing. It was a story about some disguised male figure getting into this girls’ boarding school. I had this terrible need for male figures. New-York Historical Society explores the social and cultural consequences of the environmental crisis through art

Oh, yes, when it comes to a combination of intellect and good looks, Nar tells us flatly, "My preference is always for hanging out with the finalists." Among the finalists she recounts there was burly Brit photographer Giles but, alas, similar to the other men in her life, gentleman Giles turned out to possess way too many flaws.

Find a Book

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. Mating is a sprawling novel, its narrator a close and often critical (and self-critical) observer -- with a constant air of some detachment, the scholar in her trying to separate emotion from fact.

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: It was me and a group of true strangers talking about books we liked,” said Champagne, 35, who lives in the New York City borough of Queens and works at a startup. A woman recommended the novel without giving anyone in the chat room much to go on. “She was just straight up like, ‘This is the best book I’ve ever read,’” Champagne recalled. There’s a very strong picture in your second novel, The Game, of childhood creativity, but I have the feeling that there’s an element of the smokescreen to it. It’s quite an accurate portrait of what the Brontës got up to, isn’t it?

If such a book were published today, it’s likely that its narrator would invite more scrutiny. Ann Close, Rush’s editor at Knopf, said she had no problem with it. So much goes on in Rush's nifty novel about true love, star-crossed anthropology and rural development in Southern Africa that we almost forget about the morning after." - John Leonard, The Nation No novelist, perhaps, has done so much to widen the range of English fiction. The current, almost bewildering gusto of inquiry in contemporary English writing owes an enormous amount to the example of Possession, which is the first, grandest and best example of that alluring form, the romance of the archive; the scientific fantasy of “Morpho Eugenia,” too, has proved enormously instructive to younger writers. If English writing has stopped being a matter of small relationships and delicate social blunders, and has turned its attention to the larger questions of history, art, and the life of ideas, it is largely due to the generous example of Byatt’s wide-ranging ambition. Few novelists, however, have succeeded subsequently in uniting such a daunting scope of mind with a sure grasp of the individual motivation and an unfailing tenderness; none has written so well both of Darwinian theory and the ancient, inexhaustible subject of sexual passion. 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…”: Although Nelson and the narrator are highly intellectual and unusual people they suffer the same insecurities and fear of intimacy faced by any couple. Their love grows only to be sorely tested as tensions in Tsau grow from an internal assault by a small group of residents opposed to Nelson's continued role in the village. The narrator who has always feared giving up her independence for the approval of a man becomes more obsessed with her yearning for a permanent place in Nelson's life. He in turn becomes more worried and attached to the outcome of his work, the village of Tsau. When a series of events forces Nelson out into the desert in an attempt to save Tsau he is lost for days and almost dies. To the narrator's enormous relief he is returned alive but she soon finds he is no longer the passionate, argumentative man she fell in love with. Nelson had a metaphysical experience during his ordeal in the desert and is now in an unchanging state of bliss and acceptance. Nothing seems to matter to him one way or the other including his relationship with the narrator.

One of the most hypnotic reading experiences I've ever had... every feminist would be proud to claim this extraordinary novel as her ownFittingly, 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. 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.” Tsau does seem almost too good to be true, as the narrator anthropologically describes how it functions, and how many of those there interact. Mating (1991) is a novel by American author Norman Rush. It is a first-person narrative by an unnamed American anthropology graduate student in Botswana around 1980. It focuses on her relationship with Nelson Denoon, a controversial American social scientist who has founded an experimental matriarchal village in the Kalahari desert. Elsa’s involvement in Norman’s writing was a running topic in our conversations. Though she tirelessly plays down her part, it seemed natural to include her in the interview. The final revisions of the edited transcripts were, just as naturally, a three-way effort.