Light From the Caves: Paris Review Interview with Norman Rush

Long-time readers will know my feelings about author Norman Rush. This goes way back, to the earliest days of my site. Norman Rush, author of three books (one collection of short stories and two novels), has been so significant to me that I can not extricate how I think about certain things without referencing his work (primarily Mating, the novel that put him on the map). Here is an essay I wrote on Mating, which kind of puts my feelings about it into context, although re-reading that I can feel myself blithering on and on because I can’t quite grasp myself the impact his work had had on me.

Norman Rush’s Mating is like Franny and Zooey, by JD Salinger, Possession, by A.S. Byatt, or Hopeful Monsters, by Nicholas Mosley. (I go into those books in that post as well). I actually decided to move to New York after reading Franny and Zooey. Possession, to this day, makes me feel that well, perhaps I do live in a bit of a rareified atmosphere of obsession/passion/intellectual pursuit – but at least someone out there “gets it” to such a degree that if anyone wants to understand what it is like to be me, and I can’t explain it, at least I can say, “Go read Possession and pay close attention to the character of Maud. That says it far better than I can.” And Hopeful Monsters, well. I have said before: If my actual soul/spirit could put into words what I believe, and how I believe things WORK – it would have come out like Hopeful Monsters. These books are uncanny to me. There are other, perhaps, greater books, but these are the ones I take personally.

Norman Rush burst onto the scene with Mating in 1991. His author photo showed a white-bearded man, along the lines of Ernest Hemingway. It was a first novel. It won the National Book Award. It had a female first-person narrator, which did not match up at all with his author photo, making me intrigued. Also: a first novel coming out when your hair is white? That’s something. His author bio was intriguing as well. He had lived and worked in Africa with the Peace Corps for about 10 years. That was no surprise, since Mating takes place in Botswana, and it was clear he had experience as an ex-pat.

Mating exploded like a bomb in my consciousness. I happened to be falling in love with someone at the time. It was a world-shaking love affair. Well, it shook my world. Rocked the foundations. Mating didn’t help me make any decisions. But it did put into words the hugeness of what I felt was going on. The lead male character in Mating is named “Nelson Denoon” (it still gives me goosebumps), and Mitchell referred to my guy as “your Nelson Denoon”. He said, “You realize that he is your Nelson Denoon.” I said, “Oh God, no, don’t say that!” But it was true. To say that Mating is about a love affair is to completely mischaracterize the vastness of that book. Just go read my post on it. I tried to put it all into words there.

After Mating came a long long period where nothing was heard from Norman Rush. Mating ends on a bit of a cliffhanger. It ends with a French phrase, and then a question: Je viens. Why not?

I actually spent time thinking about what had happened when the narrator (unnamed) went back to Africa. Did she find Nelson? Did they work it out? It was agonizing. But beautiful. I have rarely invested in fictional characters the way I invested in those two.

I kept my ear to the ground for news of Norman Rush. I wondered what he was working on. He had to be working on something. But he was also in his 60s, maybe early 70s, I hoped he wouldn’t freakin’ die on me before letting me know what happened. Finally, another novel from Norman Rush appeared. Mortals wasn’t a sequel, although it did take place in Botswana, after the crumbling of the Berlin Wall, and told a story of a former CIA operative who was now sort of at sea with the ending of the Cold War. But the big thing was that unnamed narrator and Nelson Denoon from Mating apparently made cameo appearances. (I wrote a big post about all of this as well.) Mortals was a disappointment to me, although I have often wondered if I just couldn’t get past the fact that it wasn’t Mating, and maybe I should give it another try.

I’d read anything Norman Rush wrote.

Yes, he’s a stellar writer and inventor of stories. But, and I know how this sounds, he’s actually important to me. I take his stuff personally.

So. When I saw that he had been interviewed by The Paris Review recently, I actually got nervous.

Norman Rush makes me nervous.

What is he doing? What is he thinking? What is he working on? What will his next book be? Will I be able to bear it? How will I even deal with my own anticipation? I mean, it’s like waiting for Empire Strikes Back to be released, that’s how intense it is for me.

For those of you interested, here is the interview with Norman Rush in The Paris Review. It is one of the most in-depth things I have ever read about him, and it is also a beautiful portrait of his wife of many many years, Elsa, who was clearly an inspiration for the unnamed narrator in Mating and the character of Ilse in Mortals. (Not for nothing, but James Joyce is one of Rush’s big influences, so it’s no surprise that he would keep re-visiting the character of his wife in his books.)

I read the interview with a swoon of what almost feels like despair, but which is actually exhilaration. I love this man. I loved hearing about his early forays into writing, his obsession with the development of the American Left (I loved his comment about how everything he was interested in stopped being relevant in about 1925 – Ha!), his obsession with Socialism and all of the different factions that splintered out following the Russian Revolution, and also his fascination with his own wife, and with trying to put into words the hold she has on him. After many years of working as a rare book-seller, and writing short stories (many of which sound dreadful), he finally came upon a “voice” in one of his short stories that he thought might be interesting enough, compelling enough, to last an entire novel. This was what would become Mating.

And naturally, I am almost in agony at hearing he has another book coming out.

I feel despair. I feel exhilaration. I am a child waiting for the premiere of Empire Strikes Back.

Norman Rush. About to speak, yet again.

Once again: Here’s the interview.