Mating

by Norman Rush

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.

Genres: Fiction, Africa, Novels, Literary Fiction, Contemporary, Literature, American

480 pages, Paperback

First published September 3, 1991

About the author

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.

Rush was born in San Francisco and graduated from Swarthmore College in 1956. After working for fifteen years as a book dealer, he changed careers to become a teacher and found he had more time to write. He submitted a short story about his teaching experiences to The New Yorker, and it was published in 1978.

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.

He lives in Rockland County, New York.

Reviews

[Glenn Russell]

Mating - What a phenomenal achievement. 55-year old author Norman Rush writes his very first novel featuring a 32-year-old female narrator. Sure, she's a bookish, superintellectual with an advanced degree in anthropology from Stanford so Norman can flex his own encyclopedic knowledge, everything from history, sociology and pop culture to agronomy, literature and the arts but our American author goes well beyond usual novel length - Mating weighs in at a whopping 495 pages.

An extraordinary novel, Mating lives at the intersection of American seeking, European utopian philosophy and African culture, a book reflecting the author's experience as a Peace Corps worker in Botswana from 1978 to 1983. And keep your dictionary handy as you'll come across vocabulary worthy of Vladimir Nabokov - several examples: passim, anti-makhoa, cinéphile, douceur, omphalos.

So, it's 1980 and we're in Gaborone, capital city Botswana, where the unnamed narrator mulls over the many causes why Africa has disappointed her. Norman Rush obviously had his own good reasons for not giving his storyteller a name. Frequently, when writing a review, I'll provide an unnamed narrator with a name but I will respect Mr. Rush and refrain here; rather, I'll simply refer to the narrator as Nar. Oh, Nar, you're such a sweetie. Love ya honey. To imbibe the full impact of her voice and character, not only did I read the novel but I also listened to the audio book expertly narrated by Lauren Fortgang who captured the confident, saucy mindset and speech of brainy Nar.

Poor Nar. She would dearly relish the opportunity to form a lasting relationship with an ideal man but what member of the male gender could ever come close to the high standards she sets for potential candidates? Listening to our attractive, scholarly lass lament over this dilemma, I hear a hint of Alison Poole's remark from Jay McInerney's novel Story of My Life: "Let's face it ladies, men are a bunch of dickheads but they're the only opposite sex we've got."

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.

But then it happened - at a posh party, she is introduced to Nelson Denoon, a beautiful, brilliant renaissance man (and a feminist as icing on the cake), a combination intellectual and Action Jackson, someone who actually established a self-sustaining community out in the Kalahari Desert, a community called Tsau, a near perfect utopia to benefit African women who were victims of abuse suffered at the hands of men in male dominated tribal society.

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?

Nar recounts her trek and finally reaching her destination: "I thought it would take me four days, at twenty-five miles a day, to get to Tsau, which it has become emotionally convenient lately for me to refer to inwardly as Pellucidar, after a book in the Tarzan series. It took me six-plus or seven-plus days, one or the other, to get there. Toward the end I was in serious straits. Calling Tsau Pellucidar is partly distancing and partly apposite. Pellucidar sounds like the way Tsau felt to me in one respect: it was like being, for the first time in my existence, in a correctly lighted place. I've never read the book, but I assume Pellucidar was one of the numerous lost and weird but still functioning cities Tarzan visited, and it was in Africa, naturally, although possibly it was at the earth's core, with only the opening leading down to it being in Africa proper."

As one would expect, the heart of the novel takes place in Tsau and focuses on Nar's relationship with Nelson Denoon. Many are the opportunities we as readers are given to peer deeper into the character of both Nar and Denoon as they perform many phases of their mating dance (perhaps I should say mating ritual since we are in Africa). Here are four snapshots I found particularly provocative:

Argument - "We argued about everything, but a lot of it devolved into arguments about his basic philosophical anthropology. His assumptions were too romantic for me." Such a harsh judgement, Nar! After all, you have done zero to help others in any substantial way, whereas Denoon established the self-sustaining community you are residing at, a community that would continue to thrive even if you didn't trek across the Kalahari. And drawing Nelson into debates on anthropology just might be considered baiting since you told him your area of specialty wasn't anthropology but ornithology.

Silence - "He liked us to walk around together in total silence much more than I did. When we finally discussed it I made him laugh by saying I get bored when I'm not talking." Nar goes on to tell us she hates silence. Make not mistake - this is a clear sign of superficiality and weakness in people. Nar is the kind of person who thrives on verbal sparring to establish her intellectual and personal superiority. And also continual internal chatter to reaffirm her identity and relationship to others. From my own experience, when I encounter such combative, talkative people, my tendency is to quickly run in the other direction.

Rival - Denoon goes off, just like that, not letting anyone in Tsau know why or where. Instantly Nar concludes Nelson must be conducting a clandestine relationship with one of the women in the community. "It had to be Kakelo, probably. She was less than twenty-five and had a very cute figure, which she tailored her nurse costume to explot." When it is determined Kakelo is in bed with a serious bout of bronchitis, another culprit is pinpointed. Ah, Nar, when you look at the world and other people as one unending competition, your horizons can flatten out quickly.

Joy - There are times when our female anthropologist surprises herself on all the positive feelings her life contains. "Anther sign of being in equilibrium must be repeated feelings of equanimity about things that would normally bother you." Throughout Nar's odyssey in Tasu I kept wondering if she is the type of woman who wants a man or who needs a man. One of the abiding questions readers can pose.

Closing reflection - In an interview, Norman Rush was asks why he chose to write his novel from the standpoint of a younger woman. He replied: "Hubris made me do it. I know it sounds absurd, but I wanted to create the most fully realized female character in the English language." Curiously, while I was reading, I kept thinking what the novel would have been like if he wrote it with two alternating first-person narrators, the young anthropologist and Nelson Denoon. But this is a minor quibble. I thoroughly enjoyed Mating, a novel that is, above all else, a highly inventive love story.


Photo of American novelist Norman Rush taken in 1991, publication year of Mating

"My bet, still, is that, all things considered, no woman would have voted to have the washhouse, the stores house, the central kitchen, and the Sekopololo offices located at the top end of a long though gentle ramp. We inhabit male outcomes. Every human settlement is a male outcome. So was Tsau, which was seventy percent complete when the first women moved in." - Norman Rush, Mating

[Stephen Witt · Rating 3 out of 5]

A 55 year-old man writing as a 32 year-old woman is a conceit that seems destined to fail. But the narrative voice overwhelms you with its startling combination of neurotic insecurity, hyper-literary pretension and genuine academic insight. About a third of the way I began to wonder if I hadn't stumbled across some sort of post-Nabokovian masterpiece.

Then begins the heart of the story, which details her infatuation and love affair with a boring, quasi-messianic, intellectual narcissist. At this point I started to lose interest. The next 200 pages were a slog, and I kept thinking to myself "Honey, you could do better."

But then came the story's denouement, in which the narrator's total supplication and abasement seemed so grossly out-of-character that I wanted to throw the book across the room (I would have too, except I finished it on an airplane where this wasn't really an option). I suspect it may have been the author's intention to provoke this sort of reaction, but still it seems a shame to degrade and humiliate this brilliant character he just spent 450 pages building up.

Anyway, it confirmed my suspicion that no, a man can't really write as a woman in the first person. But for all that, the author is a major, major talent.

Edit: Two years later, I find Rush to be my favorite writer, but oddly I still don't really "like" either of his novels in a conventional sense. Maybe every great, ambitious book has to be flawed like this, like Moby-Dick or Huckleberry Finn. Not changing my 3-star rating, but read this book.

[Jess · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think the author was trying to see how many fancy SAT words he could fit into one book. He fit in a lot, and it was meh.

[Tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not a full review, just a few thoughts in the moment of rereading...first of all, it is still somewhat jarring how different this is from Whites, his short story collection, although there are traces of the novel in the earlier collection--an analogy of Dubliners straight to Ulysses while bypassing Portrait might be apt, not in terms of experimentation with language but in terms of density of thought, consciousness. Midway through this rereading, I am struck not so much by how much richness Rush devotes to developing character (though the characters are indeed fully-wrought, at once ample and supple), but to the mission of the novel itself, which seems to be constructed as carefully and with as much openness as Tsau, the utopian outpost where the two main characters come together. As ham-handed as some of the literary opinions of Tsau's architect, Nelson Denoon tend to be (he gets poetry humorously wrong, and his views on Shakespeare seem to miss any literary dimension of the plays), it's hard not to admire his energy and his equal commitment to physical and intellectual tasks, the deltas where these tributaries of sweat come together. And in the end I come away with the distinct sense that the novel itself might be more terrain than object, a space in which to deliberate over the relationship between the political and the aesthetic, the extent to which we remain flagrantly animals, the responsibility of the artist, reader, traveler, lover, the how and why of who we become--in short, to implicate the reader in the grand questions that the book stirs up and refuses to resolve.

[N · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Time is cruel and nothing stays the same” (250).

A book that intrigued me because of its gorgeous cover and design, and winner of the National Book Award, I had high hopes of “Mating” as a possibility of an epic reading experience. Overall it was an almost perfect read. Solid, but some minor gripes.

Set in Botswana during the late 1980s, it’s about a narrator who is an anthropologist living out in Tsau. Out there, she meets a charismatic man named Nelson Denoon who has created a bizarre utopia out in the middle of the Kalahari Desert, “you can capture a transient unique form of social agony being undergone by people who have made it in every day” (60). She pursues him because of his idealism and desire to be one with nature.

Things don’t bode well for her: she’s often frustrated by his narcissism, penchant for self pity, and a need for constant reassurance from the communities in which he wants to be a part of. Our narrator is a bit of a masochist for Nelson: she wants to be a part of his life, and she becomes fed up with him.

It’s a novel with interesting ideas about love and community, “love being established between us to both our satisfactions without anyone having to go through the horrible bourgeois ritual of declaring love” (329).

It’s also a novel that could have been cut by a hundred pages since there are moments where it becomes slow to get through. I liked the heroine; Nelson is a tiresome white man with a savior complex that becomes grating.

Our narrator eventually tires of Nelson, and the novel’s conclusion seems one of defeat and a bitterness of missed connections.

I assume it had been a daring read when first published and I don’t doubt that when read, the true pleasure of Rush’s book is savoring his language.

Rich with imagery that shows love as hot as the white heat it evokes, with a lushness that is also disguised as misguided eroticism- it is a true hot and cold novel.

[Audrey · Rating 3 out of 5]

It appears that many folks really love this book. I have to admit that I was mostly bemused. A white male author writing in a female voice about Botswana; pretty ballsy. His protagonist is not someone with whom I'd like to have a cup of coffee. Of course, I don't expect every book's heroine to be someone I'd like to hang out with, but this is a female William F. Buckley; using monosyllabic, obscurely sourced words very deliberately, it seemed. She speaks of her humble beginnings and I was left wondering if her verbosity was less than authentic. And she goes after her prey, Denoon, the male protagonist, in a curiously passionless manner. This is obviously Rush's feminist archetype, but she's so willing to sacrifice her own academic career, her own morals, her own life even, that it's hard to see her as a whole, authentic person. I kept thinking of Alexander McCall Smith's overly sweet "Ladies Detective Agency" books, also written from a female perspective and also set in Botswana. Smith's books are like a nice big piece of cake; comforting, but not nutritious. Rush's Mating is like those first vegetarian meals from the 1970s; overly chewy, with lots of bulk, weird, crunchy things, and in the end, difficult to swallow.

[J · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 somehow, Norman Rush manages to make her and her narration into a stunning reflection and examination of intellectual and romantic life. Like a lot of other "big" novels from the 1990's, Mating touches on a dizzying array of themes and ideas (what it means to be a modern woman, Western privilege/guilt, the pitfalls of 3rd world development, how to help a post-colonial society without becoming just another colonist, the impossibilities of romantic love, the impossibilities of its opposite, etc.) And all of it is filtered through the unnamed narrators endlessly inquisitive musings, doubts and second thoughts. She's like a character from David Foster Wallace or Philip Roth, but with half the despair to block her perpetual self inquiry.

I can't believe that this is Rush's first novel, that people even think up situations like this as a starting out point for a nearly 500 page book of fairly realist fiction is a remarkable testament to the flexibility and sincerity of literary writing.

[Joy D · Rating 5 out of 5]

“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.”

The unnamed protagonist of Mating is an American thirty-something nutritional anthropologist living in Botswana in the 1980s. She has just determined that her doctoral thesis is going nowhere. She meets Nelson Denoon, the founder of Tsau, a secretive utopian community run by African women in a remote area of Botswana. Denoon intrigues her, and she wants to get to know him intimately, so she treks solo across the Kalahari Desert to reach Tsau, where she hopes to be welcomed.

“[H]e went into a sort of aria asking how Tsau could fail to be terrific, since it was the pyramidon at the top of all his prior failures, so called. He gave the entire sequence of truths learned, project to project, such as controlling the scale, working in the vernacular, cutting expatriate staff to near zero, locating yourself remotely enough to avoid premature disruption, balancing collective and individual incentives, basing your political economy on women instead of men…”

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.

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?

This book takes time to read, not only due to its length, but also due to the need to absorb, or possibly look up, some of the regional references that will likely not be in many readers’ immediate scope of knowledge. A helpful glossary is included for the Afrikaans and Setswana terms, as well as descriptions of (real) local organizations. Rush has a dense writing style that respects a reader’s intelligence. I found it masterfully written and intellectually stimulating.

[Alexandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Maybe I am shallow and narrow and lack the brainpower to fully appreciate this book, but to me it is the best love story. I reference it mentally almost everyday. To cross the Kalahari for the mere chance for a connection! To be a planless drifter in Africa--to be too cutting and smart and still see this chance for love. She is my hero. Endlessly quotable. And the end cracked my heart. I'm gifting it to a boy who would do well to heed Nelson Denoon's example.

[Jafar · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

This is not a typical love story. I don’t know how a typical love story is, but I’m sure it’s not anything like this. This book is long and hard. It challenges your education. It’s told by an erudite woman about her fixation on an erudite man. They’re both exceedingly gifted. They won’t slow down to explain the literary/political/historical/sociological/anthropological/etc. background of what they’re talking about. Not only do you need a dictionary in hand, you also need Wikipedia and Google on standby. Unless you’re encyclopedic like its characters, this book will just go over your head at times. But hang on tough. This is a rare gem worth struggling for.

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an interesting book for me, because I identified on many levels with the narrator, who is 32 (check), redheaded (I pretend), and an anthropology student on a bit of hiatus from her research (I started out in ethnomusicology, which is a branch of it). So even though the author is a middle-aged man, it is interesting to see his take on what a woman of that place in life would think/do. I liked seeing a woman who wasn't trivial, was a thinker, maybe even an overthinker, which to me was spot on. There are intellectual women out there, you know.

The funny thing is, and maybe Rush meant it this way, I think it is easy to tell that the love story isn't going to work out. She approaches it intentionally, almost as an experiment, because she is drawn to Nelson Denoon. I think it isn't really a physical or emotional connection as much as she falls for his brain. And she tries to make it work, but really she isn't a relationship type any more than he is. I love the crazed self-analysis about childbearing, and how that suggestion on his part in the end is what makes her leave. (Calculation on his part? I can hardly think of Nelson as clueless, although he wasn't great at picking up on social/interpersonal cues in Tsau either).

The novel ends with her back in America, benefiting from her time and experience with Doonan, but seemingly relieved that she escaped the life they would have had together. You get the sense that it was an episode in her life and he might never escape it, and I felt relieved for her too!

A lot of reviewers, even John Updike back in the day, took issue with his vocabulary usage, but I really liked it. I found this to be true to the elevated thought required of professionals in certain fields, who are surrounded by an expectation of constant noetic expression.

"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."

"It would be about as hard to read me as being in the kitchen and noticing when the compressor went on in the refrigerator."

"I had to realize that the male idea of successful love is to get a woman into a state of secure dependency which the male can renew by a touch or pat or gesture now and then while he reserves his major attention for his work in the world.... Equilibrium or perfect mating will come when the male is convinced he is giving less than he feels is really required to maintain dependency and the woman feels she is getting more from him than her servile displays should merit."

"The main effort of arranging your life should be to progressively reduce the amount of time required to decently maintain yourself so that you can have all the time you want for reading."

"Keeping permanent intimate comedy going is more important than any other thing."

"I was emotional a lot, privately. I wanted to incorporate everything, understand everything, because time is cruel and nothing stays the same."

"Religion might originate through thunder and lightning and wondering what the stars are, but once it gets rolling it's about self-hatred."

[KG · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Why can't every mating in the world be on the basis of souls instead of inevitably and fundamentally on the match between physical envelopes?"

--

Mating by Norman Rush plus Money by Martin Amis (which I just reviewed) equals I Simply Remember My Favorite Things (JD's Version). Now the title track of an avant garde off-Broadway musical starring soul mates JD Vance playing himself and a plush Prada sectional. Government funded, the unholy Tr*mp administration will pay you $666 to watch.

[Karine · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mating is a vivid portrayal of obsession, but tedious to read. Rush creates a unique protagonist, a grad student with photographic memory and love of archaic vocabulary, who can think of almost nothing other than the famous academic she goes to extreme lengths to ensnare. While she finds his every thought fascinating, I cannot say the same. Nevertheless, the women-run village in Botswana that he establishes in an interesting setting and suggests connections between personal relationships and foreign development of Africa.

[Wendy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of my favorite books, but I am afraid to read it again and am always afraid to recommend it to other people. Many people dislike it, and it's certainly extremely pretentious. I think it mostly depends on whether you understand and buy that the character is pretentious. I don't know - when I read it, it rang true, particularly the main character's relationship with her ambitions, her strange relationship, and her body.

[Jennifer · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mating reminded me a bit of Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland in that it took me fifty or so pages to realize that the unnamed narrator was supposed to be female, and only then because she spent a page or so lamenting the width of her hips. I recognize that many other readers found this an extremely convincing portrait of womanhood, but as far as I'm concerned the only thing Rush nailed was the level of obsession over an ex-boyfriend that we can occasionally bring to bear, and I'm honestly not sure if that was an intentional theme of the author's or simply a side-effect of this book about a woman being all about a man.

Rush's novel is a fairly unrelenting slog - 477 pages of text rarely broken by paragraphing, let alone by the sweet relief of dialogue - narrated by an unlikeable and frankly unreliable woman who meets a guy she doesn't even really seem to like at a party and then stalks him across a desert because she has absolutely nothing better to do with her life. There's a scene shortly after she arrives at his compound (he's a supposed genius trying to start a feminist society) while she's still recovering from Kalahari-induced delirium in which he sneaks into her room to beg her not to reveal that they've already met in the outside world, lest it throw off the delicately balanced power between the sexes in his Brave New World and call into question his vaunted celibacy. You could read this straight, but if you consider that the whole thing was likely a fever-dream on her part it puts a fantastically creepy spin on the evolution and eventual dissolution of their relationship, and on the novel's final lines.

Upon completing this novel, I actually had to go back and look to see what else was up for the National Book Award in 1991, as by that point I half-suspected the publisher of having just slapped an unearned award seal on the cover to drive sales. (Not the case; it was apparently just a really thin year for literature.) I suppose the rationale was that Rush's work was intellectual - for my part, I found the novel to be more like it's narrator, simply pretentious and dull.

[Mara · Rating 5 out of 5]

"It always surprised me how few pygmalious, polymathic men had ever been interested in sprucing me up, given that I'm so interested and available, and that, as everyone notices first about me, I remember everything."

I do love our unnamed narrator, uncomfortably, the way one loves a friend who grows tedious gushing about her new love. I love that I had to look up words and that even if I can never say "inter pocula" to describe someone who is inebriated without feeling a little pretentious, it's a nice phrase to have in one's arsenal. I love that Victoria Falls is now at the top of my life list of travel destinations when I'd not had much interest in Africa before.

And I entertain myself by coming up with subtitles for the book: Love Makes Smart People Stupid, He Just Isn't Into Remaking Himself for You the Way You Just Did for Him, Allegedly Great Men and the Women Who Love Them, and Why You Shouldn't Get into Relationships with Anthropologists.

[alex · Rating 3 out of 5]

I get why Mating strikes a chord with the overeducated and underemployed. Being neither, I can appreciate the climate, but not enough to fend off its creeping tedium.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Serious trouble began on the fourth or fifth day out. It happened because I was doing a thing I had been warned not to do in the [Kalahari] desert. I was reviewing my life. Actually I was thinking about an aspect of my life, to wit, who would miss me the most if I was reported lost. Also I was thinking in general about how easy it would be to vanish physically in the Kalahari, how quickly you would turn into dust and be distributed, the usual. I had been advised by people like the lion man to keep my consciousness in my superfices, my skin and eyes and ears, my legs, to be a scanning mechanism and nothing else while I was in the desert.

So I enjoyed this novel, which won the National Book Award in 1991, more than most. Yes this novel was written by a male author, Norman Rush, in the 1st person as a female protagonist and it is an aloof one-directional love story at best. It is an American's view of Botswana and upon reading it feels slightly like a travel book. The writing style is more typically of what you would see in a short story and it feels dated. Botswana of 2019 is presumably a lot different than the early 1980's when the story takes place.

But the writing is quite good and the book is insightful as it follows a young white American protagonist — who is in Botswana for research work — as she tries to navigate the culture and to some degree village politics and eventually develops an intimate relationship with the influential intellectual Nelson Denoon.

Within this meandering novel, there are several chapters about living in the bush that felt incredibly realistic including the third chapter entitled 'Expedition'. It follows our narrator as she travels 100 miles through the Kalahari desert to the community of Tsau. The anxiety she experiences camping at night, among lions and the numerous other wild animals that can kill you, was so deftly drawn. Right down to the fatigue. (I just completed a 200 plus mile backpacking trip so can relate). I believe that the author, who spent many years living in Africa as an ex-pat, probably did his share of long distance treks too. It felt too real to me for someone to have completely imagined it. But that's what I mean when I say it felt, in part, like reading a travel book.

A quote on the back cover compares Rush's style to Gabriel Garcia Marquez or John Knowles. I perhaps wouldn't go that far as this is not an intergenerational story or terribly complex but I see the parallels and am happy that I read it.

4 stars.

[Marjorie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was really engrossing, at the same time it basically presented me with a vocabulary lesson unlike no other. Literally--I finally just started keeping a list of the words I didn't know, because cracking the dictionary every time got to be chore. It became an exercise in picking up meaning from context. And *still* it was an utterly fabulous read.

Imagine my amusement when right after revisiting Mating after many years due to putting together my Goodreads list, I came across it discussed for this very reason on the Paper Cuts blog at the New York Times:

http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/20...

"After praising “Mating” as “aggressively brilliant,” Updike took Rush to task for his “aggressive modernist designs on conventional reading habits,” epitomized by his ostentatiously arcane vocabulary. (Yes, lots of brilliance and lots of aggression here.)

“The action is simple but stately,” Updike wrote,

a curve of neediness, attraction, pursuit, capture, fulfillment, disillusion, and departure which is traced through close to 500 pages bristling with such recondite terms as “tonus,” “makhoa,” “tallywhackers,” “lustral,” “samoosa,” “suigenerism,” “cornucopious,” “lanugo,” “superfices,” “je m’en foutisme,” “cothurni,” “karosses,” “lolwapas,” “idioverse,” “noetic,” “ketosis,” “vitromania,” “inter pocula,” “rubiconic,” “uchronia,” “watchership,” “toriis,” “langur,” “ovaldavels” (from “rondavels”), “utlitariana,” “sternocleidomastoids,” “pygmalious,” “stimmung,” “credulism,” “megrim,” “dagga,” “bogobe,” “cryptomnesia,” “urticaria,” “elenchus,” “entelechies,” “geniusly,” “crescive,” “evanition,” and “bromeliad.”


Uh, Yeah!!

And even funnier, that blog referenced a blog by Rachel Donadio, in which she quotes Norman Rush from "Mating" regarding literary deal-breakers:

“There are certain quagmires to be avoided with people,” Norman Rush wrote in “Mating.” “You can find yourself liking someone who appears intellectually normal and then have him let drop that his favorite book of all time is ‘The Prophet.’” Touché, Mr. Rush, touché."

Um, I feel you Rachel, but another literary dealbreaker might just be not being able to read the book at all due to the arcane vocabulary! too funny...

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant exploration of the limits of human analysis in the face of natural forces. Along with Infinite Jest and Middlemarch, one of the few books I've read that are so impossibly intelligent they seem written by a higher life form. Yes, the vocabulary level seems pretty insane, but given the narrator's education level and insecurity, is completely appropriate.

[Joshua Witham · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thoroughly enjoyed this one. I will say, if you’re a male writer trying to authentically convey the first-person female voice, it seems like a questionable decision to refer to cunnilingus as “infantile”

[Ben Loory · Rating 4 out of 5]

brilliant and often hilarious; 500 pages packed with fascinating insights and ideas and jokes and facts and stories. one of the most overwhelming books i've ever encountered. at times it felt like i was drowning. why, why, why so much. how do i get out of here. will it ever end. how old will i be when it ends and what will be left of me, how will i be changed, will my brain still work, will i be an insufferable human being. but then it ended. and i was pretty much the same. it gives you a lot to think about, but (esp for a love story) surprisingly little to feel. there was one moment (when she heads out alone into the desert after him) where i began to feel a feeling in my innards. but then that was rapidly headed off at the pass. can't say i was ever particularly concerned about how or whether their relationship would work out. frankly if they'd both died i don't think i would've been too bothered. emotional involvement was about zero. but intellectually, a lot going on. really a dazzling mind, a dazzling voice. can't say i ever want to read another book by norman rush. but i'm glad i read this one. and glad it's over.

[Megha · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cover Design: The design on the cover is a detail from Hieronymus Bosch's painting The Garden of Earthly Delights. (Middle panel, blue globe in the middle of the lake.)



Higher Resolution Image

[Abby · Rating 4 out of 5]

Second review. April 2026.

Here again, 11 years later, with some new thoughts:

- Is she a convincing woman, the narrator? A second time around, she strikes me as being extremely masculine, so much so that it's hard to believe she's into dudes

- White progressive American man decides he shall teach African women how to live by founding a feminist colony on their behalf. This is, among many other things, something modern readers object to in Mating, but how sure are we that Rush isn't lampooning Denoon for this very colonial presumption, given how it all turns out in the end?

- The best wisdom in it: “Causing active ongoing pleasure in your mate is something people tend to restrict to the sexual realm or getting attractive food on the table on time, but keeping permanent intimate comedy going is more important than any other one thing.”

- Read it for the intellectual love story! For the vocabulary! For the excellent sentences! For the very ambition and strangeness of it all!

- Still agree with original rating of 4 stars, although I appreciated things this time around that I didn't notice before.

First review. February 2015.

First, some practical advice: Read Mating with a dictionary at your side and brush up on your French and Latin! Norman Rush imbues his sesquipedalian narrator with an exquisite, expansive vocabulary, and she can be hard to keep up with at times. I found this to be delightfully challenging and entertaining, because I’ve always loved books that make me work (I filled up four pages in my notebook with words to look up from this novel), but I acknowledge that this requirement (of having to read with a dictionary and pencil) is not every reader’s cup of tea.

Second, how interesting to read a novel from the perspective of a woman that was written by a man. I find this to be a rather rare conceit, and I think Rush pulls it off admirably.

Third, it’s an intriguing landscape for a love story: Two white academics fall in love in Botswana. It’s a heady, self-obsessed, intellectual romance and yet there are flashes of sincere emotion and humanity. My interest flagged in the final third of the novel, but I liked it on the whole, and I think I'd recommend it to a select few patient, intellectually demanding readers.

“My utopia is equal love, equal love between people of equal value, although value is an approximation for the word I want. Why is it so difficult? Assortative mating shows there has to be some drive in nature to bring equals together in the toils of love, so why even in the most enlightened and beautifully launched unions are we afraid to hear the master-slave relationship moving its slow thighs somewhere in the vicinity? It has to be cultural. In fact the closest thing to a religion I have is that this has to be cultural. I could do practically anything while he was asleep and not bother him. I wrote in my journal, washed dishes in slow motion if we hadn’t gotten around to them. I was emotional a lot, privately. I wanted to incorporate everything, understand everything, because time is cruel and nothing stays the same.”

[CJ · Rating 5 out of 5]

what just happened to me?

[Lily Goldberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

too many usages of "bolus" but otherwise great

[Zachary Swann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just got high and finished the last 50 pages in a trancelike state.

God bless Norman Rush for writing this book: a sincerely delightful, ingenious story brimming with ideas and wit and then, slowly taking shape, heart.

This will go down as one that changed my thinking. I found myself having new questions about feminism, socialism, psychology, and global politics. The political writing is so sharp 30 years later it kinda makes my head spin. Maybe we aren't hurtling into such a unique future. Even as race is a subtextual theme throughout the book (2 white anthropologists figuring it out in the middle of an African village, duh), Mating doesn't get into ideas around race much. Most of the thematic focus is on human relations between individuals and groups more broadly.

A companion thought throughout the book is What am I to do with this male author's female protagonist's documentation of her charismatic male love? People surely disagree on whether the narrator is convincingly female, and I think the author being male creates a neat, little cognitive knot. People will also dispute if Denoon is a plausible character, but his implausibility is what allows the narrator to explore the higher planes of love. Planes that would be unattainable with lesser men, men not committed on a *societal* level to the ascent of women. The premise sort of being What about a romance where the guy is actually a feminist? No, like really (almost comically) feminist.

I'm happy I kept typing because I put down more good thoughts than I initially had. "I write to find out what I'm thinking" - Joan Didion.

Goodnight!

[Jenny · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mating is super smart. On every page, Rush casually name-drops obscure philosophers, touches on long-standing academic debates, and refers to brainy books. It makes you feel smart when you get one (Like, wow! I got that Wallace Stevens reference!), but it makes you feel dumb when you don’t (WTF does perihelion mean again?). Reading this is like reading the encyclopedia, except with more funny. It did feel a little pretentious at times but it taught me words like evaginated, which does not mean what you think it means.

I was bothered by the love interest of our main character. He’s supposed to be this brilliant man, a feminist, who is creating a Utopian, matriarchal society and giving impoverished African women agency but this model society is based on Western ideals. For instance, he has the town summarist, kind of like a town crier, read aloud to the residents dead white male literature. That’s something that bothered me about Denoon. He pushed his agenda but did it covertly through his female allies. But what’s cool about this book is that it shows the complicated layers of power in play.

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."

Last thing: The band couldn’t play because John Coltrane forgot the quatrain.

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm mildly uncomfortable with the fact that my new favourite female character was created by a man, but oh well. The female protagonist of Mating strikes me as rare because she's so clearly driven by both intellect and minutely dissected emotion working in tandem. Rush pokes fun at the pretentiousness of intellectualism without ever being smug, and writes about emotions with zero sentimentality.

[Vincent Saint-Simon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dear Sirs and Madams,

This book could have easily received five stars if Mr. Rush knew how to stick a landing.

M,

V