Mating

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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 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. 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.

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.... 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."

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With the usual rituals of courtship out the window, Rush faced the challenge of writing a new kind of love story. “What would the game be?” he said in the interview. “How would one set out to arrange things to a greater moral satisfaction?”

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. Like falling in love, reading “Mating” can give one the feeling of being the first to discover something. The writer Dan Piepenbring, 36, said he read “Mating” in his 20s, when he was thinking about his long-term romantic prospects. Part of its appeal, he added, was that Rush did not seem to take a cynical view of male-female relationships. In the Harvard Review, critic Robert Faggen praises the work as a "masterpiece of fine-hammered first person narrative." [4] While Faggen describes the narrator's beloved, Nelson Denoon, as "dull" and is the novel's "primary weakness," his commendation for the book focuses on the narrator herself, who "is most memorable in her quest for her own utopia of equal love of which she teases us with beautiful, fleeting moments of possibility."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.

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.” Nelson seems happy to see the narrator again although he asks her to keep their previous meeting a secret. As she begins to fit into life in the village she finds allies in some of the other women and in Nelson a man like none she has ever known. When, after a long and awkward courtship, he invites her to move into his house she accepts and their romance begins in earnest. Brilliantly written…utterly sui generis!…Rush has alerted us to the transfiguring power of passion…He deploys the narrative voice with…brio…wit and persuasiveness.” –Mirabella This novel first appeared in 1991, but still seems extraordinary, innovative, sui generis. (...) I hope I’m not making the whole thing sound like a mere display of braininess. This is a story with blood in its veins. And the narrator is the best female character created by a male author I have ever come across." - Brandon Robshaw, Independent on Sunday

Mating is narrated in the voice of a woman, a graduate student in nutritional anthropology. Why might Norman Rush have made this particular narrative choice? How convincing is his depiction of a woman’s consciousness and point of view? Why is it important that the story be told by a woman? By an anthropologist? 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?” Does the narrator make the right choice by leaving Denoon and Africa? Is she correct in thinking Denoon had suffered a nervous breakdown and become “insanely passive,” an “impostor,” after his ordeal in the desert? Or did Denoon have a genuinely mystical experience?