The Books: “Mating” (Norman Rush)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction

Mating: A Novel by Norman Rush

I don’t even know where to start. I’m scared. Someone hold me. This is one of my most important books. Definitely a desert island book. I’ve written quite a bit about it before and I’ve been re-reading old posts, trying to gear up for what I want to say about this magnificent novel. Funnily enough, except for critics (oh, and also Mitchell), I don’t know anyone else who loves this book. As a matter of fact, most people seem annoyed by it (at least people out in the real world). People I love and respect couldn’t get past certain aspects of the novel: the narrator’s voice, her vocabulary … and let’s face it: It’s a first-person narration. If you can’t stand the voice, you probably won’t get very far. It’s like people who are somehow irritated by Holden Caulfield’s voice. Not the story or the plot – but his VOICE. The whole BOOK is his voice … so if that is what irritates you, it would be difficult to move forward. have experienced that with other books, but with Mating definitely not.

It’s odd to have a book that you love so much that you cannot discuss with anyone. I mean, it won the National Book Award in 1991, was critically acclaimed, but it wasn’t a book like Shipping News (excerpt here) – where you saw people reading it everywhere. So thank you, Mitchell, wherever you are, for reading it, and loving it, too. It’s one of those books that became contextual for me. There’s only a couple of those out there. Actually, speaking of Salinger, Franny and Zooey was another one. But I’ll get to that when I get to Salinger. Possession (excerpt here) was another contextual book. By “contextual” I mean: I read the books in question, and along with loving the stories and the characters and the writing – the books helped me either make decisions about my life and how I was living it, OR it helped me put into context events and situations that either haunted me, or remained unfinished. I recognized myself in the books, sure – and that’s a rare thing (I am not a particularly literary character. Meaning: I don’t come across my self in books often. But with Possession I did. And with Mating I did to such a degree that I considered writing an angry letter to Norman Rush asking him to return my journals.) Mating was even more contextual than Possession.

The main male character in the book is “Nelson Denoon”, and even that name takes on almost a magical sound to me, knowing where I was at in my life when I read it. Mitchell and I used “Nelson Denoon” as a shorthand. Shorthand for: Great guy, difficult guy, challenging guy, but the guy for you. THE guy for you. I read it during the beginning stages of falling in love with someone and my situation drove me almost as crazy as the situation in Mating drives the unnamed narrator. This isn’t no regular old courtship. There are no “dates” here. There is just a meeting of the goddamn MINDS … and for some people, that is a crazy-making situation (and yeah, I’m talking about myself. That was why my “encounter” with the doppelganger was so ultimately unbalancing for me. In a bad way. It’s great to get unbalanced if things, as they say, “work out in the end” – but to be that unbalanced and to have it not work out … Well, first of all, that’s my life story. But second of all, I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. I wouldn’t wish it on myself. Ever again.)

The narrator in Mating is weird, in the very same way that I am weird. She is vulnerable, yet she uses her intellect to intimidate, in order to not get hurt. She has an inferiority complex about her worth, especially in academia. She is aware that things do not come easily to her, and she wonders if that is because she just doesn’t have the genius to make it in her chosen field (anthropology). Her vocabulary throughout the book is, indeed, daunting – even obnoxious – but I’ve read interviews with Rush where he explained his reasoning for it, and it makes total sense. She uses language as a fortress, it is how she knows she can “win”. It’s not a particularly sympathetic trait, but then – she’s not all that sympathetic. Perhaps that is why I loved her so much. We have nothing in common, at least on the outside – but intellectually, we are identical twins. She is obsessively analytical, her desire to get to the bottom of everything sinks her, and also sets her on the path of the book. Her desire to know things other people do not know – and not just in anthropology, but higher up – as in: how the world works, and who is pulling the strings and what EXACTLY is going on here – is akin to my total immersion in foreign affairs and my whole index card project, which I’m too embarrassed to even write about and I think it’s about time I threw them all away. It represents YEARS of work, but unless the CIA is interested in recruiting me (and seriously. I’m available for hire), I honestly don’t know what those boxes and boxes of index cards really provide me. It was a way for me to organize information, to try to create a big picture, to catalog – one of my great obsessions.

The narrator in Mating is a great cataloger. First, as an anthropologist, of course … but then, once she falls in love – she takes that cataloging impulse to an almost pathological level. He (Nelson Denoon) is a great anthropological study, for her – far more enthralling to her than her dissertation, because she’s in love with him. She keeps notes. She always has one eye on the larger picture and how they fit into it. Nelson Denoon is a man who appears to know things. Not just about his own life and his own project, but about how the world works. His ideas may be faulty, flawed – but he is actually walking the walk, and trying to bring his ideas into reality. Not too many people do that. Dictators do that. Nelson Denoon is a kind of dictator. The narrator is an exhausting companion. I get that. I suppose I am over-identifying because I have often been described – well, not as exhausting – but the general complaint from men is that I am “too much”, which is just another word for exhausting. The men usually say it as a compliment, they do not insult me, they love my too-much-ness – it’s just that they choose not to live side by side with it. So where does that leave me? I am unable to not be “too much”. (I am also unable to talk about Mating without talking about myself). I’m a big book-reader (as should be obvious) but I have very few books that I identify with at this level. Hopeful Monsters is another one – I am incapable of talking about that book without also talking about myself. I mean, I talk about other things as well – but the context of the whole book is either how it expresses for me how I see things or how it expresses how things are for me. Interesting that those are two books written by males.

Mating is a first-person narration – written by a male – and the voice is a female voice. I found it utterly convincing. But then: it is important to remember how weird I am, how unconventional (I don’t mean that in a pretentious self-conscious way – I am being quite literal), how “too-much”, how every time there’s some jagoff quiz about “what women are like” I come up with a score that is off-the-charts “Are you sure you’re really a woman?” There’s some web gadget you can run your blog through and it guesses if it was written by a man or a woman. I did it once and it came up with: “We are 100% positive that this blog was written by a male.” I am not one of those types who say “I like men better than women” – Bigotry in its most open-faced guise. So you won’t mind if I don’t take you seriously if you talk like that, because I tend to not take bigots seriously. Thanks. But I do know that very often I relate more to men, their concerns, worries, their senses of humor, how they actually operate. Even when it’s not the most sensible or practical way to go about things. Many found the voice of Mating to be not all that convincing. Perhaps they have more engrained views of how women talk, how men talk, whatever, I have no interest in analyzing it. To me, I felt the voice was spot-ON. Not just because I identified, but because I could hear her in my own head. Again, I do not often encounter my sensibility in books. I did in Middlemarch with poor Dorothea Brooke, I did in Franny and Zooey with Franny, I did in Possession with Maud, and I do here with unnamed narrator in Mating. Cerebral. Rigid. Obsessive. Passionate. Perhaps bordering on the fanatic (like Franny, definitely). She’s monastic in her habits and lifestyle, with one overriding passion that is NOT a man, or domestic bliss. Well, poor Dorothea Brooke. But like I mentioned in my post about Middlemarch – if she had been born in the 20th century instead of the 19th she’d be getting her doctorate in medieval tapestries or something equally as obsessive and cerebral – and men would be calling her “too much” and staying far far away. She was born in the wrong century.

Let’s get back to Mating, the actual book. Mating is all about intellectual compatability. Not just lust or desire or wanting the same things out of life, or even thinking the same way about things. Compatable in the brain – “intellectual love” the narrator in Mating calls it. That may sound dry to the majority of people, but that’s the thing: I am not the majority (every quiz I ever take confirms that!!) – and her vision of “intellectual love” is something that calls to my deepest soul. I read it, amazed – amazed first of all that a man wrote in this voice – but also amazed that it was expressed so perfectly … as though lifted from my own life.

I came across this wonderful review of it on Amazon, which is kind of creepy – in that I feel like I could have written every word of it:

I took forever deciding whether I should read Mating, whether I wanted to commit my time to such a long and apparently difficult book, whether it would be worth it in the end. I thought about buying it a number of times, but couldn’t get up the courage — what if it just gathered dust on a shelf? I borrowed a copy from the library, finally, and promised myself that if I hated it (as a number of my friends had) I would abandon it quickly.

Now Mating is one of the few books I would want to have with me on a desert island. I can easily, happily say it was one of the great reading experiences of my life so far. But it’s also a book that seems tailor-made to my sensibilities, as if somebody asked me, “What would you like a big novel to contain?” and then set out to write it.

There’s a compelling narrative voice. There’s tremendous erudition, so I felt like I learned something about the world on every page. There’s a careful attention to language, and yet the language is free and full to bursting. There’s all sorts of talk about politics, the history of leftist political movements (particularly anarcho-syndicalism, my own favorite), and utopia. There’s a love story, but it’s written about without mushy romantic spewings. There’s an exotic locale. I’m a happy reader!

But you won’t like this book if you’re looking for a standard storyline and if you don’t have patience for intellectual dialogues scattered throughout the action and if you want clean and unambiguous answers to everything. You also won’t like it if you demand that first person narrators be always appealing. I found the narrator often annoying, but in the end was quite glad to have known her.

To have known her — yes, by the end you speak of the narrator and her obsession and love, Nelson Denoon, as people you have known. (Or perhaps I shouldn’t use the second-person here, since I know people who do not agree with me, who found the characters simply exasperating. So let me rephrase: I felt like I had known them.)

If you’re fairly well-read, you can test whether you’re going to find this book stunning or frustrating by playing a cross-referencing mindgame of this sort: Imagine that James Joyce finished Ulysses and was annoyed that his writing hadn’t tackled all of the problems of human civilizations. Just then, a time warp appeared, and Paulo Freire and Emma Goldman stepped out and lectured Joyce for 40 days and 40 nights. He was thrilled. He began to write and discovered that a small part of his talent had been taken over by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and another part by Don DeLillo. Ben Okri had found his way in there somewhere, too. Writing was hard with all those different voices pulling at him, but he got through, and the book he produced was Mating.

If the names above are unfamiliar to you, then ask yourself how you felt while reading it. If you made it through to this paragraph, and you’re not mad at me for inserting the above (in fact, you found it piqued your curiosity), then you’ll do just fine with Mating, and you may be deeply grateful, as I am, that Norman Rush had the courage and genius to write it.

Yes, yes, and yes. My thoughts exactly.

Mating is, on the surface, the story of a love affair. Other themes are: what to do about Africa, the problems with “development projects” and do-gooders in Africa, socialism in Africa, differences between men and women, competition between females for males (hence, the title), satirical observations about academania – and then, more specifically, an in-depth description of the world of Botswana: the diplomatic community in Gaborone, the issues with “villagization”, the issues with development, how the development community lives high on the hog in Africa – etc. It’s a BIG book, with BIG themes.

The main theme is something the author/narrator calls “intellectual love”. Rush describes a very specific kind of love, and because he did so, and took such care with it, the concept became real to me. He articulated one of my deepest longings in a way I had never before encountered. It was like his words illuminated my own needs.

My utopia is equal love, equal love between people of equal value, although value is an approximation for the word I want. Why is it so difficult? Assortative mating shows there has to be some drive in nature to bring equals together in the toils of love, so why even in the most enlightened and beautifully launched unions are we afraid we hear the master-slave relationship moving its slow thighs somewhere in the vicinity? It has to be cultural. In fact the closest thing to a religion I have is that this has to be cultural. I could do practically anything while he was asleep and not bother him. I wrote in my journal, washed dishes in slow motion if we hadn’t gotten around to them. I was emotional a lot, privately. I wanted to incorporate everything, understand everything, because time is cruel and nothing stays the same.

“I wanted to incorporate everything, understand everything, because time is cruel and nothing stays the same.”

God. Yes.

Intellectual love is not the same animal as landing a mentor, although women I’ve raised the construct with want to reduce it to that. I distrust and shun the whole mentor concept, which is just as well since I seem not to attract them. Nelson was not my mentor, ever. I gave as well as I got, with him. But there was intellectual love on my part, commencing circa that night.

Intellectual love is a particular hazard for educated women, I think. Certain conditions have to obtain. You meet someone — I would specify of the opposite sex, but this is obviously me being hyperparochial — who strikes you as having persuasive and wellfounded answers to questions on the order of Where is the world going? These are distinctly not meaning-of-life questions. One thing Denoon did convince me of is that all answers so far to the question What is the meaning of life? dissolve into ascertaining what some hypostatized superior entity wants you to be doing, id est ascertaining how, and to whom or what, you should be in an obedience relationship. The proof of this is that no one would ever say, if he or she had been convinced that life was totally random and accidental in origin and evolution, that he or she had found the meaning of life. So, fundamentally, intellectual love is for a secular mind, because if you discover someone, however smart, is — he has neglected to mention — a Thomist or in Baha’i, you think of him as a slave to something uninteresting.

What beguiles you toward intellectual love is the feeling of observing a mental searchlight lazily turning here and there and lighting up certain parts of the landscape you thought might be dubious or fraudulent but lacked the time or energy to investigate or the inner authority to dismiss tout court. The searchlight confirms you.

“The searchlight confirms you.”

I have tears in my eyes. All I can say is that is exactly what it is, and exactly what I respond to. “The searchlight confirms you.” Anything less is a total bore for me.

To me, the book has it all. It has the love story, it has the intellectual questions I find interesting, it takes on big issues, world events, socialism vs. capitalism – and it also, in parts, is laugh-out-loud funny. I find the narrator’s voice inherently funny. Even when she is at her most manic.

Another element of the book is the religious aspect, which becomes of the ultimate importance in the final third. But I wouldn’t dream of giving it away. Suffice it to say, there is a bit of a Master and Margarita (excerpt here) trick going on in the book: If the devil came to Moscow, a city that supposedly did not believe in God, how would they interpret him? In Mating, it is the confrontation with forces beyond understanding that undoes our obsessive narrator. And she’s not just obsessive, she’s rigid, she has beliefs, she has a system of beliefs … and when things occur outside of that, she hunkers down and holds onto her beliefs rather than adapt. An interesting quandary for an anthropologist. But it’s the essential question … and what I think Rush was really driving at all along through his magnificent book.

There’s more to be said, and I’m sure I’ll do more excerpts. I knew what the first one HAD to be … it comes very early on in the book, and it was when I realized, first time through, that not only was this a great read, but that it would be one of my all-time favorite books. I could just feel it.

Our unnamed narrator lives in Botswana. She was there to finish her dissertation on hunger-gatherers, but her research exploded into irrelevance, wasting years of her life. She decides to renew her Visa, to basically live there – and hang out – unattached for a year … She’s in her mid to late 20s. She immediately starts to have love affairs with unattached men in Botswana – and some of them are laugh out loud funny, because you know she CAN’T be serious about these guys! One is a vain gorgeous photographer – the other is a political activist in exile from nearby South Africa, and the last one is … well, it’s unclear … but it turns out he’s in intelligence. These are all men she might be able to be serious about … if she were in a different headspace. Nelson Denoon has not made an appearance. And while she is “dating” the photographer (who seems like a silly kind of clueless guy), he gets a gig to photograph the falls in Zimbabwe (which was still in the throes of becoming Zimbabwe at the time of the book’s timeline) – and she decides, in a mercenary way, to keep the ridiculous relationship going, at least until she gets to see Victoria Falls. “I’ll break up with him, but at least I’ll see the Falls first.”

And she has a breakdown staring at the Falls. It’s my favorite part of the book.

I am unable to read it without getting moved.

Mating is one of those books I feel proprietary about. I feel like it’s MINE. More to come, more to say.

EXCERPT FROM Mating: A Novel by Norman Rush

Well before you see water you find yourself walking through pure vapor. The roar penetrates you and you stop thinking without trying.

I took a branch of the path that led out onto the shoulder of the gorge the falls pour into. I could sit in long grass with my feet to the voice, the falls immense straight in front of me. It was excessive in every dimension. The mist and spray rise up in a column that breaks off at the top into normal clouds while you watch. This is the last waterfall I need to see, I thought. Depending on the angle of the sun, there were rainbows and fractions of rainbows above and below the falls. You resonate. The first main sensation is about physicality. The falls said something to me like You are flesh, in no uncertain terms. This phase lasted over an hour. I have never been so intent. Several times I started to get up but couldn’t. It was injunctive. Something in me was being sated and I was paralyzed until that was done.

The next phase was emotional. Something was building up in me as I went back toward the hotel and got on the path that led to overlooks directly beside and above the east cataract. My solitude was eroding, which was oddly painful. I could vaguely make out darkly dressed people here and there on the Zambia side, and there seemed to be some local African boys upstream just recreationally manhandling a huge dead tree into the rapids, which they would later run along the bank following to its plunge, incidentally intruding on me in my crise or whatever it should be called. The dark clothing I was seeing was of course raingear, which anyone sensible would be wearing. I was drenched.

You know you’re in Africa at Victorial Falls because there is nothing anyplace to keep you from stepping off into the cataract, not a handrail, not an inch of barbed wire. There are certain small trees growing out over the drop where obvious handholds on the limbs have been worn smooth by people clutching them to lean out bodily over white death. I did this myself. I leaned outward and stared down and said out loud something like Weep for me. At which point I was overcome with enormous sadness, from nowhere. I drew back into where it was safe, terrified.

I think the falls represented death for the taking, but a particularly death, one that would be quick but also make you part of something magnificent and eternal, an eternal mechanism. This was not in the same league as throwing yourself under some filthy bus. I had no idea I was that sad. I began to ask myself why, out loud. I had permission to. It was safe to talk to yourself because of the roar you were subsumed in, besides being alone. I fragmented. One sense I had was that I was going to die sometime anyway. Another was that the falls were something you could never apply the term fake or stupid to. This has to be animism, was another feeling. I was also bemused because suicide had never meant anything to me personally, except as an option it sometimes amazed me my mother had never taken, if her misery was as kosher as she made it seem. There was also an element of urgency underneath everything, an implication that the chance for this kind of death was not going to happen again and that if I passed it up I should stop complaining – which was also baseless and from nowhere because I’m not a complainer, historically. I am the Platonic idea of a good sport.

Why was I this sad? I needed to know. I was alarmed. I had no secret guilt that I was aware of, no betrayals or cruelty toward anyone. On the contrary, I have led a fairly generative life in the time I’ve had to spare from defending myself against the slings and arrows. Remorse wasn’t it. To get away from the boys and their log I had moved to a secluded rock below the brink of the falls. At this point I was weeping, which was disguised by the condensation already bathing my face. No bypasser would notice. This is not saying you could get away with outright sobbing, but in general it would not be embarrassing to be come upon in the degree of emotional dishevelment I seemed to be in.

What was it about? It was nothing sexual: I was not dealing on any level with uncleanness, say. My sex history was the essence of ordinary. So any notion that I was undergoing some naughtiness-based lustral seizure was worthless, especially since I have never been religious in the slightest. One of the better papers I had done was on lustral rites. Was something saying I should kill myself posthaste if the truth was that I was going to be mediocre? This was a thought with real pain behind it. To my wreck of a mother mediocre was a superlative – an imputation I resisted with all my might once I realized it involved me. I grew up clinging to the idea that either I was original in an unappreciated way or that I could be original – this later – by incessant striving and reading and taking simple precautions like never watching television again in my life.

There must be such a thing as situational madness, because I verged on it. I know that schizophrenics hear people murmuring when the bedsheets rustle or when the vacuum cleaner is on. The falls were coming across to me as an utterance, but in more ways than just the roar. There seemed to be certain recurrent elongated forms in the falling masses of water, an architecture that I would be able to apprehend if only I got closer. The sound and the shapes I was seeing went together and meant something, something ethical or existential and having to do with me henceforward in some way. I started to edge even closer, when the thought came to me If you had a companion you would stay where you are.

I stopped in my tracks. There was elation and desperation. Where was my companion? I had no companion, et cetera. I had no life companion, but why was that? What had I done that had made that the case, leaving me in danger? Each time I thought the word “companion” I felt pain collecting in my chest. I suddenly realized how precipitous the place I had chosen to sit and commune from was. The pain was like hot liquid, and I remember feeling hopeless because I knew it was something not amenable to vomiting. I wanted to expel it. Vomiting is my least favorite inevitable recurrent experience, but I would have been willing to drop to all fours and vomit for hours if that would access this burning material. It was no use saying mate or compadre instead of companion: the pain was the same. Also, that I genuinely deserved a companion was something included. I wish I knew how long this went on. It was under ten minutes, I think.

Who can I tell this to, was the thought that seemed to end it. I may have been into the diminuendo already, because I had gotten back from the ledge, back even from the path and into the undergrowth. It all lifted. I sat in the brush, clutching myself. I had an optical feeling that the falls were receding. Then it was really over.

I hauled myself back to the hotel feeling like a hysteric, except for the sense that I had gotten something germane, whatever it was, out of my brush with chaos.