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Mortals
Norman Rush returns with his finest work to date - the long-awaited follow-up to Mating, winner of the 1991 Irish Times International Fiction Prize. Mortals constitutes the final element in Norman Rush's trilogy on the Western presence in contemporary southern Africa. Set in Botswana in the 1990s, it is a political adventure, a social comedy and a passionate love story. Mortals chronicles the misadventures of three expat Americans: a contract CIA agent, operating undercover as a teacher of Milton in a private school; his beloved but disaffected wife; and an iconoclastic black holistic physician on a personal mission to 'lift the yoke of Christian belief from Africa'. The machinations of these three entangle them with a local populist leader whose purposes are grotesquely misconstrued by the CIA. And when a violent but pathetic insurrection erupts - stoked in part by the erotic and political intrigues of the American trio - the outcome is both explosive and explosively funny. Mortals examines with wit and insight the dilemmas of power, religion, rebellion, and contending versions of liberation and love, through lives lived ardently in an unforgiving land. Botswana is indelibly Norman Rush's fictional territory, and Mortals is his most commanding work.
880 pages, Hardcover
First published May 27, 2003
About the author
Norman Rush
21 books121 followersNorman 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 88 reviews
October 13, 2009
Two stars because:
1. The author insists on using the term "pubic escutcheon" several times.
2. The book is 400 pages too long.
3. Lots and lots of cringeworthy sex and anatomy talk. Both our protagonist, Ray, and his wife, Iris, sometimes refer to her pubic region as her "shame."
4. Ray, a CIA agent in Botswana undercover as a college professor, is hopelessly, embarrassingly, relentlessly, exhaustingly uxorious.
5. Ray and Iris are obsessed with the cutesiness of their inside jokes, puns, and aphorisms, such as making the plural of Kleenex "Kleenices." When Ray is horny he tells Iris, "It's sex o'clock." Ray's gay brother back in the States is also obsessed with (what he thinks are) clever aphorisms, and writes a whole book of clever aphorisms which Ray uses in an interminable combat scene in the Kalahari desert late in the book.
6. The book is deckle edged, which is tremendously annoying, not classy as Knopf would have us believe (it's a pretension bestowed on their finer literary selections).
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I loathed Mating, but this one was practically free and in perfect condition so I bought it.
1. The author insists on using the term "pubic escutcheon" several times.
2. The book is 400 pages too long.
3. Lots and lots of cringeworthy sex and anatomy talk. Both our protagonist, Ray, and his wife, Iris, sometimes refer to her pubic region as her "shame."
4. Ray, a CIA agent in Botswana undercover as a college professor, is hopelessly, embarrassingly, relentlessly, exhaustingly uxorious.
5. Ray and Iris are obsessed with the cutesiness of their inside jokes, puns, and aphorisms, such as making the plural of Kleenex "Kleenices." When Ray is horny he tells Iris, "It's sex o'clock." Ray's gay brother back in the States is also obsessed with (what he thinks are) clever aphorisms, and writes a whole book of clever aphorisms which Ray uses in an interminable combat scene in the Kalahari desert late in the book.
6. The book is deckle edged, which is tremendously annoying, not classy as Knopf would have us believe (it's a pretension bestowed on their finer literary selections).
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I loathed Mating, but this one was practically free and in perfect condition so I bought it.
January 29, 2020
4 1/2 stars - just shy of perfect
"Mortals" does expertly well what I love most in novels - it hangs a plot on the lives of a few people to better tell their intimacies and interactions, to better show their humanity and reveal our own to us. For all of the fighting, the bombs, the guns, the escapes, the spying (well, sort of), the fires, the danger, I was most tense and riveted during the early bathing scene between Iris and Ray. Their 50+ page (or near - I'm recalling off the top of my head) discussion, skirting around their relationship problems, Iris's need for newness, Ray's need for sameness, their mutual desire to get what they want while hurting the other as little as possible, their moves and words polished by years of loving one another was absolutely thrilling to me. This is a book about the ways that we love people and the sacrifices that we sometimes make thinking that we are done with them while later realizing that many of those sacrifices are instead rights of passage and cannot be skipped - doomed to be undertaken at the right time or the very wrong time. I found this book to be wildly daring and extremely satisfying. The ending in particular (the final 40 or so pages) which gives us Iris's point-of-view and her very human and rational reasoning, her final send-off to him (as well written of this type of scene that I can remember having read), and the conclusion to the one story and beginning of the next for each was true, real, refreshing, and remarkably gratifying. I loved Ray's arc and I loved Iris.
The ancillary characters were good (Kerekang in particular was compelling) but paled (as surely they had to) by comparison. Morel was a wonderful construct - perfectly built to be exactly what was needed for each character whom he fueled.
I loved this book
"Mortals" does expertly well what I love most in novels - it hangs a plot on the lives of a few people to better tell their intimacies and interactions, to better show their humanity and reveal our own to us. For all of the fighting, the bombs, the guns, the escapes, the spying (well, sort of), the fires, the danger, I was most tense and riveted during the early bathing scene between Iris and Ray. Their 50+ page (or near - I'm recalling off the top of my head) discussion, skirting around their relationship problems, Iris's need for newness, Ray's need for sameness, their mutual desire to get what they want while hurting the other as little as possible, their moves and words polished by years of loving one another was absolutely thrilling to me. This is a book about the ways that we love people and the sacrifices that we sometimes make thinking that we are done with them while later realizing that many of those sacrifices are instead rights of passage and cannot be skipped - doomed to be undertaken at the right time or the very wrong time. I found this book to be wildly daring and extremely satisfying. The ending in particular (the final 40 or so pages) which gives us Iris's point-of-view and her very human and rational reasoning, her final send-off to him (as well written of this type of scene that I can remember having read), and the conclusion to the one story and beginning of the next for each was true, real, refreshing, and remarkably gratifying. I loved Ray's arc and I loved Iris.
The ancillary characters were good (Kerekang in particular was compelling) but paled (as surely they had to) by comparison. Morel was a wonderful construct - perfectly built to be exactly what was needed for each character whom he fueled.
I loved this book
January 3, 2010
Norman Rush is irrevocably added to my personal list of all-time great writers. For those who enjoy long, wandering pieces of dialog and introspection, I think Rush will endear himself to you permanently as well. The wonderful thing is, though his protagonists are wordy in their mental peregrinations, the plots of both of his novels (Mortals and Mating) kept me on the edge of my seat until the very end, at which point they both made me cry. Rush's genius, I think, is that he is concerned with two landscapes: the narrator's complex, prejudiced, sympathetic, and yet often irritating mind; and the similarly fascinating but deadly landscape of Botswana, and the Kalahiri Desert. Rush paints incredible vistas of both places.
(Mortals, by the way, brought me to tears on a Portland-bound airplane, which enables me to add it to the list of books that have made me cry in strange places. The Yearling on an upstate New York train, and Magic Mountain while substitute teaching are also on the list.)
(Mortals, by the way, brought me to tears on a Portland-bound airplane, which enables me to add it to the list of books that have made me cry in strange places. The Yearling on an upstate New York train, and Magic Mountain while substitute teaching are also on the list.)
May 10, 2013
One could be forgiven for picking up a 700+ page tome detailing a white CIA agent’s musings about, among other things, liberal guilt and the impenetrability of Botswanan culture to a western outsider and thinking, “You navel-gazing ass,” but it would be mistake to discard this book so quickly. This is an easier book to admire than to love, but I liked it very, very much.
While this is perhaps the single most masculine novel I’ve ever read – even aside from the guns and competition for labia rendered in (unnecessary?) great detail, Ray’s penis is all over it, and I apologize to men everywhere but the scatological, too, is your special province, and there’s plenty of that -- it is self-consciously so, and not in an unduly arch way. Rather, it offers a serious examination of the way being a good old boy (our protagonist, Ray) can mute one’s perceptions and occasion real moral anguish. Rush effectively gets out in front of speculative postcolonial and gendered readings by allowing his narrator to directly formulate some of his more apt-to-offend thoughts (Ray used to think the problem of women was solvable by marrying someone – no more, with all this women’s lib! Ray does not like the way the what he thinks is the gift of western technology is being squandered in Africa). No reader need to torture the text to find the problems with Ray’s worldview.
As other reviewers have noted, this is of a piece with Ray’s general narcissism, but part of what makes this a great read is Ray’s complexity, because anyone reading it by choice will likely hate some of his cluelessness even as she identifies deeply with Ray’s abiding faith in literature. Part of what makes this book remarkable has to do with the way literature figures in it in ways that should seem absurd, or at least coyly postmodern. But Rush isn’t playing games. Rush has a knack for making the preposterous seem plausible, without screaming “LOOK! THIS IS A FICTION, THIS IS WHY SOMETHING SO CRAZY CAN HAPPEN!” as many of his contemporaries seem to do. A lot of the best absurdities can’t be revealed without also giving away huge plot developments, but it’s fair to say that at one point a character recites “Dover Beach” out of politeness to his foe, to mask the sound of that foe’s defecating – and somehow, this scene is not ridiculous. Similarly, an unpublished manuscript winds up saving lives, and Rush manages to present this plot twist with a kind of touching earnestness. Ray’s love of literature makes him sympathetic, but his succinct disses of Joyce and then Flaubert endeared him to me in spite of his many failures. I hope that Rush hates them too.
Perhaps the most important evidence that this is a novel premised on the idea that literature is a serious business is that, even though it does much to present warring ideologies and is full of gross sex and literary flourishes, it finally feels like the portrait of a moral awakening. I read this in part because of James Wood’s How Fiction Works and would like to restate one objection I had to that book (also voiced in my review of that book.) Wood says that readers too often demand “moralizing niceness” and take authors to task when they don’t present us with likable characters. I believe that he misunderstands readers’ objections, which generally have to do with the frustration of being implicitly asked by an author to have sympathy for an unsympathetic character; we love/hate Humbert Humbert because Nabokov doesn’t ask us to like him. It is interesting, having read this essentially at Wood’s recommendation, to find that Rush does what I and so many Amazon and Goodreads reviewers ask of our authors: he gives us a not wholly likable character and does not try to coax us into greater sympathy than the character deserves. And the novel is ultimately a moralizing one! At least, in my reading. And it is a moralizing novel in a very satisfying and even subtle way.
This book requires attention in a different way than other books of similar length and difficulty, and it took me forever to read, but it was worth it. It does things that I thought twenty-first century authors had given up. I will certainly check out Mating.
While this is perhaps the single most masculine novel I’ve ever read – even aside from the guns and competition for labia rendered in (unnecessary?) great detail, Ray’s penis is all over it, and I apologize to men everywhere but the scatological, too, is your special province, and there’s plenty of that -- it is self-consciously so, and not in an unduly arch way. Rather, it offers a serious examination of the way being a good old boy (our protagonist, Ray) can mute one’s perceptions and occasion real moral anguish. Rush effectively gets out in front of speculative postcolonial and gendered readings by allowing his narrator to directly formulate some of his more apt-to-offend thoughts (Ray used to think the problem of women was solvable by marrying someone – no more, with all this women’s lib! Ray does not like the way the what he thinks is the gift of western technology is being squandered in Africa). No reader need to torture the text to find the problems with Ray’s worldview.
As other reviewers have noted, this is of a piece with Ray’s general narcissism, but part of what makes this a great read is Ray’s complexity, because anyone reading it by choice will likely hate some of his cluelessness even as she identifies deeply with Ray’s abiding faith in literature. Part of what makes this book remarkable has to do with the way literature figures in it in ways that should seem absurd, or at least coyly postmodern. But Rush isn’t playing games. Rush has a knack for making the preposterous seem plausible, without screaming “LOOK! THIS IS A FICTION, THIS IS WHY SOMETHING SO CRAZY CAN HAPPEN!” as many of his contemporaries seem to do. A lot of the best absurdities can’t be revealed without also giving away huge plot developments, but it’s fair to say that at one point a character recites “Dover Beach” out of politeness to his foe, to mask the sound of that foe’s defecating – and somehow, this scene is not ridiculous. Similarly, an unpublished manuscript winds up saving lives, and Rush manages to present this plot twist with a kind of touching earnestness. Ray’s love of literature makes him sympathetic, but his succinct disses of Joyce and then Flaubert endeared him to me in spite of his many failures. I hope that Rush hates them too.
Perhaps the most important evidence that this is a novel premised on the idea that literature is a serious business is that, even though it does much to present warring ideologies and is full of gross sex and literary flourishes, it finally feels like the portrait of a moral awakening. I read this in part because of James Wood’s How Fiction Works and would like to restate one objection I had to that book (also voiced in my review of that book.) Wood says that readers too often demand “moralizing niceness” and take authors to task when they don’t present us with likable characters. I believe that he misunderstands readers’ objections, which generally have to do with the frustration of being implicitly asked by an author to have sympathy for an unsympathetic character; we love/hate Humbert Humbert because Nabokov doesn’t ask us to like him. It is interesting, having read this essentially at Wood’s recommendation, to find that Rush does what I and so many Amazon and Goodreads reviewers ask of our authors: he gives us a not wholly likable character and does not try to coax us into greater sympathy than the character deserves. And the novel is ultimately a moralizing one! At least, in my reading. And it is a moralizing novel in a very satisfying and even subtle way.
This book requires attention in a different way than other books of similar length and difficulty, and it took me forever to read, but it was worth it. It does things that I thought twenty-first century authors had given up. I will certainly check out Mating.
May 24, 2020
A marriage novel that becomes an adventure novel and then a marriage novel again. It was just the right thing to get lost in, during quarantine, and I admit that I may have liked it less if I had read it at a different time and place, but Norman Rush’s energetic and wide-ranging vocabulary was a sustaining delight. His deep pleasure in words and in using them animates this fat novel, set in Botswana and concerned with the life of Ray Finch and his wife, Iris. A perfect distraction.
February 9, 2026
He fucking did it again <333
December 25, 2014
I have looked forward to rereading this masterful work for several years, and suddenly, it was time. Curiously, except for remembering how much I liked it the first time (2014), the story was a complete surprise.
As a massive piece of storytelling, this is a 712 page epic. The author stays absolutely in that peculiar narrative place where the principal character is "he" but the telling stays completely inside "his" mind -- a tale told by a disembodied observer hovering above the protagonist but knowing his every thought. During the action following his imprisonment, this narrator is clearly losing his hold on reality (understandable given the circumstances) but Rush manages to stay solidly within the narrative position. For the reader, the result is an intense sense of participation.
The book is a window into Botswana and far southern Africa during a time of massive change; it is also a love story: the disintegration part, where an almost too tight marriage with a too-sheltered woman comes apart. Husband and wife's lover get caught up in terror and must work together to survive; the narrative working out of their impossible horror is harsh, believable, masterful.
As a romantic, I wanted a last chapter, husband and wife navigating the rapids and resuming their excellent partnership under kinder conditions -- and kudos to Rush for stopping where he did, and letting me work that out on my own.
As a massive piece of storytelling, this is a 712 page epic. The author stays absolutely in that peculiar narrative place where the principal character is "he" but the telling stays completely inside "his" mind -- a tale told by a disembodied observer hovering above the protagonist but knowing his every thought. During the action following his imprisonment, this narrator is clearly losing his hold on reality (understandable given the circumstances) but Rush manages to stay solidly within the narrative position. For the reader, the result is an intense sense of participation.
The book is a window into Botswana and far southern Africa during a time of massive change; it is also a love story: the disintegration part, where an almost too tight marriage with a too-sheltered woman comes apart. Husband and wife's lover get caught up in terror and must work together to survive; the narrative working out of their impossible horror is harsh, believable, masterful.
As a romantic, I wanted a last chapter, husband and wife navigating the rapids and resuming their excellent partnership under kinder conditions -- and kudos to Rush for stopping where he did, and letting me work that out on my own.
February 16, 2023
A very solid 3 out of 5 stars. There was a lot to love about this book, especially Rush's sincere and passionate love of language, intellectual engagement, and originality. His deeply wrought portrait of the inner nuances a marriage is also illuminating and honest. It is a shame then that these assets are frequently undermined by a certain flimsiness of plotting and protagonist who is—and I use this term in its technical sense—a douchebag. So while generally enjoying this book, you roll your eyes at it, in the way you do a friend who is likable in well-controlled doses.
January 11, 2023
An intricate, lengthy, and overall good book about an imperiled marriage between a CIA agent/Milton scholar and his somewhat adrift and much younger wife in Botswana at the end of the Cold War. The main character grows suspicious that she is having an affair with an African-American doctor named Morel, who has moved to Botswana to launch an anti-religion crusade and a strange version of psycho-therapy. At the same time, the protagonist has been ordered to spy on a Botswanan rebel named Kerekang, who is leading a peasant revolt against corrupt authorities and white supremacist militias. A lot goes down, and it isn't always easy to tell what it happening. Each scene or part of the book is incredibly intricate, realistic, and vivid, especially the core relationship of Ray and Iris, which is fascinating and well-explored. My main beef, I guess, is that it's harder to get the big picture of the plot; it isn't the kind of book that holds your hand at any point, and it assumes a bit of knowledge about Southern African politics. It's a book that both requires and rewards patience.
February 26, 2026
I’d rather the whole thing have been Strange News
May 2, 2020
Rush is an amazing storyteller and writer of the English language. I really enjoyed reading this book, even though it was 700 pages and difficult to get through. Most good books can tell the story in 300-350 pages, but Rush indulges in the inner meanderings of his characters' minds, made me laugh out loud, and an added bonus for my imagination that the protagonist is an undercover CIA agent living as an expat in Botswana. Probably one of the best American writers that I have read. I read a different book of his, Mating, about five years ago and remember really enjoying that too. Read him with a dictionary and be ready to really get into a book.
January 3, 2019
Well, the Vulture list has failed me for the first time. Maybe I should shy away from the books only one person endorsed, or maybe I should shy away from the long books because they present too much risk. Here's the Vulture list's description of Mortals:
A novel of adultery and conspiracy, of Americans in Africa on the morning after the end of the Cold War, Mortals follows a CIA agent (and Milton scholar) in Botswana in 1992. Rush is the most politically committed and engaged of contemporary American novelists, and Mortals is the most sustained and well-informed fictional account of U.S. meddling in countries that rarely feature in our headlines. The human story of a faltering marriage merges with the geopolitical in the form of a boiling civil conflict. Rush is Joseph Conrad’s heir in the era of globalization. —Christian Lorentzen
Wow! Doesn't that sound good? It did to me. But here's an accurate review from the Guardian:
The Great American Novel can look a lot like the Big American Novel, a product not of ambition but a sort of elephantiasis affecting novelistic tissue. Obese books aimed at readers who can hardly squeeze into their aircraft seats, books which themselves barely qualify as carry-on luggage. Norman Rush's Mortals is serious and well written, but it operates on a scale that only blazing genius could justify. I've read and enjoyed every word, but my bond with the book felt mildly unhealthy, like the literary equivalent of Stockholm Syndrome, based less on the free play of literary pleasure than being separated for so long from other stimuli. Rush won the National Book Award for his previous novel, Mating (itself no lightweight), and major literary prizes can paralyse the self-critical urge in their winners. One 32-page chapter of Mortals is entirely devoted to the hero having a bath and a conversation with his wife. Rather than streamline the chapter, Rush has given it a jaunty title, as if the formula 'I Would Like to Reassure you About my Penis' appearing at the top will give the reader the necessary boost. The great casualty of over-detailed writing is pace. {End quote}
In other words, Mortals was 736 pages where it could've been 300, tops. Most of the action takes place in the protagonist's mind, but in a terrible way--not at all like Jennifer Egan does it so that you feel things as the character experiences them. No, Rush constantly has his protagonist realize and figure things out completely independent of what he's experiencing.
Geez, that's not even the worst of it. The worst of it is that half this novel is devoted to describing how much this couple that has been together for 20 years loves each other so dang much and yet they're completely insecure in their relationship (which, of course, frays for reasons more literary than plausible).
Nope, that's not the worst of it. This was just a bad book until the author spent like 30 of his last 50 pages going full out Danielle Steele describing this stupid couple's make-up sex scene (which is not the ridiculous bath scene the other reviewer took issue with). I'm serious. Page after page after page of nipple hardening, foreplay, thrusting, and coming. Oh, and the other has a very good sized penis and is 48 and has no issue getting hard. Projecting much, dear author?
After that, Mortals started asking me whether it is the worst book I've ever read. Probably not, but geez was this bad. I routinely fault books where I think an editor could've lopped off some pages to everyone's benefit. Here I think the publisher should've just said, "Can you send us the 250-page version? Also, please limit yourself to describing the wife's nipples to once or twice instead of I-lost-count-how-many-times."
The problem is that Rush seems like one of those authors who has completely lost touch with reality. He only exists in the douche world of people reading Updike and Proust and going to Upper West Side dinner parties to talk about Updike and Proust with people who had an article published in Harper's 30 years ago.
150 LSAT. No, I'm too mad. 159. His protagonist was well-crafted, and his CIA and Africa thinking were well-done and well-researched.
A novel of adultery and conspiracy, of Americans in Africa on the morning after the end of the Cold War, Mortals follows a CIA agent (and Milton scholar) in Botswana in 1992. Rush is the most politically committed and engaged of contemporary American novelists, and Mortals is the most sustained and well-informed fictional account of U.S. meddling in countries that rarely feature in our headlines. The human story of a faltering marriage merges with the geopolitical in the form of a boiling civil conflict. Rush is Joseph Conrad’s heir in the era of globalization. —Christian Lorentzen
Wow! Doesn't that sound good? It did to me. But here's an accurate review from the Guardian:
The Great American Novel can look a lot like the Big American Novel, a product not of ambition but a sort of elephantiasis affecting novelistic tissue. Obese books aimed at readers who can hardly squeeze into their aircraft seats, books which themselves barely qualify as carry-on luggage. Norman Rush's Mortals is serious and well written, but it operates on a scale that only blazing genius could justify. I've read and enjoyed every word, but my bond with the book felt mildly unhealthy, like the literary equivalent of Stockholm Syndrome, based less on the free play of literary pleasure than being separated for so long from other stimuli. Rush won the National Book Award for his previous novel, Mating (itself no lightweight), and major literary prizes can paralyse the self-critical urge in their winners. One 32-page chapter of Mortals is entirely devoted to the hero having a bath and a conversation with his wife. Rather than streamline the chapter, Rush has given it a jaunty title, as if the formula 'I Would Like to Reassure you About my Penis' appearing at the top will give the reader the necessary boost. The great casualty of over-detailed writing is pace. {End quote}
In other words, Mortals was 736 pages where it could've been 300, tops. Most of the action takes place in the protagonist's mind, but in a terrible way--not at all like Jennifer Egan does it so that you feel things as the character experiences them. No, Rush constantly has his protagonist realize and figure things out completely independent of what he's experiencing.
Geez, that's not even the worst of it. The worst of it is that half this novel is devoted to describing how much this couple that has been together for 20 years loves each other so dang much and yet they're completely insecure in their relationship (which, of course, frays for reasons more literary than plausible).
Nope, that's not the worst of it. This was just a bad book until the author spent like 30 of his last 50 pages going full out Danielle Steele describing this stupid couple's make-up sex scene (which is not the ridiculous bath scene the other reviewer took issue with). I'm serious. Page after page after page of nipple hardening, foreplay, thrusting, and coming. Oh, and the other has a very good sized penis and is 48 and has no issue getting hard. Projecting much, dear author?
After that, Mortals started asking me whether it is the worst book I've ever read. Probably not, but geez was this bad. I routinely fault books where I think an editor could've lopped off some pages to everyone's benefit. Here I think the publisher should've just said, "Can you send us the 250-page version? Also, please limit yourself to describing the wife's nipples to once or twice instead of I-lost-count-how-many-times."
The problem is that Rush seems like one of those authors who has completely lost touch with reality. He only exists in the douche world of people reading Updike and Proust and going to Upper West Side dinner parties to talk about Updike and Proust with people who had an article published in Harper's 30 years ago.
150 LSAT. No, I'm too mad. 159. His protagonist was well-crafted, and his CIA and Africa thinking were well-done and well-researched.
March 18, 2014
The reviews were mostly correct: this is not as good as Mating. To me, at least, that's because one of its central subjects (for at least the first part of the book) is religion. Indeed, there are about twenty pages of dialog about Christ as a Jew that is the most boring interlude about religion since the Grand Inquisitor scene in The Brothers K. More fundamentally, the two halves of the book don't hang together very well. Once Ray goes into the wild the focus of the book changes from his interactions with his wife and his employer--the "agency"--to his search for Karekeng and the battles with the evil Koevet. Other reviewers found Ray's uxuriousness hard to take; it did get a little cloying after a while. Yet this reader did get involved in the fate of Ray and his wife, in Ray's desire to find more meaning in his life as he confronts what he and the agency have wittingly or unwittingly done, and in the hope embodied in Karekeng as he attempts to bring about change in Botswana. Perhaps part of the weakness of the book is that no character holds a candle to the narrator of Mating, who was one of the most fully realized characters whose mind I've ever inhabited (and who makes a cameo appearance here with her husband). Moreover, both Karekeng and Morel are pale shadows of Nelson Denoon, whose insight lit up Mating. Morel, in particular, never quite jells, perhaps because we always see him through Ray's eyes, who for obvious reasons is not particularly objective. Still, for a 714-page book it was a good, entertaining, and captivating read. Mating was just a hard act to follow. Subtle Bodies, anyone?
August 17, 2014
My daughter-in-law turned me on to this book; she thought I would enjoy it because it was set in Botswana. That was definitely part of my enjoyment. It took me back to my childhood, when Botswana was Bechuanaland. But it was Norman Rush's seductive writing that captured and entranced me. How does he do it, I kept asking myself, how is he able to just keep going inside a character's head, off on tangents not related to plot or to moving the story forward, making a point over and over again in different sometimes hilarious ways. It swept me along. To some readers this is a turn-off, to me it was icing on the cake, a deep penetrating way to connect with the characters; it was like I had a ringside seat, one I could slip back into after being away a while and pick right up where I left off. I knew these people. I wanted to know more.
I just ordered Norman Rush's "Mating," which takes places before "Mortals." Can't wait.
I just ordered Norman Rush's "Mating," which takes places before "Mortals." Can't wait.
February 20, 2008
Another interesting psychological exploration by Rush... however the plot really gets in the way, at times. There is a 300 page digression of questionable value and relevance. My impression of this section is that it was included to position the book to be made into a movie. It is possible I didn't appreciate this part of the book b/c I skimmed it so fast-- but it was very hard to get interested in it given the other things happening.
The portrayal of the breakdown of the marriage is compelling and well-written-- with the exception of the narrator's perseveration on his wife's perfection. The worshipful passages about her physical attributes got old, fast, but kept coming. At one point, I think he actually describes her breath as delectable.
The portrayal of the breakdown of the marriage is compelling and well-written-- with the exception of the narrator's perseveration on his wife's perfection. The worshipful passages about her physical attributes got old, fast, but kept coming. At one point, I think he actually describes her breath as delectable.
July 16, 2010
This book might have been interesting for its insight into the politics and country of Botswana if it hadn't been filled with page after page of repetitive and boring discourse. How many ways can one say the same thing? Ask Norman Rush and he will give you a quick 25 page answer. I kept hoping that I'd like it better, but in the end my feeling was that it was not particularly interesting and not particularly entertaining. It's not often that I skip pages of a book, but in reading this book, I started skipping a page, then two or three, then more. Funny thing is that the plot hadn't progressed an iota after skipping several pages. If it weren't for some thought provoking insights on religion by Dr. Morel, I would feel that reading this book was a waste of time.
October 28, 2007
I couldn't finish this book, but wish I could have - the premise is very interesting - a scholar in Botswana who is really CIA agent struggling with his career, philosophical issues about race, religion and life, his overwhelming love for his wife .... it is NOT a spy type thriller at all. Rather, it is very intellectual - and at times, the long-ish conversations between people on philosophy just seemed totally out of synch with rest of book's plot.... and it was just more than I could finish. But if someone gets farther than half way through and tells me it's worth it, I'll believe it, and would go back and finish b/c it is promising.
June 18, 2013
The story was good but way too long. The characters might have been engaging if it weren't for my boredom with the length of every description, which had too much interior dialogue and not enough about surroundings, reactions of others, etc. If the author's goal was to show how the protagonist was too wrapped up in himself, he nailed it. I did not like this book well enough to recommend it to anyone else.
August 17, 2009
For all it's flaws, this book has stayed with me, powerfully.
January 4, 2025
this author is so mysterious in his treatment. are his charecters a product of his terrible dated taste( he is in his nineties) or are they devices from the tradition of a divine comedy. the book aludes to the later as the main character is an in sufferable littersry nerd in cognito as a poetry professor. he is really a cia agent with a passion for blake. his wife and him are the american elites of the time in botswanna. they have hot sex and are also in sufferavke with thier insider, sexual puns. the book doubles down on its classical comedy because our protagonist suspects his wife to have an affair. as an agent he he dives on the suspect. his hunch is correct but his research is inconclusive
the books irony is good a cia a agent using his training to find his cuckold but the work is best from norman rushs talent for itrveteered narratives of over educated white nancies harshly juxtaposed by the foreigneess of botswanna, aficionado.
i like this work and the author for his style of ebterwiseined personal, mostly romantic internal thoughts intertwined with the visceral observations of africa where his characters are purposefully on the outside.
he is great at romantic tangential thoughts. this book in particular is primed to have a paranoid husband by trade tragically paranoid and aware of his deterating marriage with the love of his life.
the book slaps you in the face with irony when our protagonist is captured on a recon mission for his real work and his suspect cuckold joins him in captivity while attempting to rescue him, out narrator knows the circumstances of why he came, and inoty climaxes when the two are held in an interrogation room and the husband interigates the stutoor in his own fashion ( -after being tortured and questioned by the parimatry group he was assigned to investigate). he gets his beeeded confirmation and the irony conditions as the suitor doctor tends to the agents wounds and it forced to cuddle with him for warmth in the cell to save his life. they have the ultimate bro mande and save each others lives again and again escaping from hell in an un related fortunous attack from our agents leftist allie’s which then prove to the suitor that our prograntisirx is not the problematic agent we’d assume him to be. thier survival bromance dis tells the affair into and surreal depth
the story finishes faithful to the romance central to the story as the narrator and his wife deal with his rescues and knowledge of the affair.It ends with possibility and hope from the aftermath.
i like norman rush because i suspect him of uses topical themes poetically and polemically to make a provoking sorry. race, romance and american foreign policy are handled well
the books irony is good a cia a agent using his training to find his cuckold but the work is best from norman rushs talent for itrveteered narratives of over educated white nancies harshly juxtaposed by the foreigneess of botswanna, aficionado.
i like this work and the author for his style of ebterwiseined personal, mostly romantic internal thoughts intertwined with the visceral observations of africa where his characters are purposefully on the outside.
he is great at romantic tangential thoughts. this book in particular is primed to have a paranoid husband by trade tragically paranoid and aware of his deterating marriage with the love of his life.
the book slaps you in the face with irony when our protagonist is captured on a recon mission for his real work and his suspect cuckold joins him in captivity while attempting to rescue him, out narrator knows the circumstances of why he came, and inoty climaxes when the two are held in an interrogation room and the husband interigates the stutoor in his own fashion ( -after being tortured and questioned by the parimatry group he was assigned to investigate). he gets his beeeded confirmation and the irony conditions as the suitor doctor tends to the agents wounds and it forced to cuddle with him for warmth in the cell to save his life. they have the ultimate bro mande and save each others lives again and again escaping from hell in an un related fortunous attack from our agents leftist allie’s which then prove to the suitor that our prograntisirx is not the problematic agent we’d assume him to be. thier survival bromance dis tells the affair into and surreal depth
the story finishes faithful to the romance central to the story as the narrator and his wife deal with his rescues and knowledge of the affair.It ends with possibility and hope from the aftermath.
i like norman rush because i suspect him of uses topical themes poetically and polemically to make a provoking sorry. race, romance and american foreign policy are handled well
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 2, 2026
Editor: Norm, listen, it's great. It really is. Everything is there, the psychological study of coupledom, the agonies and insanities of love, the idioverse, all that good stuff for your Mating Stans. But it's too long. It drags. Can we cut some scenes?
Norm: Sure, but what scenes would you like me to cut?
Editor: Do we need to have so much of the brother's bad pseudo-poetry—
Norm: Rex is nothing without his book, or, should I say, this book is nothing without Rex. Iris's jacquerie starts and ends with Rex, and is really all about Rex. Rex is the foil, or maybe Ray is the foil. It's hard to say. But if you pull on that thread, the whole thing comes apart.
Editor: Okay, hm. Do we need so much of Ray's internal dialogue?
Norm: His philippics make Ray who he is. Plus I thought you said that's the part my fans—what is it you said? Stans—like. The inner monologues that, when properly overheard, illuminate more about the human condition than anyone has yet been able to achieve? I think that resonated with my ... audience ... and I can't let them down. And I have a duty to this type of work, lest introspection, like Ray's collection of obscure words, go the way of the dodo. I could redo it, of course, I could cut, and I could shorten. But it would hobble. Let me ask Elsa.
*Shuffles down the attic steps. Returns 10 minutes later.*
Norm: Elsa says I need to keep everything.
Editor: *Sigh.* Okay. Everything stays.
Norm: Sure, but what scenes would you like me to cut?
Editor: Do we need to have so much of the brother's bad pseudo-poetry—
Norm: Rex is nothing without his book, or, should I say, this book is nothing without Rex. Iris's jacquerie starts and ends with Rex, and is really all about Rex. Rex is the foil, or maybe Ray is the foil. It's hard to say. But if you pull on that thread, the whole thing comes apart.
Editor: Okay, hm. Do we need so much of Ray's internal dialogue?
Norm: His philippics make Ray who he is. Plus I thought you said that's the part my fans—what is it you said? Stans—like. The inner monologues that, when properly overheard, illuminate more about the human condition than anyone has yet been able to achieve? I think that resonated with my ... audience ... and I can't let them down. And I have a duty to this type of work, lest introspection, like Ray's collection of obscure words, go the way of the dodo. I could redo it, of course, I could cut, and I could shorten. But it would hobble. Let me ask Elsa.
*Shuffles down the attic steps. Returns 10 minutes later.*
Norm: Elsa says I need to keep everything.
Editor: *Sigh.* Okay. Everything stays.
May 5, 2017
I can't quite get on why this was less engrossing for me than other Rush novels, but I know that I'm a bit exhausted now.
Okay, it is very likely because I can't get past Ray's cutesy and obsessive love for Iris when there were much more interesting things to be explored with Kerekang and Morel. Mortals is very set within its own present, which made it hard for me to follow the political intrigues of countries I know very little about. And yes, that is my own failing and I shouldn't expect to get southern African history from a white novelist but could we replace the odes to Iris' breasts with more info about Kerekang's motivations?
Okay, it is very likely because I can't get past Ray's cutesy and obsessive love for Iris when there were much more interesting things to be explored with Kerekang and Morel. Mortals is very set within its own present, which made it hard for me to follow the political intrigues of countries I know very little about. And yes, that is my own failing and I shouldn't expect to get southern African history from a white novelist but could we replace the odes to Iris' breasts with more info about Kerekang's motivations?
August 31, 2018
This book is LONG and it took me quite a while to get into it. At the center are a married couple, Ray and Iris. Ray's nearly 50 and works for the CIA. Iris is 10 years younger and in the midst of some kind of existential crisis. They both have issues with their siblings, and they are currently living in Botswana during a tumultuous time. Iris starts going to unconventional therapy with a man named Morel, who Ray quickly suspects Iris is attracted to. Ray is sent on a mission that becomes quite dangerous, and Morel ends up trying to find him and the two get to know each other. So there's war and romance, and by the end I actually did get emotional about their story.
December 20, 2022
From a journal entry dated 12/24/2004:
"I ... finally finished ... 'Mortals' by Rush, over 700 pages. It was interesting enough to keep reading but not gripping enough to read without being able to put it down. [In other words, I didn't sit at the kitchen table engrossed for hours on end.] And about 2/3 through I REALLY lost interest but persevered to the end, having gotten that far. (It was WAY too long & wordy & could have used judicious pruning & editing; & i thought the last 1/3 was totally unrealistic.)"
Note from today, 12/20/2022: even reading the plot summary online, I have zero memory of this book.
"I ... finally finished ... 'Mortals' by Rush, over 700 pages. It was interesting enough to keep reading but not gripping enough to read without being able to put it down. [In other words, I didn't sit at the kitchen table engrossed for hours on end.] And about 2/3 through I REALLY lost interest but persevered to the end, having gotten that far. (It was WAY too long & wordy & could have used judicious pruning & editing; & i thought the last 1/3 was totally unrealistic.)"
Note from today, 12/20/2022: even reading the plot summary online, I have zero memory of this book.
December 21, 2023
I got about a third of the way through before giving up. It took over a hundred pages to even introduce a conflict for a plot.
I don't mind a slow burn, but it just wasn't interesting.
Then about a third of the way, the plot thickens (predictably), but by that time, it was too little (too obvious) and too late for me.
Knowing how my brain is wired, I'll have to eventually get back and finish it, but ugh, I'm not going to look forward to it, nor will I probably enjoy it.
I don't mind a slow burn, but it just wasn't interesting.
Then about a third of the way, the plot thickens (predictably), but by that time, it was too little (too obvious) and too late for me.
Knowing how my brain is wired, I'll have to eventually get back and finish it, but ugh, I'm not going to look forward to it, nor will I probably enjoy it.
January 28, 2026
Nobody captures the somewhat bizarre experience of being a white American expatriate in Africa quite like Rush. I didn’t think he could write anything better than ‘Mating’ but here it is. Why hasn’t someone made a movie yet?
May 17, 2019
Good but much, much too long.
May 3, 2020
A fine, big book to have during quarantine.
Read
December 27, 2020Messier and loopier than Mating, but nevertheless enjoyed being in Norman Rush's world over 700 pages.
July 23, 2022
In this book, which takes place in Botswana, Rush creates a vivid sense of place, characters that seem alive and compelling, and a plot that produces genuinely surprising turns.
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