This was an interesting book for me, because I identified on many levels with the narrator, who is 32 (check), redheaded (I pretend), and an anthropology student on a bit of hiatus from her research (I started out in ethnomusicology, which is a branch of it). So even though the author is a middle-aged man, it is interesting to see his take on what a woman of that place in life would think/do. I liked seeing a woman who wasn't trivial, was a thinker, maybe even an overthinker, which to me was spot on. There are intellectual women out there, you know.The funny thing is, and maybe Rush meant it this way, I think it is easy to tell that the love story isn't going to work out. She approaches it intentionally, almost as an experiment, because she is drawn to Nelson Denoon. I think it isn't really a physical or emotional connection as much as she falls for his brain. And she tries to make it work, but really she isn't a relationship type any more than he is. I love the crazed self-analysis about childbearing, and how that suggestion on his part in the end is what makes her leave. (Calculation on his part? I can hardly think of Nelson as clueless, although he wasn't great at picking up on social/interpersonal cues in Tsau either). The novel ends with her back in America, benefiting from her time and experience with Doonan, but seemingly relieved that she escaped the life they would have had together. You get the sense that it was an episode in her life and he might never escape it, and I felt relieved for her too!A lot of reviewers, even John Updike back in the day, took issue with his vocabulary usage, but I really liked it. I found this to be true to the elevated thought required of professionals in certain fields, who are surrounded by an expectation of constant noetic expression."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." "It would be about as hard to read me as being in the kitchen and noticing when the compressor went on in the refrigerator." "I had to realize that the male idea of successful love is to get a woman into a state of secure dependency which the male can renew by a touch or pat or gesture now and then while he reserves his major attention for his work in the world.... 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.""The main effort of arranging your life should be to progressively reduce the amount of time required to decently maintain yourself so that you can have all the time you want for reading.""Keeping permanent intimate comedy going is more important than any other thing.""I was emotional a lot, privately. I wanted to incorporate everything, understand everything, because time is cruel and nothing stays the same.""Religion might originate through thunder and lightning and wondering what the stars are, but once it gets rolling it's about self-hatred."
This book was really engrossing, at the same time it basically presented me with a vocabulary lesson unlike no other. Literally--I finally just started keeping a list of the words I didn't know, because cracking the dictionary every time got to be chore. It became an exercise in picking up meaning from context. And *still* it was an utterly fabulous read. Imagine my amusement when right after revisiting Mating after many years due to putting together my Goodreads list, I came across it discussed for this very reason on the Paper Cuts blog at the New York Times: http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/20..."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.)“The action is simple but stately,” Updike wrote, a curve of neediness, attraction, pursuit, capture, fulfillment, disillusion, and departure which is traced through close to 500 pages bristling with such recondite terms as “tonus,” “makhoa,” “tallywhackers,” “lustral,” “samoosa,” “suigenerism,” “cornucopious,” “lanugo,” “superfices,” “je m’en foutisme,” “cothurni,” “karosses,” “lolwapas,” “idioverse,” “noetic,” “ketosis,” “vitromania,” “inter pocula,” “rubiconic,” “uchronia,” “watchership,” “toriis,” “langur,” “ovaldavels” (from “rondavels”), “utlitariana,” “sternocleidomastoids,” “pygmalious,” “stimmung,” “credulism,” “megrim,” “dagga,” “bogobe,” “cryptomnesia,” “urticaria,” “elenchus,” “entelechies,” “geniusly,” “crescive,” “evanition,” and “bromeliad.” Uh, Yeah!!And even funnier, that blog referenced a blog by Rachel Donadio, in which she quotes Norman Rush from "Mating" regarding literary deal-breakers: “There are certain quagmires to be avoided with people,” Norman Rush wrote in “Mating.” “You can find yourself liking someone who appears intellectually normal and then have him let drop that his favorite book of all time is ‘The Prophet.’” Touché, Mr. Rush, touché."Um, I feel you Rachel, but another literary dealbreaker might just be not being able to read the book at all due to the arcane vocabulary! too funny...
Do You like book Mating (1992)?
I never realized that :D Charles Beaumont, wrote for the original The Twilight Zone, had a collection of short stories that used a detail from the third panel. A close-up of winged-ears, I think. This has been on my wishlist for about a year but I couldn't tell whether I would like it or not. Can't wait to hear your thoughts!
—Megha
Most pages of this book contain not only wondrous English but also some French and Latin, with frequent use of Setswana and Afrikaans, though there is a glossary for the latter two. In fact the verb venir on the last page changed my understanding of the whole preceding novel. So, ok, read it with the your Larousse and your OED (which should also serve for the Latin) at your side.Much later-After reading Mortals now too, the passages in here that are directly 'about' mating stand out: What was not good enough was the usual form that mating takes. I had to realize that the male idea of successful love is to get a woman into a state of secure dependency which the male can renew by a touch or pat or gesture now and then while he reserves his major attention for his work in the world or the contemplation of the various forms of surrogate combat men find so transfixing. I had to realize that female-style love is servile and petitionary and moves in the direction of greater and greater displays of servility whose object is to elicit from the male partner a surplus--the word was emphasized in some way--of face-to-face attention. So on the distaff side the object is to reduce the quantity of servile display needed to keep the pacified state between the mates in being. (173)Just then I was trying to see the relationship between Nelson's cynical observation that the meaning of life in every formulation seemed to reduce to finding or inventing a perfect will to be subject to, the relationship of that to scanting remarks about la femme moyenne sensuelle--which we agreed I was not, of course--finding her raison d'etre in the love of a male as close to alpha as she can get. (389)Before reading-I've been meaning to read this for at least 10 years, and only because I think some family members were reading it. But what if I was wrong all this time? En passant-This book is immense. It has tannins and notes, body and bouquet and all the rest. Which, coming from a nondrinker, is basically meaningless, so consider it another example of Rush exposing the inadequacy of my vocabulary. Delight upon delight.
—Sps
"It always surprised me how few pygmalious, polymathic men had ever been interested in sprucing me up, given that I'm so interested and available, and that, as everyone notices first about me, I remember everything."I do love our unnamed narrator, uncomfortably, the way one loves a friend who grows tedious gushing about her new love. I love that I had to look up words and that even if I can never say "inter pocula" to describe someone who is inebriated without feeling a little pretentious, it's a nice phrase to have in one's arsenal. I love that Victoria Falls is now at the top of my life list of travel destinations when I'd not had much interest in Africa before.And I entertain myself by coming up with subtitles for the book: Love Makes Smart People Stupid, He Just Isn't Into Remaking Himself for You the Way You Just Did for Him, Allegedly Great Men and the Women Who Love Them, and Why You Shouldn't Get into Relationships with Anthropologists.
—Mara
