Mating by Norman Rush

First published: 1991

Type of plot: Comedy of manners

Time of work: The early 1980’s

Locale: Botswana

Principal Characters:

• The narrator, an unnamed thirty-two-year-old woman who is in Botswana to write a thesis on nutritional anthropology
• Nelson Denoon, the socialist founder of a utopian colony for women in the Kalahari Desert

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 next three sections—“Tsau,” “Acquisitive Love,” and “Love Itself”—the narrator and Denoon act out their desert idyll before their story unravels in a final African chapter, “Strife.” In a brief commentary, “About the Foregoing,” the narrator reflects on it all from the distant vantage point of Palo Alto, California.

The narrator had hoped to show in her Stanford doctoral thesis that fertility among “remote dwellers” varies from season to season depending on what the gatherers can find, but she has learned that there are no gatherers in Botswana; people everywhere are eating canned food and breakfast cereal or handouts from the World Food Program. As a result, she retreats to the capital, Gabarone, where she socializes with the local expatriates and works her way through affairs with several men who offer her nothing permanently satisfying. From the last of these, Z, a spy for the British High Commission, she learns of Sekopololo (“The Key”), a project to create an entire new village in the north-central Kalahari Desert. What especially excites her about this project is that it is run by Nelson Denoon, a legendary social scientist.

She soon meets Denoon at a reception; the great man’s wife, Grace, approaches in some distress and guides her to a room where Denoon, the author of Development and the Death of Villages, is holding forth on his own version of socialism. Grace explains that her marriage to Denoon has soured and that she has identified the narrator as her successor. The charismatic Denoon’s dialogue with one of the local Marxist intellectuals is so spellbinding that the narrator pressures Grace into revealing the location of Tsau, the new utopian settlement. The journey to Tsau is grueling, complicated by the defection of one of her two donkeys, but eventually Tsau looms up in the distance. Although uninvited visitors are not allowed, she is taken in and nursed back to strength.

Tsau is entered through an archway on a road that continues up a koppie, or stone hill, with a community of two hundred thatched homesteads spread around the slope. A small airstrip affords a place for a mail plane to land every two weeks. A striking feature of Tsau is the presence everywhere of glinting glass ornaments and mirrors. The inhabitants are mostly destitute women, two-thirds of them past childbearing age, about 450 people all told, including forty children and no more than fifty male relatives. The charter women own the property, which is passed down to female relatives and other women. Denoon lives on the hilltop in a concrete octagon. Like the women, he has lived with no mate; for that reason, his previous acquaintance with the narrator must not be disclosed, as it would suggest he was bringing in a companion denied the others. A delegation agrees to the narrator’s temporary residence, and after she has proven herself, she eventually moves in with Denoon.

The romance proceeds smoothly, with Denoon and the narrator attuned to each other in all ways. Yet when Denoon remarks offhandedly one day that they could give up their American citizenship and stay on in Tsau permanently, the narrator obviously experiences uncertainty. Real difficulties for them arise with the manipulations of Hector Raboupi, a troublemaker who runs a string of male prostitutes, the “night men,” who offer themselves to the women. When Hector mysteriously disappears, his woman, Dorcas, raises a great row, accusing Denoon of having done away with him. In the middle of this, Denoon—against the rules—appropriates one of Tsau’s two horses and heads north on a quixotic mission to found a sister colony. He is brought in after two weeks, near death from a fall from his horse. His recovery is uneventful, but his passivity alarms the narrator, who takes him to Gabarone to see a psychiatrist.

The narrator learns that in his horrific experience Denoon witnessed his horse eaten by jackals and endured a hallucinatory vision of being saved from a rogue lion by a swarm of protecting bees, leaving him satisfied with no more intense feeling than the simple awareness of consciousness. “Consciousness is bliss,” as he puts it. At this point, the frustrated narrator goes to the Botswana Book Centre, where she sees a beautiful young woman from the U.S. State Department eagerly reading Denoon’s classic study. The narrator seizes on the young woman as her “satanic miracle” whereby she can free herself from Denoon, as Grace had earlier freed herself, and by holding a surprise birthday party for Denoon, she maneuvers the satanic miracle into his bed.

In the epilogue, the narrator is back in Palo Alto, wringing a new dissertation out of her research data and enjoying her celebrity as a lecturer on the feminist circuit. Her talks always preach the gospel of Denoon on the destruction of Third World cultures by the aggressive development policies of the twentieth century. The narrator ends her story by pondering a mysterious message she has received in California: Hector Raboupi has turned out to be a spy for a nearby dictator, and her successor, “lustrous Bronwen,” has been evicted from Tsau after one week.

The Characters

By having an anonymous narrator tell his story, Rush restricts the reader to his main character’s vision of events. Although Rush’s allusiveness and hieratic diction sometimes intrude to betray the mastermind behind the narrator and create some dissonance in point of view, most of what she reports can be easily accepted. For example, she immediately reveals much about herself by confessing that she could never mate with a Rhodesian or South African (because they come from racist countries), with anyone sympathetic to Ronald Reagan, or with a black African (because “male chauvinism is in the air Africans breathe”). Her reflections on her “carnal involvements” reveal her as subject to sexual appetites but not given to unrestrained sexual adventuring; she remarks that “if I was clear about anything in my life I was clear about not staying in Africa forever.” Her desert journey to Tsau shows her to be physically courageous to the point of imprudence. Her constant meditation on events provides a mirror to her inner thoughts and character, reflecting an extraordinarily likable and intelligent young woman with an independent mind and spirit.

The substance of Denoon’s character emerges in a dialogue with an African Marxist that the narrator overhears at a party before she even meets Denoon. His eloquence on a “third way” depicts Denoon as contemptuous of exploitative capitalism but not oblivious to the naïvetes of an unrealistic socialism. Rush develops Denoon’s potential weakness for alcohol by introducing two minor characters, Harold Mace and Julia Rodden, who appear out of nowhere as Shakespearean performers dispatched to Tsau by the British Council and for whom Denoon breaks out his hidden wine cache in a boozy evening of trivial male bonding. More about Denoon’s background unfolds in several flashbacks depicting his childhood relations with his father. The narrator’s final judgment on Denoon is ambiguous. Back at Stanford, she spouts Denoon’s doctrines in her lectures, but otherwise she rejects his teaching completely. When she reads his personal bible, the Tao Te Ching, she is repulsed by his quietism, finding it to be a handbook on how to become an impostor. Had it made Denoon an impostor, or had he always been one, she wonders. The ultimate difference between the narrator and Denoon appears in her comment on his vision of their spending their lives with the poor: “I respected it, although I reserved the right to adumbrate ways you could be with the poor without necessarily being at their elbow year in and year out.”

Several of the Tsau women appear vividly, but in roles too brief to be memorable. Hector Raboupi is villainous enough to carry a larger role, but he fades from the scene for good when some ruse is needed to send Denoon on the near-fatal mission that culminates in his debilitating religious experience with the lion.

Critical Context

This National Book Award-winning novel follows the concerns of Rush’s earlier collection of stories, Whites (1986), and continues the tradition of American utopian novels such as Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888), Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance (1852), and William Dean Howells’s A Traveler from Altruria (1894), but it does it with a feminist slant and with more attention paid to the love story than to the social mechanics of the Tsau colony. Mating also includes thoughtful commentary on the role of socialist politics in African countries, and Rush joins other white novelists of Africa such as Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee, and André Brink in their fictional dialogues on colonialism and its effects on southern Africa.

A diary kept by the narrator provides background about Tsau and other concerns. The narrative flows well, but there are episodes that could be cut to good effect. The diction is demanding, and writers and other persons (such as Father Coughlin, William Empson, and E. M. Cioran, for example) are referred to without explanation. The effect is a mild pomposity that will annoy many readers but that dedicated autodidacts may appreciate.

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.