In the Harvard Review, critic Robert Faggen praises the work as a "masterpiece of fine-hammered first person narrative." [4] While Faggen describes the narrator's beloved, Nelson Denoon, as "dull" and is the novel's "primary weakness," his commendation for the book focuses on the narrator herself, who "is most memorable in her quest for her own utopia of equal love of which she teases us with beautiful, fleeting moments of possibility." The next day she locates him in a Gaborone slum, where he is lodging with a friend before returning to Tsau. Upon arrival, her “accursed female bladder” sends her running to the outhouse. Denoon offers a blunt welcome: “Look, did you just urinate?” She has misused an eco-toilet that Denoon has just installed. “It seems,” she says, “I was the only educated human being who had never heard of the universally known fact that urea keeps feces from composting properly.”

Flirtatious banter ensues, in English and Setswana, and she inquires if Tsau—a closed experimental community—would accept her as a volunteer. “You tempt me,” retorts Denoon, “but I have to say no. Of course what would make you irresistible would be if you know something about cooperage. Or taxidermy, say.” “Sorry, I said.”

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NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER• Is love between equals possible? This modern classic is a delightful intellectual love story that explores the deepest canyons of romantic loveeven as it asks large questions about society, geopolitics, and the mystery of what men and women really want.

I guess what I’d want to say is that people should look at ‘Mating’ as the account of an experiment,” he said. “In terms of translating what’s in the book to their own personal lives, they should consider what will make an experiment work — but remember that it’s an experiment with no guaranteed outcome.” She ignores his rebuff and goes to Tsau—a decision that entails a six-day trek through the Kalahari Desert. This section, entitled “My Expedition,” is the most exhilarating segment of writing in Rush’s work . She endures hallucinations, splinters, ill-fitting sunglasses and constipation; she encounters lions, ostriches, dead weaverbird nests and vultures. Halfway through the journey, one of her two donkeys, Mmo, runs away with her tent, most of her water supply and her toilet kit: “Now I was supposed to present myself to Denoon with only the vaguest notion of how I looked, and uncombed.” She arrives in Tsau severely dehydrated but triumphant: “How many women could have done this, women not supported by large male institutions or led by male guides?”The writing is strong but quite relentless; the fact that the narrator is not very sympathetic -- and so often a manipulator -- makes it difficult to empathize with her -- and at a more neutral distance her story simply isn't that engaging.

So much goes on in Rush's nifty novel about true love, star-crossed anthropology and rural development in Southern Africa that we almost forget about the morning after." - John Leonard, The NationBruns” anchored Rush’s 1986 collection, Whites, which featured six stories set in Botswana and was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize. Perhaps the praise it received—from Nadine Gordimer, Alice Munro, Joyce Carol Oates and Leslie Marmon Silko, among others—gave Rush the confidence he needed to compose a long novel entirely in the voice of the young anthropologist from “Bruns.” “Hubris made me do it,” he told the New York Times Book Review in 1991. “I know it sounds absurd, but I wanted to create the most fully realized female character in the English language.”

He won the U.S. National Book Award [2] and the 1992 Irish Times/ Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize for his novel Mating. Closing reflection - In an interview, Norman Rush was asks why he chose to write his novel from the standpoint of a younger woman. He replied: "Hubris made me do it. I know it sounds absurd, but I wanted to create the most fully realized female character in the English language." Curiously, while I was reading, I kept thinking what the novel would have been like if he wrote it with two alternating first-person narrators, the young anthropologist and Nelson Denoon. But this is a minor quibble. I thoroughly enjoyed Mating, a novel that is, above all else, a highly inventive love story.

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Rush and his wife Elsa were co-directors of the Peace Corps in Botswana from 1978 to 1983, which provided material for his short story collection Whites (1986). Whites was a finalist for the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. [4] His Botswana experience also served as the setting for his novels Mating (1991) and Mortals (2003). At the end of the novel, after she has returned to the states, the narrator argues that the major affliction of our age is "corporatism unbound." She goes on to say "What is becoming sovereign in the world is not the people but the limited liability corporation . . . that's what's concentrating sovereign power to rape the world and overenrich the top minions who run these entities"; and, finally she asserts that the "true holocaust in the world is the thing we call development . . . the superimposition of market economies on traditional and unprepared third world cultures" [p. 471]. Have events in the past decade, in the United States and around the world, confirmed or refuted these arguments? Yes, this is true. It’s also something to do with what a man I once knew said to me about his sister. It was the only thing he ever said about his sister, and what he said was that she played an imaginary board game with imaginary pieces. That was like the thing Henry James said about going up the stair and finding the one needful bit of information. A lot of what I write is about the need, the fear, the desire for solitude. I find the Brontës’ joint imagination absolutely appalling. So, in a sense, the whole thing was, as you rightly say, a construct and a smokescreen. In an interview with Norman Rush and his wife Elsa for the Paris Review, Joshua Pashman describes Rush's first novel as "Both an adventure story and a 'novel of ideas,' Mating is also a microscopic, Lawrentian examination of an embattled courtship. [11] Mating (1991) is a novel by American author Norman Rush. It is a first-person narrative by an unnamed American anthropology graduate student in Botswana around 1980. It focuses on her relationship with Nelson Denoon, a controversial American social scientist who has founded an experimental matriarchal village in the Kalahari desert.