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 social scientist who has founded an experimental matriarchal village in the Kalahari desert. The best rendering of erotic politics…since D.H. Lawrence…The voice of Rush’s narrator is immediate, instructive and endearing.” — The New York Review of Books A novel of real, original ideas about feminism, love, politics, race and anthropology... This is a story with blood in its veins. And the narrator is the best female character created by a male author I have ever come across 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. Just turning thirty-two when the novel begins, she finds she has an: "exploded thesis on her hands" -- the work she was doing has run into a complete dead end -- and no good reason not return to the US.

Kakutani, Michiko (September 16, 2013). "Gazing Into Their Past Through Their Bellybuttons". The New York Times . Retrieved April 10, 2021.

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Does the narrator make the right choice by leaving Denoon and Africa? Is she correct in thinking Denoon had suffered a nervous breakdown and become "insanely passive," an "impostor," after his ordeal in the desert? Or did Denoon have a genuinely mystical experience? 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. A dryly comic love story about grown-up people who take the life of the mind seriously and know they sometimes sound silly… Mating is state-of-the-art artifice.” –Newsweek To me, there’s no pessimism in it,” said Piepenbring, who coordinated The Paris Review’s “Mating” book club in 2015, when he worked at the magazine. “That was exactly the kind of relationship I wanted to be in.” My story is turning into the map in Borges exactly the size of the country it represents, but I feel I should probably say everything.

For a novelist, Rush has an unusual fascination with history, power struggles and left-wing ideology; he once remarked to Granta that “Spanish anarchism,” eradicated by Franco, was “the best lost cause.” As a reader, he is drawn to long novels in which ideas are deeply embedded: Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Conrad’s The Secret Agent, Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. In interviews, he comes across as a peculiar hybrid: old-school socialist intellectual circa 1914; bearded radical archivist; hyper-articulate literary critic; and voracious autodidact. “Too much reading and drinking, and too much perfectionism”—that’s how Rush defined his younger self to the Paris Review. It was me and a group of true strangers talking about books we liked,” said Champagne, 35, who lives in the New York City borough of Queens and works at a startup. A woman recommended the novel without giving anyone in the chat room much to go on. “She was just straight up like, ‘This is the best book I’ve ever read,’” Champagne recalled. The Virginia Quarterly Review mentions the first-person narrator's "emotional and intellectual entanglement" with her beloved, but concludes with the general, positive statement that "The context of their encounter and of the ensuing relationship plays a significant role in their experience, and is forcefully depicted in the sophisticated, thought-provoking novel." [9]Rush said the gender of his narrator did not invite much criticism at the time, to his knowledge; he remembered only one “protest movement” among book clubs in Canada, which, he said, had objected to his appropriation of a female interiority. Tsau is entered through an archway on a road that continues up a koppie, or stone hill, with a community of two hundred thatched homesteads spread around the slope. A small airstrip affords a place for a mail plane to land every two weeks. A striking feature of Tsau is the presence everywhere of glinting glass ornaments and mirrors. The inhabitants are mostly destitute women, two-thirds of them past childbearing age, about 450 people all told, including forty children and no more than fifty male relatives. The charter women own the property, which is passed down to female relatives and other women. Denoon lives on the hilltop in a concrete octagon. Like the women, he has lived with no mate; for that reason, his previous acquaintance with the narrator must not be disclosed, as it would suggest he was bringing in a companion denied the others. A delegation agrees to the narrator’s temporary residence, and after she has proven herself, she eventually moves in with Denoon.

But I’ll tell you, her patience with my arcane fiction was part of a greater patience, over a sort of battle we waged for years. Some couples don’t ask much of one another after they’ve worked out the fundamentals of jobs and children. Some live separate intellectual and cultural lives, and survive, but the most intense, most fulfilling marriages need, I think, to struggle toward some kind of ideological convergence. I was a sectarian leftist when we met. Radicalism was essential to my self-definition. So there had to be a long period of argument and discussion before I developed, let’s say, a less immanentist view of social change. Also—and this is relevant to Mortals—I was sort of a stage atheist when we first got together. I just couldn’t believe religion was still happening. She had a much more humane view of the whole business. In Africa, you want more, I think.” With that laconic affirmation begins one of the strangest and most sublime American novels of the last half-century. The protracted monologue of a 32-year-old Stanford University anthropologist who is adrift and loveless in Botswana at the dawn of the Reagan era, Mating was published by Knopf in 1991 and went on to win the National Book Award for fiction. John Updike, writing in the New Yorker, hailed it as “rather aggressively brilliant.” It was Norman Rush’s first novel. He was 58 when it appeared.Brilliantly written... utterly sui generis... Rush has alerted us to the transfiguring power of passion Haigney said that she and her friends, a group of young women in their 20s, had developed what they called the “Mating” litmus test, which poses the question: Would you want a relationship like the one in the novel? Those who say yes tend to be people who are after a “grand, romantic experience,” she said — or those who have had relationships with “older, intelligent, emotionally troubled men” resembling Denoon. There is an intriguing psychological component, where questions arise as to the reason Nelson wants to remain in Tsau. This part gets into philosophy, such as that of the Tao Te Ching, and transformations caused by near-death experiences. Is the change real or fabricated? Dizzyingly readable... has that feeling, rare and unforgettable in contemporary fiction, of everything being at stake - ethically, emotionally and imaginatively... The best novel published this year, and doubtless for some to come All of this is presented in an allusively freewheeling first-person narrative that provides exhilarating evidence of an impressive intelligence at work and play. Readers receive a palpable sense of having their education sternly tested -- and expanded -- by Mr. Rush's novel. Geography, history, political science, economics, literature, biology, popular culture and utter trivia -- the narrator and her beloved Denoon hash everything out, and in doing so are encyclopedic in the extreme, segueing from bats to Boers to Borges to Botswana. (...) 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. And few books evoke so eloquently that state of love at its apogee" - Jim Shepard, The New York Times Book Review

In the Harvard Review, critic Robert Faggen praises the work as a "masterpiece of fine-hammered first person narrative." [4] 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." That would be comically overstating it. I was active in the pacifist movement—demonstrations, marches, the usual. I was for years on the boards of the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors and the War Resisters League, and was active in CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality.

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In the interview, Rush again credited the influence of his wife, who sat just out of frame. “Realizing at least some of the imperatives toward equality and fairness in a relationship was something that was imposed itself on me as someone living with a really unusually strong and gifted woman,” he said. 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. So, it's 1980 and we're in Gaborone, capital city Botswana, where the unnamed narrator mulls over the many causes why Africa has disappointed her. Norman Rush obviously had his own good reasons for not giving his storyteller a name. Frequently, when writing a review, I'll provide an unnamed narrator with a name but I will respect Mr. Rush and refrain here; rather, I'll simply refer to the narrator as Nar. Oh, Nar, you're such a sweetie. Love ya honey. To imbibe the full impact of her voice and character, not only did I read the novel but I also listened to the audio book expertly narrated by Lauren Fortgang who captured the confident, saucy mindset and speech of brainy Nar.