Mating

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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. Halfway through Mating, Tsau’s residents are surprised by the sudden appearance of an eccentric actor sent by the British Council. Over a boozy dinner, Denoon and the actor (a right-winger) debate women’s rights. Denoon, in “masterly” form, excoriates “male marxism,” which, generation after generation, has placed the wrong bets: it searched “high and low for the liberatory class that would lift human arrangements into a redeemed state—the proletariat, the students, the lumpen, third world nationalists—in short, every group around except for the most promising one … the mass of women.” Passages of this sort make us wonder if Rush, at bottom, is not a novelist but a pamphleteer; and yet the conversation fits seamlessly into the busy carpet he unfurls before our eyes, one in which individuals develop and correct their ideas, in dialogue with others and themselves, as happens in real life. Rush never allows one voice to speak the Truth, and there remains something slightly suspect about Denoon’s utopianism.

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. 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). Tsau does seem almost too good to be true, as the narrator anthropologically describes how it functions, and how many of those there interact. 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. This is the story of a cerebral, overanalyzing woman who doesn’t want the mediocre or the nearly-great and sets her eyes on the one great man that she finds. She’s an anthropology student, working in Botswana on a failed dissertation. He’s an overachieving and well-known intellectual who’s running an experimental matriarchal-utopian village in the middle of the Kalahari. She risks her life to get to him – to get to the “intellectual love.” What follows is an insanely good introspective and analytical narrative – not just on her love, but on so many other things.

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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. 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. But Mating is, above all, a love story. And it’s hilarious. Case in point: "All the missionaries I stayed with showed a certain interest in my, shall we say, spiritual orientation. I don't think I teased them. I didn't misrepresent myself, but I didn't give them the full frontal, either." But I’ll tell you, her patience with my arcane fiction was part of a greater patience, over a sort of battle we waged for years. Some couples don’t ask much of one another after they’ve worked out the fundamentals of jobs and children. Some live separate intellectual and cultural lives, and survive, but the most intense, most fulfilling marriages need, I think, to struggle toward some kind of ideological convergence. I was a sectarian leftist when we met. Radicalism was essential to my self-definition. So there had to be a long period of argument and discussion before I developed, let’s say, a less immanentist view of social change. Also—and this is relevant to Mortals—I was sort of a stage atheist when we first got together. I just couldn’t believe religion was still happening. She had a much more humane view of the whole business.

Shepard, Jim (22 September 1991). "The Perfect Man, the Perfect Place, and Yet. . ". New York Times . Retrieved 28 January 2016. Set in Botswana in the early 1980s, Mating is narrated by an American graduate student in anthropology who feels a compulsion to “tell everything,” to record everything that happens to her. The result is a sprawling, complex, confessional narrative that explores the equally extraordinary inner lives and outer circumstances of its two main characters, the narrator and the man she falls in love with, Nelson Denoon. Denoon is a scourge and star academic, the author of the classic Development as the Death of Villages, who is now working on a utopian experiment: a solar-powered, egalitarian, matriarchal village deep in the Kalahari. When the narrator sets off alone across the desert to find Denoon and his highly secretive project in Tsau, she enters a world unlike any she has experienced before and finds a man more complicated and more intellectually challenging than any she has ever known. In the Harvard Review, critic Robert Faggen praises the work as a "masterpiece of fine-hammered first person narrative." [4] While Faggen describes the narrator's beloved, Nelson Denoon, as "dull" and is the novel's "primary weakness," his commendation for the book focuses on the narrator herself, who "is most memorable in her quest for her own utopia of equal love of which she teases us with beautiful, fleeting moments of possibility." 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."And, as George Steiner says, at the rows of students sniggering automatically at every mention of the Sunday supplements. Norman Rush (born October 24, 1933 in Oakland, California) is an American novelist whose introspective novels and short stories are set in Botswana in the 1980s. He is the son of Roger and Leslie (Chesse) Rush. He was the recipient of the 1991 National Book Award and the 1992 Irish Times/Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize for his novel Mating. Mating,” published in 1991, usually finds its evangelists by word-of-mouth. For some, its plot points can be a tough sell: An unnamed graduate student in Botswana pursues an American anthropologist, Nelson Denoon, who is trying to form a matriarchal society in a desert village. Punctuating the book are extended dialogues on socialism and a laundry list of obscure words and Latin phrases most readers confess to having to look up. The story is told in the voice of the unnamed student, a 32-year-old woman. I was doing a sort of retrospective analysis of how people who had come to, maybe not a consummate relationship, but a compelling relationship with a significant other,” Rush said. Joshua Pashman (Fall 2010). "Norman Rush, The Art of Fiction No. 205". Paris Review. Fall 2010 (194).