Mating (novel)
First edition
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| Author | Norman Rush |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Alfred A. Knopf |
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Publication date
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1991 |
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Mating (1991) is a novel by American author Norman Rush. It is a first-person narrative by an unnamed American anthropology graduate student in Botswana around 1980. It focuses on her relationship with Nelson Denoon, a controversial American anthropologist who has founded an experimental matriarchal village in the Kalahari desert.
Mating won the 1991 National Book Award for Fiction.
Critical reviews of Norman Rush's first novel, Mating, have mostly been positive. New York Times critic, Jim Shepard writes, "Mr. Rush has created one of the wiser and wittier fictive meditations on the subject of mating. His novel illuminates why we yield when we don't have to. It seeks to illuminate the nature of true intimacy -- how to define it, how to know when one has achieved it." Although "[a] certain amount of rambling does take place. . . And important secondary characters in Tsau, even given the narrator's focus on Denoon and her own self-absorption, are sketchily drawn," Shepard nonetheless extols Rush's "vigorous and luminous prose." The New York Times also lists the book as having received multiple votes on their 2006 survey "What is the best work of American Fiction of the last 25 years?"
In the Harvard Review, critic Robert Faggen praises the work as a "masterpiece of fine-hammered first person narrative." 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."
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?" 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."
A book reviewer for the Library Journal, Ann Sapp explains her recommendations: "though there is plenty of action and interaction among the characters, this is largely a novel of ideas and anthropological information. The humor is at a sophisticated level, as is the vocabulary. For public library with an educated community."
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