Mating
by Norman Rush
Summary
The narrator, never named, is a thirty two year old American anthropology graduate student in Botswana whose doctoral thesis has just quietly died, and she is the show: the most compulsively articulate voice in modern American fiction, self aware to the point of comedy, honest to the point of self incrimination, narrating her own romantic campaign in the vocabulary of a research program.
Her target is Nelson Denoon, a celebrity development theorist who has founded Tsau, a semi secret experimental village in the Kalahari: solar powered, matriarchal by charter, owned and run by displaced women, with men admitted on sufferance. Getting there uninvited requires her to cross a stretch of desert alone with two donkeys, a journey the book renders in enough detail to double as a survival manual, and her arrival begins the real subject: not the utopia, though Tsau is built with wonderful thoroughness, but the courtship. What would it mean, she wants to know, for a man and a woman of equal intelligence to construct love deliberately, as a project, with the power accounted for? The middle of the novel is that experiment running beautifully, an intellectual romance conducted in nicknames, debates and shared administration, and the last movement is the experiment meeting its variables: a rival, a crisis in the village, and the discovery of what each of them will trade for the other.
Around four hundred and eighty pages, dense with vocabulary and completely absorbing.
Best for readers who want the smartest love story in American fiction, and are happy to keep a dictionary within reach while falling for the voice.
Historical Context & Significance
Mating won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1991, a first novel Norman Rush published in his fifties. He and his wife Elsa had spent five years as co directors of the Peace Corps in Botswana, and the novel's texture, expatriate aid culture, village politics, the Kalahari itself, is inventory from that tour.
The New York Times' 2006 survey of writers recorded multiple votes for it among the best American novels of the previous twenty five years, and its reputation has kept compounding, a book pressed on friends with unusual fervour; the narrator's coinages and the couple's private idiom have made it a cult object in the exact sense, a novel people quote to identify each other.
Rush has published slowly since, Mortals and Subtle Bodies extending the expatriate canvas, and criticism of the book's American lens on Botswana has been part of its conversation from the start. The voice has outargued every objection.