Mating

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Exhilarating…vigorous and luminous…Few books evoke the state of love at its apogee.” –The New York Times Book Review You didn’t publish your first book, Whites, until you were fifty-three. What were you writing all those years?

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.This novel is set in Botswana, about Botswana, but it is not of or for Botswana. It has been written for Americans and is more about America and American perceptions of the world than Africa. (...) Mating is, in reality, a giant short story, right down to its O'Henry-ish ending, and it might better have stopped as a novella." - Sheldon G. Weeks, Africa Today The next day she locates him in a Gaborone slum, where he is lodging with a friend before returning to Tsau. Upon arrival, her “accursed female bladder” sends her running to the outhouse. Denoon offers a blunt welcome: “Look, did you just urinate?” She has misused an eco-toilet that Denoon has just installed. “It seems,” she says, “I was the only educated human being who had never heard of the universally known fact that urea keeps feces from composting properly.”

All of this is presented in an allusively freewheeling first-person narrative that provides exhilarating evidence of an impressive intelligence at work and play. Readers receive a palpable sense of having their education sternly tested -- and expanded -- by Mr. Rush's novel. Geography, history, political science, economics, literature, biology, popular culture and utter trivia -- the narrator and her beloved Denoon hash everything out, and in doing so are encyclopedic in the extreme, segueing from bats to Boers to Borges to Botswana. (...) Mr. Rush has created one of the wiser and wittier fictive meditations on the subject of mating. His novel illuminates why we yield when we don't have to. It seeks to illuminate the nature of true intimacy -- how to define it, how to know when one has achieved it. And few books evoke so eloquently that state of love at its apogee" - Jim Shepard, The New York Times Book Review She wasn’t skeptical. She appreciated it, as writing. She noted that I wasn’t happy with the kinds of responses I was getting, but was entirely supportive for decades. She didn’t think I could change, and felt bad for me. 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. 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.)

His understandable antipathy to anthropologists -- "Most of the official great names in anthropology were mediocrities. Some were creeps" -- complicates matters too.

Rush and his wife worked as co-workers for the Peace Corps in Botswana from 1978 to 1983, w Norman Rush (born October 24, 1933 in Oakland, California) is an American novelist whose introspective novels and short stories are set in Botswana in the 1980s. He is the son of Roger and Leslie (Chesse) Rush. He was the recipient of the 1991 National Book Award and the 1992 Irish Times/Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize for his novel Mating. Mating is largely set in Botswana, in the early 1980s -- as Ronald Reagan comes to power in the US -- and is narrated by an unnamed American anthropologist doing field work there.

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:

It would be about as hard to read me as being in the kitchen and noticing when the compressor went on in the refrigerator."To me, there’s no pessimism in it,” said Piepenbring, who coordinated The Paris Review’s “Mating” book club in 2015, when he worked at the magazine. “That was exactly the kind of relationship I wanted to be in.”