Mating: A Novel (Vintage International)

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Scott, Anna (8 November 2013). "Mating by Norman Rush—Review". TheGuardian.com . Retrieved 29 February 2016. Toal, Drew (September 13, 2013). "Death And The Aging Hipster: A Tale Of Intolerable Men". NPR . Retrieved April 10, 2021. Halfway through Mating, Tsau’s residents are surprised by the sudden appearance of an eccentric actor sent by the British Council. Over a boozy dinner, Denoon and the actor (a right-winger) debate women’s rights. Denoon, in “masterly” form, excoriates “male marxism,” which, generation after generation, has placed the wrong bets: it searched “high and low for the liberatory class that would lift human arrangements into a redeemed state—the proletariat, the students, the lumpen, third world nationalists—in short, every group around except for the most promising one … the mass of women.” Passages of this sort make us wonder if Rush, at bottom, is not a novelist but a pamphleteer; and yet the conversation fits seamlessly into the busy carpet he unfurls before our eyes, one in which individuals develop and correct their ideas, in dialogue with others and themselves, as happens in real life. Rush never allows one voice to speak the Truth, and there remains something slightly suspect about Denoon’s utopianism. Her attempts at positioning herself -- her efforts at 'mating', from the pure sexual release to the complications of "intellectual love", as well as finding a place in Tsau -- are quite interesting -- though she does remain quite at sea. The narrator’s politics are more conventional: “I think probably we should all be liberals.” And yet her own utopia is even more utopian than Denoon’s: “nobody lying … lie to me at your peril.” The clash of these utopias contributes to the novel’s dynamism, as well as to its enduring relevance in a period when the positions of liberals continue to face strong challenges from the left. If the narrator allows Denoon to expatiate on world-historical themes, she won’t allow him to romanticize Africa’s poor. After eight nomadic Basarwa families establish a camp on the edge of Tsau, barter arrangements ensue with the newcomers. Denoon is irked: “unequal exchange, as a general thing, disgruntled Nelson.” That is piffle to her, and she hastens to affirm the complexity of human behavior and the limits of rationalist discourse; Rush seems to be telling us that it is women who must rescue men from the schemes they’ve hatched on the precipices of rationality . She has read V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River and lives by its first six words: “The world is what it is…”:

I think, for obvious reasons, heterosexuality is not particularly fashionable — indeed, it’s highly suspect,” said Hermione Hoby, the author of the novel “Virtue.”“So in some ways it makes sense that this book from 30 years ago should now find that talismanic force. It reads almost like a blueprint.” Darüber und über gelegentliche sprachliche Scheußlichkeiten ("die Hinterfragung meiner eigenen Motive") kann man hinweglesen und den Roman nicht nur als Porträt des heutigen Afrikas betrachten, sondern auch als Psychogramm derer, die als Therapeuten doch zutiefst der Therapie bedürfen. Im Verzicht auf das happy ending, in seiner ernüchternden Bilanz und in der Destruktion der Heilsgewißheiten wirkt dieser Roman ehrlich." - Wilhelm Kühlmann, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung The best rendering of erotic politics…since D.H. Lawrence…The voice of Rush’s narrator is immediate, instructive and endearing.” — The New York Review of Books 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 or the contemplation of the various forms of surrogate combat men find so transfixing. I had to realize that female-style love is servile and petitionary and moves in the direction of greater and greater displays of servility whose object is to elicit from the male partner a surplus—the word was emphasized in some way—of face-to-face attention. So on the distaff side the object is to reduce the quantity of servile display needed to keep the pacified state between the mates in being. 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. In the dream this seemed to me like a burning insight and I concentrated fiercely to hold on to it when I woke up: I should remember this inescapable dyad at the heart of mating because it was not what I had come this far to get.”

Unable to reach him as she once did and convinced he is psychologically damaged, the heartbroken narrator takes him to Gaborone for treatment but none of the experts she consults thinks he has a problem. The narrator cooks up a scheme to fix Nelson up with a beautiful young woman hoping to force him to make a choice. Her plan is successful and believing he has chosen someone else she flees Africa returning to her life and academic pursuits in America. Brilliantly written... utterly sui generis... Rush has alerted us to the transfiguring power of passion You didn’t publish your first book, Whites, until you were fifty-three. What were you writing all those years? She ignores his rebuff and goes to Tsau—a decision that entails a six-day trek through the Kalahari Desert. This section, entitled “My Expedition,” is the most exhilarating segment of writing in Rush’s work . She endures hallucinations, splinters, ill-fitting sunglasses and constipation; she encounters lions, ostriches, dead weaverbird nests and vultures. Halfway through the journey, one of her two donkeys, Mmo, runs away with her tent, most of her water supply and her toilet kit: “Now I was supposed to present myself to Denoon with only the vaguest notion of how I looked, and uncombed.” She arrives in Tsau severely dehydrated but triumphant: “How many women could have done this, women not supported by large male institutions or led by male guides?” She does get there, and she manages to convince them to let her stay on; after that, the seduction of Nelson is only a (brief) matter of time.

His understandable antipathy to anthropologists -- "Most of the official great names in anthropology were mediocrities. Some were creeps" -- complicates matters too. Haigney said that she and her friends, a group of young women in their 20s, had developed what they called the “Mating” litmus test, which poses the question: Would you want a relationship like the one in the novel? Those who say yes tend to be people who are after a “grand, romantic experience,” she said — or those who have had relationships with “older, intelligent, emotionally troubled men” resembling Denoon. The narrator describes herself as suffering from “scriptomania,” [p. 407] the need to get everything in her life into writing. “The point is to exclude nothing” [p. 26]. Why does she feel such a compelling urge to write everything down? What is the value of “telling everything”? 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 And, as George Steiner says, at the rows of students sniggering automatically at every mention of the Sunday supplements.Norman Rush was born and raised in the San Francisco area, and graduated from Swarthmore College in 1956. He has been an antiquarian book dealer, a college instructor, and, with his wife, Elsa, lived and worked in Africa from 1978 to 1983. His first book, Whites, a collection of stories, was published in 1986. Mating is his first novel. It was awarded the National Book Award for fiction. Suggested Reading Well, I tend to say I wrote nothing as an undergraduate. But, in fact, I sat there in most of the lectures I went to, which weren’t many, writing this novel very obsessively and extremely slowly. And knowing it was no good, and knowing I didn’t want to write a novel about a young woman at a university who wanted to write a novel, and equally knowing I didn’t know anything else, and hadto write that sort of novel . . .