So much goes on in Rush's nifty novel about true love, star-crossed anthropology and rural development in Southern Africa that we almost forget about the morning after." - John Leonard, The Nation Pashman, Joshua (Fall 2010). "Norman Rush, The Art of Fiction No. 205". The Paris Review. No.194 . Retrieved April 10, 2021. While the future of the protagonists is uncertain at the end of “Mating,” their real-life analogues know how such a relationship might play out. Rush now spends much of his time caring for his wife, who has dementia and was recently recovering from a broken hip.

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. This is the story of a cerebral, overanalyzing woman who doesn’t want the mediocre or the nearly-great and sets her eyes on the one great man that she finds. She’s an anthropology student, working in Botswana on a failed dissertation. He’s an overachieving and well-known intellectual who’s running an experimental matriarchal-utopi 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 loveeven as it asks large questions about society, geopolitics, and the mystery of what men and women really want. I would hear again that in Tsau we had everything we have a right to demand in a continent as abused and threatened as Africa: decent food and clean water, leisure, decent and variable work, self-governance, discussion groups on anything, medical care. Why is organized religion kept out of Tsau? What does Denoon believe to be the taproot of religion?Nelson's current project is entirely off the beaten path, a utopian community, populated and for the most part led by women, called Tsau. The narrator had hoped to show in her Stanford doctoral thesis that fertility among “remote dwellers” varies from season to season depending on what the gatherers can find, but she has learned that there are no gatherers in Botswana; people everywhere are eating canned food and breakfast cereal or handouts from the World Food Program. As a result, she retreats to the capital, Gabarone, where she socializes with the local expatriates and works her way through affairs with several men who offer her nothing permanently satisfying. From the last of these, Z, a spy for the British High Commission, she learns of Sekopololo (“The Key”), a project to create an entire new village in the north-central Kalahari Desert. What especially excites her about this project is that it is run by Nelson Denoon, a legendary social scientist. 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?

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"? 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…”: Rush was born in San Francisco and raised in Oakland, the son of Roger and Leslie (Chesse) Rush. He graduated from Swarthmore College in 1956. [3] During the Korean War he was sentenced to two years incarceration for his status as a conscientious objector to the war, but was released on parole after nine months. 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, which was published in 1978. Korby Lenker, a singer-songwriter, artist and writer in Nashville, Tennessee, said he was introduced to the novel through his godmother, who thought it might help him expand his vocabulary. In a review on his YouTube channel, Lenker, 46, described it as a “funny, smart love story about two people trying to discover what love between equals might look like.” What is the Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years?". www.newyorktimes.com . Retrieved 2 March 2016.Idiosyncrasies such as sprinkling French and Latin terms -- id est, enfin, jeu -- in her writing tend to be somewhat grating (and the excuse that both she and Nelson had studied Latin -- "We both loved Latin" -- don't really make it more agreeable). 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.”