Mating (Masterplots II: American Fiction Series, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Norman Rush
- First Published: 1991
- Type of Plot: Comedy of manners
- Time of Work: The early 1980’s
- Setting: Botswana
- Principal Characters: The narrator, Nelson Denoon
- Genres: Long fiction, Comedy of manners
- Subjects: Culture, Africa or Africans, Politics, Socialism, Love or romance, Sex or sexuality, Marriage, Feminism, Economics, Anthropology or anthropologists, Sociology
- Locales: Botswana, Palo Alto, CA
The Novel
The plot of Mating is much like that of an Elizabethan tragedy. An opening section, “Guilty Repose,” reveals a narrator caught in a “caesura,” as she calls it, a period of panic in the fall of 1980 when she finds herself turning thirty-two in Botswana with a dead dissertation topic on her hands. The plot thickens in the next two sections, “The Solar Democrat” and “My Expedition,” when she meets the world-famous utopian socialist Nelson Denoon and vows to track him to the colony he has established for distressed women in the Kalahari Desert. In...
[The entire page is 2278 words long]
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