Wednesday, October 02, 2013 07:00 PM
Awards
Review-A-Day
"...Rush's fiction is sharply attuned to the psychological and economic world of expatriates...people who reside for a long time, sometimes a lifetime, without planning to settle, native foreigners: there are not so many stories about their lives. There are certainly none better than Rush's work." Tim Burke, The National Book Critics Circle (read the entire National Book Critics Circle review)
Synopses & Reviews
The narrator of this splendidly expansive novel of high intellect and grand passion is an American anthropologist at loose ends in the South African republic of Botswana. She has a noble and exacting mind, a good waist, and a busted thesis project. She also has a yen for Nelson Denoon, a charismatic intellectual who is rumored to have founded a secretive and unorthodox utopian society in a remote corner of the Kalahari — one in which he is virtually the only man. What ensues is both a quest and an exuberant comedy of manners, a book that explores the deepest canyons of eros even as it asks large questions about the good society, the geopolitics of poverty, and the baffling mystery of what men and women really want.
Review:
"A complex and moving love story...breathtaking in its cunningly intertwined intellectual sweep and brio." Chicago Tribune
Review:
"[G]abby and relentlessly high-minded lovers turn Rush's first novel into a meeting of true minds with too long an agenda....In essence a love story, an unusual and credible one...but the nonstop clever talk eventually provokes irritation rather than sympathy. A flawed novel of too many ideas, many good, but collectively too much." Kirkus Reviews
Review:
"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
Review:
"A dazzling original....In the pyrotechnics that erupt on the page, in its fecundity of ideas, Mating has much in common with the writing of Garcia Marquez, Vargas Llosa, and John Fowles....This is undeniably a big book....Rush has taken on a lot — and made it work." The Philadelphia Inquirer
Review:
"If anything, the biggest problem with Mating is that its two central figures are too smart for their own good. They're so politically correct and intellectually rendered that you might find them to be more sets of ideas than characters. But it is precisely there...that Mating comes into its own as a scathing commentary on the many 'isms' it traffics in — feminism most of all." The Nation
Review:
"[A] marvelous novel, one in which a resolutely independent voice claims new imaginative territory....Even in its narrative excess, its cheerful willingness to say too much in order to say as much as one can, the voice of Rush's narrator is immediate, instructive, and endearing in ways that may encourage comparison to Walt Whitman's or Huck Finn's. In his first novel Norman Rush commanded my attention as few other contemporary writers do." The New York Review of Books
Review:
"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." Library Journal
Synopsis:
US
Synopsis:
Set in the African republic of Botswana--the locale of his acclaimed short story collection, Whites--Norman Rush's novel simultaneously explores the highest of intellectual high grounds and the most tortuous ravines of the erotic. tackles the geopolitics of poverty and the mystery of what men and women really want.
About the Author
Norman Rush was raised in Oakland, California, and graduated from Swarthmore College in 1956. He has been an antiquarian book dealer, a college instructor, and, with his wife Elsa, he lived and worked in Africa from 1978 to 1983. They now reside in Rockland County, New York. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Best American Short Stories. Whites, a collection of stories, was published in 1986, and his first novel, Mating, the recipient of the National Book Award, was published in 1991. His most recent novel is Mortals.
