Mating

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Mating” was acclaimed in its time — it won the National Book Award — and is now in its 41st printing, having never gone out of print. So on the distaff side the object is to reduce the quantity of servile display needed to keep the pacified state between the mates in being.

For the reader of Mating, love and politics, intimacy and justice, are held in perfect equipoise; the pitfalls and possibilities of both are precisely—and thrillingly—explored to their limits. Punctuating the book are extended dialogues on socialism and a laundry list of obscure words and Latin phrases most readers confess to having to look up.

On British imperialism: “By 1898 Japan was the only Pacific country the British had failed to force the opium trade on. Power, powerless, white black man woman city farmer, lack of water underlying all attempts at societal change.

A companion thought throughout the book is What am I to do with this male author's female protagonist's documentation of her charismatic male love?

All through the 1960s and 1970s, Rush, who was born in San Francisco in 1933, had written experimental fiction with negligible success. She is “sexually alert” but crushingly lonely and despairing of finding a mate: “Not that I’m so beautiful, unless hair volume determines beauty. He’s supposed to be this brilliant man, a feminist, who is creating a Utopian, matriarchal society and giving impoverished African women agency but this model society is based on Western ideals. I quite liked the characters and probably would have enjoyed it more so, if I could have fully understood what the hell was going on.

For some, its plot points can be a tough sell: An unnamed graduate student in Botswana pursues an American anthropologist, Nelson Denoon, who is trying to form a matriarchal society in a desert village. I perhaps wouldn't go that far as this is not an intergenerational story or terribly complex but I see the parallels and am happy that I read it.It helps that I knew American anthropologists in Botswana of whom I'm reminded by the central couple. God bless Norman Rush for writing this book: a sincerely delightful, ingenious story brimming with ideas and wit and then, slowly taking shape, heart.