Mating

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Our conversation took place over the course of five days in the summer of 1998 in the garden of her house in the south of France. We talked over champagne, by the side of a swimming pool rather like the one in her short story “A Lamia in the Cévennes.” As the hot day cooled into evening, our conversations had the feeling of relaxation on both sides. Dame Antonia spent the days working on The Biographer’s Tale, and I submitted to the rigor of cycling in solitude up the ferocious mountains that surround her house. One day, we took a day off and drove to Nimes, that beautiful Roman city: Dame Antonia’s pleasures—they seemed equal—in the dazzling glass palace of the Carré d’Art, old bullfighting posters, a ravishing Matisse nude in pencil, and a superlatively delicious lunch at that great temple of the art nouveau, the Hôtel Imperator Concorde, were contagious. Both of us, I think, enjoyed the conversations, however, as a break from more arduous activities, and although the interviewer should always try to keep the conversation to the point, it was not always easy to resist a feeling of delight as Dame Antonia moved onto evolutionary theory, non-conformism, F. R. Leavis, and dozens of other topics with a sure, swift movement of thought. There are few writers so rich in intellectual curiosity; none, perhaps, who so definitely regards the life of the mind as a matter of pleasure taken and given in equal measure.

I was doing a sort of retrospective analysis of how people who had come to, maybe not a consummate relationship, but a compelling relationship with a significant other,” Rush said. She goes "slightly decadent" for a while, trying out a variety of lovers, among other things, but what eventually really catches her eye is the legendary Nelson Denoon, the "acme of what you could get out of academia", able to do his own thing: Set in Botswana in the early 1980s, Mating is narrated by an American graduate student in anthropology who feels a compulsion to “tell everything,” to record everything that happens to her. The result is a sprawling, complex, confessional narrative that explores the equally extraordinary inner lives and outer circumstances of its two main characters, the narrator and the man she falls in love with, Nelson Denoon. Denoon is a scourge and star academic, the author of the classic Development as the Death of Villages, who is now working on a utopian experiment: a solar-powered, egalitarian, matriarchal village deep in the Kalahari. When the narrator sets off alone across the desert to find Denoon and his highly secretive project in Tsau, she enters a world unlike any she has experienced before and finds a man more complicated and more intellectually challenging than any she has ever known. And even funnier, that blog referenced a blog by Rachel Donadio, in which she quotes Norman Rush from "Mating" regarding literary deal-breakers:

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?” Rush and his wife worked as co-workers for the Peace Corps in Botswana from 1978 to 1983, w 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. There’s a very strong picture in your second novel, The Game, of childhood creativity, but I have the feeling that there’s an element of the smokescreen to it. It’s quite an accurate portrait of what the Brontës got up to, isn’t it?

Knopf editor for Mating, Ann Close, commends Rush's "facility in conveying the voice and sensibility of his amusingly self-absorbed narrator, a feminist anthropologist whose pursuit of a famous social scientist is a timely riff on a perennial theme, What do women want?" [5] She criticizes the book for having "too much detailed sociology," but "in the main readers will be captivated by the narrator's quirky, obsessive voice and the situation she describes: a game of amorous relationships complicated by feminist doctrine and an exotic locale." Gates, David (21 October 1991). "The Novelist as Ventriloquist". Newsweek.com . Retrieved 22 February 2016. Although Nelson and the narrator are highly intellectual and unusual people they suffer the same insecurities and fear of intimacy faced by any couple. Their love grows only to be sorely tested as tensions in Tsau grow from an internal assault by a small group of residents opposed to Nelson's continued role in the village. The narrator who has always feared giving up her independence for the approval of a man becomes more obsessed with her yearning for a permanent place in Nelson's life. He in turn becomes more worried and attached to the outcome of his work, the village of Tsau. When a series of events forces Nelson out into the desert in an attempt to save Tsau he is lost for days and almost dies. To the narrator's enormous relief he is returned alive but she soon finds he is no longer the passionate, argumentative man she fell in love with. Nelson had a metaphysical experience during his ordeal in the desert and is now in an unchanging state of bliss and acceptance. Nothing seems to matter to him one way or the other including his relationship with the narrator.But he's elusive, difficult to find and approach -- and then, she realizes, likely to be difficult to hook. Argument - "We argued about everything, but a lot of it devolved into arguments about his basic philosophical anthropology. His assumptions were too romantic for me." Such a harsh judgement, Nar! After all, you have done zero to help others in any substantial way, whereas Denoon established the self-sustaining community you are residing at, a community that would continue to thrive even if you didn't trek across the Kalahari. And drawing Nelson into debates on anthropology just might be considered baiting since you told him your area of specialty wasn't anthropology but ornithology. 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. Exhilarating…vigorous and luminous…Few books evoke the state of love at its apogee.” –The New York Times Book Review Writer Lauren Oyler said she read it on the recommendation of critic Christian Lorentzen, who gave her a beat-up copy a few years ago. Other recent converts include Blair Beusman, a social media editor at The New Yorker, and Sophie Haigney, the web editor at The Paris Review and a freelance writer, who said she counted the book among those like Shirley Hazzard’s “Transit of Venus” or Nancy Lemann’s “Lives of the Saints,” which are part of a “network of recommendations and rediscovery” online and in group texts.