Norman Rush is the author of four works of fiction: Whites, a collection of stories, and three novels, Subtle Bodies, Mating, and Mortals. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Best American Short Stories. Mating was the recipient of the National Book Award. Rush and his wife live in Rockland County, New York.
Paperback
(Reprint)
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- ISBN-13: 9780679737094
- Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
- Publication date: 09/28/1992
- Series: Vintage International Series
- Edition description: Reprint
- Pages: 496
- Sales rank: 67,547
- Product dimensions: 5.15(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.99(d)
Reading Group Guide
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER
“Exhilarating . . . vigorous and luminous. . . . Few books evoke so eloquently the state of love at its apogee.” —The New York Times Book Review
The introduction, discussion questions, author biography, and suggested reading list that follow are designed to enhance your group’s discussion of Norman Rush’s National Book Award–winning novel Mating.
1. Mating is narrated in the voice of a woman, a graduate student in nutritional anthropology. Why might Norman Rush have made this particular narrative choice? How convincing is his depiction of a woman’s consciousness and point of view? Why is it important that the story be told by a woman? By an anthropologist?
2. The narrator describes herself as suffering from “scriptomania,” [p. 407] the need to get everything in her life into writing. “The point is to exclude nothing” [p. 26]. Why does she feel such a compelling urge to write everything down? What is the value of “telling everything”?
3. Why does the narrator describe her affairs with men just prior to meeting Denoon? How do they set up or illuminate what follows? In what respects is Denoon different from, and superior to, the men who precede him?
4. What are the main characteristics of life at Tsau? In what sense is it an attempt at utopia? How is it different from both Western and African societies? Does it offer a successful alternative to these societies?
5. The narrator observes, “One difference between women and men is that women really want paradise. Men say they do, but what they mean by it is absolute security, which they can obtain only through utter domination of the near and dear and the environment as far as the eye can see” [p. 44]. Is this an accurate assessment? In what ways does Tsau seek to alter this version of paradise as male domination? What other hard truths does the novel deliver about relations between men and women?
6. Why is organized religion kept out of Tsau? What does Denoon believe to be the taproot of religion?
7. What picture emerges of the African residents of Tsau? What role do such characters as Dineo, Dorcas, and Raboupi play in the novel? How do they regard the only whites in Tsau, the narrator and Denoon?
8. After a bitterly contentious parlamente meeting, in which Denoon is verbally attacked, the narrator remarks “Yesterday was a catastrophe trying to tell us something like that Tsau is an organism trying to deal with us as foreign bodies. Yesterday was only the latest trope” [p. 380]. Why do the villagers grow hostile to Denoon? Why do they mistrust him? In what senses are Denoon and the narrator “foreign bodies”?
9. The narrator tries to avoid thinking of marriage as “a form of slowed-down wrestling where the two parties keep trying different holds on each other until one of them gets tired and goes limp, at which point you have the canonical happy marriage, voilà” [p. 381]. What kind of relationship do she and Denoon have? What has drawn them together? What threatens to pull them apart?
10. Mating is a vast and intellectually challenging novel that incorporates history, politics, philosophy, anthropology, economics, feminism, and much more into its narrative scope. Why has Norman Rush chosen to call it Mating? Is it chiefly a love story?
11. During an argument, Denoon asks the narrator, “Can’t anything be innate?… Does everything have to be an exfoliation from the minutiae of our miserable childhoods?” [p. 208] What connection does the novel reveal between Denoon’s childhood and his adulthood? According to the narrator, what are the seminal and shaping events of his early life? Is Denoon right to question the explanatory value of referring everything back to one’s childhood?
12. Does the narrator make the right choice by leaving Denoon and Africa? Is she correct in thinking Denoon had suffered a nervous breakdown and become “insanely passive,” an “impostor,” after his ordeal in the desert? Or did Denoon have a genuinely mystical experience?
13. After she returns to the United States, the narrator writes, “Being in America is like being stabbed to death with a butter knife by a weakling” [p. 470]. What does she mean by this? What does this characterization suggest about the differences between life in Africa and America? Why would her life in Africa incline her to experience America in this way?
14. 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?
15. Mating ends with the narrator asserting that she is going back to Africa? Why does she make this decision? Why does Rush choose to end the novel in this way?
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The narrator of this splendidly expansive novel of high intellect and grand passion is an American anthropologist at loose ends in the South African republic of Botswana. She has a noble and exacting mind, a good waist, and a busted thesis project. She also has a yen for Nelson Denoon, a charismatic intellectual who is rumored to have founded a secretive and unorthodox utopian society in a remote corner of the Kalahari—one in which he is virtually the only man. What ensues is both a quest and an exuberant comedy of manners, a book that explores the deepest canyons of eros even as it asks large questions about the good society, the geopolitics of poverty, and the baffling mystery of what men and women really want.
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