Mating: A Novel (Vintage International)

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Being in America,” she reflects, “is like being stabbed to death with a butter knife by a weakling.” She drops out of Stanford but lingers in the “academic demimonde,” working for a marginal scholarly publisher. Sought after in Palo Alto’s intellectual/activist milieu, where interest in Denoon’s Botswana experiment runs high, she is invited to give talks, the main themes of which are mostly “siphoned from Nelson.” First: “What is becoming sovereign in the world is not the people but the limited liability corporation, that particular invention: that’s what’s concentrating sovereign power to rape the world and overenrich the top minions who run these entities.” Second: “The destruction of nature accompanying the ascent to absolute power of the corporate system.” She adds her “own emendation, a less pessimistic one”—the “jagged and belated but definite rise of women into positions of political authority.” These dialogues are well-received: “They love me for it.” that they could give up their American citizenship and stay on in Tsau permanently, the narrator obviously experiences uncertainty. Real difficulties for them arise with the manipulations of Hector Raboupi, a troublemaker who runs a string of male prostitutes, the “night men,” who offer themselves to the women. When Hector mysteriously disappears, his woman, Dorcas, raises a great row, accusing Denoon of having done away with him. In the middle of this, Denoon—against the rules—appropriates one of Tsau’s two horses and heads north on a quixotic mission to found a sister colony. He is brought in after two weeks, near death from a fall from his horse. His recovery is uneventful, but his passivity alarms the narrator, who takes him to Gabarone to see a psychiatrist. For a novelist, Rush has an unusual fascination with history, power struggles and left-wing ideology; he once remarked to Granta that “Spanish anarchism,” eradicated by Franco, was “the best lost cause.” As a reader, he is drawn to long novels in which ideas are deeply embedded: Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Conrad’s The Secret Agent, Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. In interviews, he comes across as a peculiar hybrid: old-school socialist intellectual circa 1914; bearded radical archivist; hyper-articulate literary critic; and voracious autodidact. “Too much reading and drinking, and too much perfectionism”—that’s how Rush defined his younger self to the Paris Review. There were a couple of cases, I won’t say which, where she said that examples of feminine behavior were not truthful,” Rush said. “I fought her on a couple of them, and it turns out that she was right.” Just turning thirty-two when the novel begins, she finds she has an: "exploded thesis on her hands" -- the work she was doing has run into a complete dead end -- and no good reason not return to the US.

An extremely sophisticated dramatic monologue... a serious romance refracted comically through the mind of a startlingly individual narrator... Rush has ingenuity to burn Young women’s affinity with “Mating” might also have to do with Rush’s female narrator, through whom he gives voice to his thoughts on love, sex, feminism, the infrastructure of Denoon’s experimental all-woman society and just about every other topic under the sun. In 2003, Rush published an even longer novel set in Botswana, Mortals, but the wizardry was gone. Mating’s intimate first-person narration was jettisoned in favor of a leaden third-person account of Ray Finch, a CIA agent and Milton specialist, who has a tempestuous relationship with his wife. The narrator of Mating makes a brief appearance and is finally named: Karen Ann Hoyt. Her future, and Tsau’s fate, are revealed.More recent mention of Mating appeared in relation to Rush's more recent books. John Updike, reviewing Rush's 2003 novel, Mortals, in The New Yorker said "There was much of this claustral pillow talk—self-consciousness squared—in Rush’s previous, prize-winning novel, Mating, but there the point of view was that of the nameless female protagonist, a thirty-two-year-old anthropologist engaged in a courtship pursuit of an older, married utopian activist, and this male reader, through whatever kink in his gendered nature, was comfortable with their orgies of talk." [10] Updike preferred the female narrator in Mating, over the male protagonist in Mortals. Ideas about heterosexuality have changed considerably in the more than three decades since “Mating” was published. While most Americans still identify as heterosexual, writer Asa Seresin in 2019 noted the rise of “heteropessimism,” the belief that being straight is “drab and predictable,” to the point that “indictments of heterosexuality have become something of a meme.” So while love remains among the greatest subjects for fiction writers, heterosexual love is, well, perhaps a bit passé — particularly the notion that a woman might devote so much energy to landing a man. In “Mating,” the narrator sets off on a harrowing journey across the desert to get hers. In an interview with Norman Rush and his wife Elsa for the Paris Review, Joshua Pashman describes Rush's first novel as "Both an adventure story and a 'novel of ideas,' Mating is also a microscopic, Lawrentian examination of an embattled courtship. [11] 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.

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • Is love between equals possible? This modern classic is a delightful intellectual love story that explores the deepest canyons of romantic love even as it asks large questions about society, geopolitics, and the mystery of what men and women really want. In the interview, Rush again credited the influence of his wife, who sat just out of frame. “Realizing at least some of the imperatives toward equality and fairness in a relationship was something that was imposed itself on me as someone living with a really unusually strong and gifted woman,” he said. Shepard, Jim (22 September 1991). "The Perfect Man, the Perfect Place, and Yet. . ". New York Times . Retrieved 28 January 2016.

The writing is strong but quite relentless; the fact that the narrator is not very sympathetic -- and so often a manipulator -- makes it difficult to empathize with her -- and at a more neutral distance her story simply isn't that engaging. Whites, short stories Alfred A. Knopf, 1986, ISBN 978-0-394-54471-7 — finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction [4] 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.”