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On Mating
I read all of Mating by Norman Rush because I was trying to be part of the zeitgeist. This was an overcommitment to being trendy. It’s a very long book. My favorite thing about it was how the protagonist has urticaria, a condition which I think should be better known. Otherwise, I generally prefer to read very short, very earnest books with clear, unadorned writing so Mating was not an obvious fit for me. I generally disliked it. For all that it is claustrophobically inside its narrator’s head, it felt lacking in interiority to me.
I will be transparent and say that my reaction to the book was certainly influenced by the fact that Norman Rush is a man. Natalia Ginzburg writes that, “Women think a lot about themselves and they do so in a painful and feverish way that is unknown to men." It’s not that I think men can’t write women protagonists — some men do so very well like Alejandro Zambra or Julian Barnes. But this book isn’t just about a woman, it’s about *being* a woman and more narrowly, about what women want. And on that level, I found it strange and uncompelling.
Just in terms of vibe, Mating made me think most of Anna Karenina, another great novel about a woman written by a man, but Tolstoy is much warmer, much subtler, much more interested in emotion and devastation and character depth, much deeper on utopianism. He’s also more interested in morality. There’s a lot of gesturing in Mating towards geopolitical events, philosophical and economic theories, ideas of how to live well, but there are very few real ideas for a novel of ideas and even less ideology (the narrator learns from her lover to only use ideology in the pejorative sense). The book might have benefited from a split narrative in the style of Anna Karenina. I think it is notable that Rush started writing the book from the perspective of Nelson Denoon, the male love interest, before decided that men’s thoughts on courtship can only go so far, that women essentially have more feelings about love.
Of course just because I don’t relate to the protagonist of Mating doesn’t make her unrealistic. I am not every woman and many women apparently do find her a convincing character. If she is tenacious in ways that startled me (“Exactly what is it I enjoy about situations like finding myself the only woman in a roomful of men trying to ignore me?”), that may be the result of my own character flaws and not of hers (that exact situation haunts my nightmares). Hilary Mantel argues that Rush just wasn’t very concerned with women’s interiority: “There is little attempt to convince us that a female psyche is looking out through her eyes, and scant sense of a female body attached to her fretful self-perceptions. Like Nelson, she is the vehicle for the author’s thoughts, his grumbles, his private worries and public concerns.”
To overestimate the uniformity of women’s interiority is to fall into the trap of “women’s fiction,” into the trap that Rush’s own heroine worries about. She conceals her headaches, her jealousy, her insecurities for fear of seeming like a stereotype, critically assesses her own sexual attractiveness (“I’m robust, shall we say, but my waist is good”) tries essentially to be a cool girl. It’s less that I think that Rush has fatally misunderstood women and more that I think he has applied a kind of anthropological gaze to the problem of womanhood as a whole and come up with his own solutions for it. The narrator herself reflects that “because of the history of crushing and molding of women, men have no idea what women are or what they might be if they were left alone."
It is not an accident that Mating is centered around a (lapsed) anthropologist. Although she basically disavows anthropology, the book follows the general structure of an ethnography. The narrator goes to Botswana, learns the customs and language, lives in an experimental community, reflects a lot on her romantic relationship, on her relationship to Africa and its people. She comes to the conclusion, framed as heretical, that she is really the one being gazed at and not the one gazing. But this notion has also been incorporated into contemporary anthropology which is both more reflexive and more relational than its traditional form. It does not solve the problem noted above: namely that because of the history of oppression, it is impossible to understand what an oppressed people might be if they were left alone. The fundamental twist of the novel to me is that although the narrator believes she is the pursuer, follows her potential lover, Denoon, across the Kalamari Desert tries to live in the matriarchal community he has set up as one of the only “mated” women, and strives for gender equality in her relationship, he is really the anthropologist. He is the one setting the rules of the community, of the relationship, of the book. When their relationship starts to fray, she spirals into the kind of woman she despises (emotional, hysterical, desperate), and then eventually leaves.
Is it significant that this psychodrama plays out in Africa? Rush worked for the Peace Corps in Botswana and his writing is almost all set there. In a negative review of one of V.S. Naipaul’s works, Rush calls it derogatorily “the latest of his exercises in forensic tourism in the third world.” Rush himself published Mating, his first novel, at the age of 58. His first failed novel was about an unnamed South American dictatorship and a vehicle for his philosophy of nonviolence (according to the Paris Review interview also linked above). His first major literary success, a short story published in The New Yorker, was also about Botswana and centered around a young anthropologist who would go on to become the protagonist of Mating. Clearly Rush’s literary imagination was awoken by Africa and by some kind of encounter with the other. His protagonists only exist refracted through this gaze, the deformed structure of postcolonialism. When the narrator of Mating returns to California at the end of the book, she suffers. Her life is constrained. She hungers less, experiences less freedom, less possibility, less utopianism.
The exact nature of this potential is one of the endless discussion points of the novel. Early on, when the narrator first meets Denoon, he is engaged in a public political debate, written out in the format of a script. When he suggests that neither capitalism nor socialism (but a third thing) is the path forward, he is challenged by a Botswana socialist, Isaac Mbaake (The Point calls him a “sneering young Marxist”), who answers, “Ehé, so now we just perish whilst makoha dispute about which way we must live.” In the Paris Review’s series of “Mating book club” essays, all written by white male authors except for one by Miranda Popkey, the debate scene is described by Joshua Cohen as a performance. “A woman remaining still and silently attentive while the men act out: perhaps the best definition of anthropology is “theater”.”
Denoon’s objections to socialism rest on critiques of bureaucracy and the problem of trade with capitalist countries. Mbaake accuses him of eurocentrism, of ignoring Africa’s precolonial histories, of the fundamental anthropological mistake of assuming that colonized people are simply waiting to progress into western liberalism. In response, Denoon digresses into some vision of ecological development. Watching from the sidelines, the narrator finds the experience strangely gratifying. “Is it erotic or not to be in the ambience of someone who offhandedly confutes the two systems that are dividing the world, is fairly convincing about it, and has in reserve something entirely his own and superior?”
Although Mating is ostensibly about a romantic relationship and its foibles, it’s also about the libidinal aspects of being a western intellectual in Africa. The psychosexual core of the book is intimately linked to the perceived freedom, underdevelopment, and magic of Botswana. The narrator is obsessed with local cultural attitudes towards nudity, with the chauvinism of Black African men, and her own relative prudishness. She gets closer to nature and is able to fuck more freely and with fewer bourgeois hangups. It’s less that Botswana is a backdrop for the plot of Mating and more that it provides an erotic foundation to the central romance. What has been described as the couple’s quest for pure “intellectual love” all begins with Denoon’s debate, his grand theoretical gestures, his lofty ideas for the future of Botswana, the characters’ shared background in anthropology. Denoon thinks he has invented Africa, Rush thinks he has invented women.
I understand that this book is intended to be a clever parody, a comedy about sex and white saviors and arrogance and utopianism, that Rush is leaning into the impossibility of ever grasping at the core of any of these problems. I just don’t think the book successfully functions that way or has been received that way. The only notable review I could find paying much attention to the book’s setting was published in Africa Today, an academic journal, and suggests damningly that “It might have been better, as some authors do, to have simply created a mythical African nation for Rush to place his imaginary utopia in.” Reviews at the time of its publication and in the 30 years since have largely focused on its relationship politics and elided its relationship to Africa. But the two are inextricable. I was vaguely sympathetic to the idea that "intellectual love is a particular hazard for educated women”, although I think the extreme angst around that particular, not very uncommon problem is tiresome. But the narrator escalates her angst in starkly Hegelian terms to wonder, “why even in the most enlightened and beautifully launched unions are we afraid we hear the master-slave relationship moving its slow thighs somewhere in the vicinity?”
It is hard reading this not to think of Fanon, who draws extensively upon Hegelian dialectics in Black Skin, White Masks. To Fanon, the fundamental acknowledgement of subjectivity inherent in Hegel’s idea of the master-slave relationship is lacking from colonial structures. “For Hegel, there is reciprocity;” he writes, “here the master laughs at the consciousness of the slave.” In the “Forward” to the 1986 edition, Homi K. Bhabha sums up Fanon’s theory, writing: “It is this flash of “recognition” — in its Hegelian sense with its transcendental, sublative spirit — that fails to ignite in the colonial relation where there is only narcissistic indifference.” Ultimately, I don’t think Rush has transcended this relationship or achieved recognition any more than his male lead does.
I’d love to see more critical writing about Mating and especially about its relationship to colonialism if anyone has recommendations. In the meantime, I will continue to pray for a Divorcing renaissance, another, very good book about a relationship, about being intellectual, being abject, about the history and future of the world.
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