Argument - "We argued about everything, but a lot of it devolved into arguments about his basic philosophical anthropology. His assumptions were too romantic for me." Such a harsh judgement, Nar! After all, you have done zero to help others in any substantial way, whereas Denoon established the self-sustaining community you are residing at, a community that would continue to thrive even if you didn't trek across the Kalahari. And drawing Nelson into debates on anthropology just might be considered baiting since you told him your area of specialty wasn't anthropology but ornithology.

Nelson seems happy to see the narrator again although he asks her to keep their previous meeting a secret. As she begins to fit into life in the village she finds allies in some of the other women and in Nelson a man like none she has ever known. When, after a long and awkward courtship, he invites her to move into his house she accepts and their romance begins in earnest. Pashman, Joshua (Fall 2010). "Norman Rush, The Art of Fiction No. 205". The Paris Review. No.194 . Retrieved April 10, 2021. Gates, David (21 October 1991). "The Novelist as Ventriloquist". Newsweek.com . Retrieved 22 February 2016. There’s a sense from the very beginning of your work of what you want to do. It’s not every novelist that would write a first novel about a successful novelist.Flirtatious banter ensues, in English and Setswana, and she inquires if Tsau—a closed experimental community—would accept her as a volunteer. “You tempt me,” retorts Denoon, “but I have to say no. Of course what would make you irresistible would be if you know something about cooperage. Or taxidermy, say.” “Sorry, I said.” How can Norman Rush's 1991 Mating rank among the great 20th-century novels? Let me count the ways. With all respect to Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, Isabel Archer, no modern male has imagined a female protagonist as vivid and complex as Mating's unnamed lover-anthropologist-adventurer. Few if any white novelists have written so easily about the underrepresented turf of Africa Young women’s affinity with “Mating” might also have to do with Rush’s female narrator, through whom he gives voice to his thoughts on love, sex, feminism, the infrastructure of Denoon’s experimental all-woman society and just about every other topic under the sun. Why does the narrator describe her affairs with men just prior to meeting Denoon? How do they set up or illuminate what follows? In what respects is Denoon different from, and superior to, the men who precede him?

Mating is narrated in the voice of a woman, a graduate student in nutritional anthropology. Why might Norman Rush have made this particular narrative choice? How convincing is his depiction of a woman's consciousness and point of view? Why is it important that the story be told by a woman? By an anthropologist? There were a couple of cases, I won’t say which, where she said that examples of feminine behavior were not truthful,” Rush said. “I fought her on a couple of them, and it turns out that she was right.” The best rendering of erotic politics…since D.H. Lawrence…a marvelous novel, one in which a resolutely independent voice claims new imaginative territory…The voice of Rush’s narrator is immediate, instructive and endearing.” –The New York Review of Books

More good mail days.

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. 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. Scott, Anna (8 November 2013). "Mating by Norman Rush—Review". TheGuardian.com . Retrieved 29 February 2016.

A complex and moving love story... breathtaking in its cunningly intertwined intellectual sweep and brioClosing reflection - In an interview, Norman Rush was asks why he chose to write his novel from the standpoint of a younger woman. He replied: "Hubris made me do it. I know it sounds absurd, but I wanted to create the most fully realized female character in the English language." Curiously, while I was reading, I kept thinking what the novel would have been like if he wrote it with two alternating first-person narrators, the young anthropologist and Nelson Denoon. But this is a minor quibble. I thoroughly enjoyed Mating, a novel that is, above all else, a highly inventive love story. The narrator’s politics are more conventional: “I think probably we should all be liberals.” And yet her own utopia is even more utopian than Denoon’s: “nobody lying … lie to me at your peril.” The clash of these utopias contributes to the novel’s dynamism, as well as to its enduring relevance in a period when the positions of liberals continue to face strong challenges from the left. If the narrator allows Denoon to expatiate on world-historical themes, she won’t allow him to romanticize Africa’s poor. After eight nomadic Basarwa families establish a camp on the edge of Tsau, barter arrangements ensue with the newcomers. Denoon is irked: “unequal exchange, as a general thing, disgruntled Nelson.” That is piffle to her, and she hastens to affirm the complexity of human behavior and the limits of rationalist discourse; Rush seems to be telling us that it is women who must rescue men from the schemes they’ve hatched on the precipices of rationality . She has read V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River and lives by its first six words: “The world is what it is…”: