The next day she locates him in a Gaborone slum, where he is lodging with a friend before returning to Tsau. Upon arrival, her “accursed female bladder” sends her running to the outhouse. Denoon offers a blunt welcome: “Look, did you just urinate?” She has misused an eco-toilet that Denoon has just installed. “It seems,” she says, “I was the only educated human being who had never heard of the universally known fact that urea keeps feces from composting properly.” Mating shouldn't work on any level. A first person narrative about a young failing female anthropologist falling in love with an older American man who has founded an egalitarian feminist commune in the heart of Southern Africa is just too cutely exotic, too cheaply high concept to work. Norman Rush was born and raised in the San Francisco area, and graduated from Swarthmore College in 1956. He has been an antiquarian book dealer, a college instructor, and, with his wife, Elsa, lived and worked in Africa from 1978 to 1983. His first book, Whites, a collection of stories, was published in 1986. Mating is his first novel. It was awarded the National Book Award for fiction. Suggested Reading

Elsa’s involvement in Norman’s writing was a running topic in our conversations. Though she tirelessly plays down her part, it seemed natural to include her in the interview. The final revisions of the edited transcripts were, just as naturally, a three-way effort.The introduction, discussion questions, author biography, and suggested reading list that follow are designed to enhance your group’s discussion of Norman Rush’s National Book Award–winning novel Mating. Introduction Oh, yes, when it comes to a combination of intellect and good looks, Nar tells us flatly, "My preference is always for hanging out with the finalists." Among the finalists she recounts there was burly Brit photographer Giles but, alas, similar to the other men in her life, gentleman Giles turned out to possess way too many flaws. She does get there, and she manages to convince them to let her stay on; after that, the seduction of Nelson is only a (brief) matter of time.

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? Ideas about heterosexuality have changed considerably in the more than three decades since “Mating” was published. While most Americans still identify as heterosexual, writer Asa Seresin in 2019 noted the rise of “heteropessimism,” the belief that being straight is “drab and predictable,” to the point that “indictments of heterosexuality have become something of a meme.” So while love remains among the greatest subjects for fiction writers, heterosexual love is, well, perhaps a bit passé — particularly the notion that a woman might devote so much energy to landing a man. In “Mating,” the narrator sets off on a harrowing journey across the desert to get hers.Korby Lenker, a singer-songwriter, artist and writer in Nashville, Tennessee, said he was introduced to the novel through his godmother, who thought it might help him expand his vocabulary. In a review on his YouTube channel, Lenker, 46, described it as a “funny, smart love story about two people trying to discover what love between equals might look like.” Updike, John (2 June 2003). "Botswana Blues: Orgies of Talk in Africa". The New Yorker. Vol.79, no.14. pp.97–98 . Retrieved 29 February 2016. H]e went into a sort of aria asking how Tsau could fail to be terrific, since it was the pyramidon at the top of all his prior failures, so called. He gave the entire sequence of truths learned, project to project, such as controlling the scale, working in the vernacular, cutting expatriate staff to near zero, locating yourself remotely enough to avoid premature disruption, balancing collective and individual incentives, basing your political economy on women instead of men…” that they could give up their American citizenship and stay on in Tsau permanently, the narrator obviously experiences uncertainty. Real difficulties for them arise with the manipulations of Hector Raboupi, a troublemaker who runs a string of male prostitutes, the “night men,” who offer themselves to the women. When Hector mysteriously disappears, his woman, Dorcas, raises a great row, accusing Denoon of having done away with him. In the middle of this, Denoon—against the rules—appropriates one of Tsau’s two horses and heads north on a quixotic mission to found a sister colony. He is brought in after two weeks, near death from a fall from his horse. His recovery is uneventful, but his passivity alarms the narrator, who takes him to Gabarone to see a psychiatrist. After praising “Mating” as “aggressively brilliant,” Updike took Rush to task for his “aggressive modernist designs on conventional reading habits,” epitomized by his ostentatiously arcane vocabulary. (Yes, lots of brilliance and lots of aggression here.)

One attractive thing about me is that I'm never bored, because during any caesuras my personal automatic pastime of questioning my own motives is there for me." While Mating is very much a love story, exploring the shifting nuances of love with a subtlety and insight seldom encountered in American fiction, it is also a novel of great intellectual sweep that seems to comment on everything. History and politics, psychology and religion, poetry and science, economic systems and the Tao Te Ching all come within the novel’s capacious purview. And it is a book that asks, and then brilliantly explores, some profoundly important questions: how can we create a just society? What is the nature of a truly equal relationship? What is the relation between past and present, the personal and the political, and between reality and the narratives used to record and represent that reality? Questions and Topics for DiscussionTo 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.” 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