Mating
Norman Rush served as regional director of the Peace Corps in Botswana from 1978 to 1983. Botswana has in turn served Norman Rush extraordinarily well as the setting for the six stories collected in Whites (1987) and in his sprawling new novel, Mating. As its narrator says midway through, “My story is turning into the map in Borges exactly the size of the country it represents.” Apparently even a relatively small, largely arid country like Botswana can yield a long, surprisingly rich fiction. Yet neither Mating nor Whites can be said to be about Botswana; they are, rather, about the “whites” who take up temporary residence there; their unsettlement—geographical, cultural, and sexual—is his real subject. Mating is this and more: a work of expansive intelligence and great daring. And surely the greatest risk Rush has chosen to take is to tell his story in a woman’s voice. It risks seeming, perhaps smugly, to know the answer to Sigmund Freud’s famous query, What do women want? Mating is a smart—and smartly written—book, but never smug. If the narrator serves as a mouthpiece, it is as a mouthpiece for the times and not, except rarely and almost incidentally, for the novel’s male author. Among Mating’s very few faults, one cannot count the author’s “doing a Denoon.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby heard in Daisy Fay’s Southern voice the sound not of music but of money and was, because Midwestern and poor, suitably entranced and enthralled. The voice of Mating’s narrator (heard previously in the story “Bruns” in Whites) is also enchanting and enthralling, differently so for her different times: ironic and self-ironizing, striving to overcome its humble origins in the same Midwest of Gatsby, Nick Carraway, and Fitzgerald himself. Sounding like the odd (and Irish) offspring of a narrative menage á trois comprising Daisy, Nick Carraway, and T. Coraghessan Boyle, she is the undisputed champion of the self-reflexive bon mot. “Kang has douceur,” she characteristically says of one Botswana town, “the still center of nowhere.” It is hard not to like, even love, a narrator who offers up chapter titles such as “Gaffe Fest” and “A Fete Worse Than Death,” and who says of another character, “He said something passé like touché”—the same character who “undressed…became very laissez-faire,” though he refrained from doing so “with the local nubility.” Hers is a voice which sends up American and British foreign service types, which compares Botswana’s capital, Gaborone, to a college town in the American Southwest (both built in the 1960’s), a voice capable of this kind of insight and irony: “You know that you’re in Africa at Victoria Falls because there is nothing anyplace to keep you from stepping off into the cataract, not a handrail, not an inch of barbed wire.” Nor is there anything to keep her from falling in love, except all that as a thoroughly modern, well-educated woman she knows about the topic: that marriage, for example, is “a form of slowed-down- wrestling” in which (and here she adopts her most academic, for- the-lecture-audience-only voice) “equilibrium or perfect mating will come when the male is convinced he is giving less than he feels is really required to maintain dependency and the woman feels she is getting more from him than her servile displays should merit.”
Late in the novel the narrator will ask the question implicit throughout: “What is to be done?” She attributes the quote to Lenin though it could more accurately be traced back to N. G. Chernyshevsky’s social reform novel, What Is To Be Done ? (1864), and from there to...
(This entire section contains 2491 words.)
Unlock this Study Guide Now
Start your 48-hour free trial and get ahead in class. Boost your grades with access to expert answers and top-tier study guides. Thousands of students are already mastering their assignments—don't miss out. Cancel anytime.
Already a member? Log in here.
the curious novel it provoked Fyodor Dostoevski to write that same year,Notes from the Underground. The linkage here is neither gratuitous nor merely academic, for not only is Mating’s narrator well read: She is also, like Chernyshevsky, interested in social reform (albeit of a different, “nihilo-liberal” kind), and more important, like Dotoevski’s Underground Man, anonymous, self-conscious, at once self-vaunting and self- deprecating, at odds with herself and her world, longing to be a participant, doomed to the role of mere observer and recorder. In sum, she is, as he is, the ultimate “paradoxicalist,” not only figuratively underground but geographically as well: under the Equator where it is not just the seasons that are reversed. “In Africa, you want more, I think,” she says, managing to be both assertive and diffident, at novel’s outset in a chapter punningly titled “Another Disappointee.” The time is the fall of 1980—spring below the Equator in the African underground; the narrator has just completed eighteen months in the bush, where she has been doing research for her dissertation in nutritional anthropology on seasonal variations in the fertility of rural populations. What her research proves is that “It wasn’t so.” Her thesis discredited, her research funds exhausted, feeling de trop in a country overpopulated with “anthropologists and anthropologists manqué like me,” desiring some civilized companionship but unwilling to return home either to mother (bigoted and prone to bigness) or to her alma mater, Stanford, she decides to stay on in Botswana, indecisive and directionless as ever: thirty-two, “robust” but not beautiful, and disarmingly honest. She explains that she will not sleep with Rhodesians, South Africans, and other right- wingers, nor with Black Africans, not because of their race but because of their culturally ingrained male chauvinism. Her lovers include Giles, a professional photographer; Martin Wade, rumored to be connected to the ANC; “Z.”, a spy and “leading-man type who was just over the line into the paterfamilias roles and hating it”; and then Denoon Nelson, by far the biggest game of them all, part obscure object of desire, part research project.
Brilliant, handsome, internationally renowned, and available (in country and about to be divorced), Denoon is Prince Charming in contemporary drag. Not royally but (like the narrator) humbly born and (again like her) made in the image of a parent (in his case the father) against whom he rebels, he is a Prince who instead of seeking Beauty (asleep these past three months in the bush and later with her three temporary lovers) must be sought by her. Differences in sex, age (fifteen years), and reputation aside, Denoon and the narrator are alike in a number of ways, not the least being that he is what she would like to be—all that as a woman and a student she has been denied. Denoon, however, proves as difficult to approach as any fairy-tale princess locked in a tower or encircled by a ring of fire; unlike the princess, Denoon is inaccessible in another way as well, as difficult to know as a postmodern text. To the people of Botswana he is Rra Puleng, “the Man as Good as Rain,” virtually a god, but he also appears as Dr. Johnson (to the narrator’s Boswell), Samson (to her Delilah), Petruchio (to her Kate), and a Pygmalionish Henry Higgins (to her and the native women’s Eliza Doolittle), with a touch of Jekyll and Hyde and fallen angel thrown in for added measure. As reformer he plays the part of Hollingsworth in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blythesdale Romance (1852), with the narrator cast as both the sexy, intellectually daunting Zenobia and mild-mannered tale- teller Miles Coverdale. No less utopian than George Ripley’s Brook Farm (on which Blithedale is modeled), the community Denoon founded eight years before (code name Sekopololo, “the key”), located at Tsau in the north-central Kalahari Desert, puts Denoon’s social theories into practice: “suigenerism” (community development according to local needs and customs) and “solar democracy,” an alternative to Third World dependency on oil as well as on capitalism and communism. Development as the Death of Villages is his most famous book and “Capitalism is strangling black Africa; socialism will bury her” his most often quoted remark. That “her” is significant, for Denoon conceives (if that is the right word) of Tsau as a secret project designed to transform, economically, politically, and intellectually, the lives of destitute women he gathers (or draws) there. In the inverted world of Tsau, only women can own property; men are dependents. In Tsau all hierarchical privileges are suspended (among the women that is); women rule (by committee), and streets are named after prominent African women (and crossways for virtues necessary to communal well-being). Denoon’s hope is that in the very near future Tsau will become a model solar democracy; there, utilizing the energy of the sun available in abundance to all Africans (but poison to white men both physiologically and economically), the women of Tsau will “choose something better than being rich”; they will choose freedom.
Life at Tsau does not turn out quite according to plan. After eight years this garden of earthly delights in the midst of an inhospitable world sours (one pun the narrator does not use), giving birth (and switching metaphors) to a number of unplanned offspring. (It is worth noting that a detail from Hieronymous Bosch’s painting The Garden of Earthly Delights adorns the book’s dust-jacket.) “The problem is to find a form of association which will defend with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone.” The words here belong to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, adopted by Denoon and copied out by the narrator—with Denoon’s permission. Apparently possessiveness—particularly of the patriarchal kind—is not the exclusive property of the capitalists Denoon despises. That is one problem, or inconsistency, at Tsau. Another derives from the fact that for all the talk of “women,” the actual women of Tsau turn out to be fairly heterogeneous, forming at least two large political-sexual classes: the Queens and the Aunts, the one nubile and rebellious, and the other maternal and supportive (of Denoon, that is). From these two departures from Denoon’s theoretical plan, two further consequences arise. One is that the women come to resent their being—or having ever been—dependent on their benefactor (specifically Denoon, more generally and allegorically men, whites, the West). The other is that the women do become just what Denoon hoped they would: powerful and independent—so much so as to make his continued presence there unnecessary, except ironically, as proof of Denoon’s theory concerning “the characterological collapse of the male in the western world, American in particular. As women get stronger and more defined, men get more silly, violent, and erratic overall.” Not surprisingly, this champion of women’s rights finds it difficult to relinquish power. “Your problem,” the narrator tells him, “is that you want to do everything, an impresario.” Again, not surprisingly though certainly inconsistently, Denoon—the patriarchal disseminator (but not inseminator)—wants both to keep Tsau a secret, his secret, and to exhibit it to the world as his creation and the proof of the viability of his seminal social theories. Caught up in an ultimate fantasy, Denoon fails to see the writing on the wall: that he has been found wanting and his days are numbered, not by God but by the women who now bar him from even attending their meetings unless formally invited.
Denoon responds to his loss of power in the expected (male) ways: first denial, then escape, going off to found a new utopia forty-five miles north. The narrator, not content to play faithful Penelope to his quixotic Odysseus, follows him into the desert, as much Sanzo Panza as would-be helpmate, sure only that her efforts will end in either liebestod or farce. Farce prevails. Neither accomplishes what he or she set out to; both make their way back to Tsau and from there to Gaborone where their saga began and where the narrator will do for another adoring would-be disciple of the Denoon cult what Denoon’s former wife Grace did for her: set up a meeting, beginning the rather involved intellectual mating game one more time. Off the amorous hook, the narrator returns to Palo Alto, making a name for herself lecturing on a still-mysterious Tsau, a heart of darkness of sorts, and pondering the mysterious phone message which seems to suggest that Denoon may be free to return to Tsau and that he wants her to return to him. “What is to be done?” she wonders. “Je viens,” she responds, with her characteristic note of ironized pretentiousness. But this word is penultimate, not final, for it is followed by a further query, “Why not?”, which may or may not be rhetorical, may or may not intentionally echo the differently accented “Why not?” at the end of Joan Didion’s grimmer version of the mating game, Play It As It Lays (1970). More than a sign of her own habitual indecisiveness, the narrator’s “Why not?” is a sign of her postmodern times in which the relations between sexes as well as systems have become hopelessly and hopefully complicated and confused. In this brave new world, what kind of mating and what kind of development are possible? So many of Denoon’s actions are, for all his good intentions, compromised by a residual paternalism about which he remains woefully ignorant. Conversely, virtually all of the narrator’s actions—and would-be actions—are marked by a corresponding and at times paralyzing self-consciousness, a fear of acting out the old female roles. As much comedy of ideas as of manners, Mating is both rich and rare, a romantic anti- romance which with a necessary change in gender and a small shift in narrative strategy, might well have ended with the words with which Dostoevski’s “editor” concludes the Underground Man’s equally elliptical narrative: “However, the ‘notes’ of this paradoxicalist don’t end here. He couldn’t resist and kept on writing. But it also seems to us that we might as well stop here.”
Bibliography
Edwards, Thomas R. “Good Intentions: Mating, by Norman Rush.” The New York Review of Books, October 10, 1991.
Jones, Libby Falk, and Sarah Webster Goodwin, eds. Feminism, Utopia, and Narrative. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990. Published too early to include Mating, but a valuable study.
Kolmerten, Carol A. Women in Utopia: The Ideology of Gender in the American Owenite Community. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1998. A tangential but relevant discussion of many of the issues raised in Mating.
Lanting, Frans. “Botswana.” National Geographic 178, no. 6 (December, 1990): 5-97. Indispensable to anyone interested in the culture and physical setting of Mating.
Leonard, John. “Culture Watch: Dream Republics.” The Nation 267, no. 6 (1998). A review of several novels, including Mating.
Lescaze, Lee. “Bookshelf: Adventures in Africa.” Wall Street Journal, September 17, 1991, p. A14. Lescaze praises Rush’s creation of character (the unnamed narrator), criticizes Mating’s thin plot.
Nozick, Robert. Anarchy, State and Utopia. New York: Basic Books, 1975. A National Book Award-winning examination of accepted beliefs about socialism and anarchy.
Rush, Norman. Whites. New York: Viking, 1986. Rush’s collection of stories about white expatriates in Africa.
