'We know what we are.' Mating: a romance of rationalism and pragmatism.

The influence of V.S. Naipaul on Norman Rush.

The next Western Canon book club is about Turgenev, October 17th.

Radio New Zealand asked me questions about Second Act no-one has asked before.

The next Shakespeare book club is in two weeks, October 13th.

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I. What makes a book like this so popular today?

“Why can’t every mating in the world be on the basis of souls instead of fundamentally on the match between physical envelopes?” That is the question at the heart of Mating, Norman Rush’s 1991 novel about an anthropology graduate student in Botswana who falls in love with an older man. As the detached, anthropological title suggests, Mating is not a traditional romance. The narrator’s “personal automatic pastime of questioning my own motives” makes Mating a highly analytic piece of fiction, with a narrator who thinks and speaks unlike many others. 

Mating is narrated by an unnamed 32 year-old woman, who is unable to complete her PhD thesis. She was studying how the reproductive rates of gathers are affected by seasonal food changes, but everyone in Botswana now eats cornflakes and tinned food, so her research failed. She takes some time out to re-think her life, exploring not just career options but romantic ones. When she meets Nelson Denoon, an impressive but flawed anthropologist (who’s trying to establish a utopian matriarchal society in the Kalahari desert) she decides she must pursue him. But what she is looking for with Denoon is not the usual romance. “What was not good enough was the usual form mating takes,” she tells us. Instead she wants a relationship between intellectual equals. Rush has described her as a “moral entrepreneur, of sorts.”

I read Mating because it began to feel like everyone else was reading Mating. People I follow on Twitter were reading it. Someone I know who is writing a novel strongly recommended it to me, twice, telling me it was doing the rounds in Brooklyn. I began to see it everywhere. It was recently included in the Atlantic’s list of Great American Novels since 1923. When people talk about it online, they often say it is one of the best books they have ever read. 

What makes a book like this so popular today?

It’s not so much that everyone is reading Mating right now, more that Mating is such a good novel that it always feels like everyone is reading it. It’s one of those books that is constantly being passed around. It has been through 41 print runs in 23 years. 

It is popular, in part, because it is a “proper” novel. It has a story. There are plenty of long words and big ideas, but you always know what’s going on. It’s big and challenging, but it’s not Ulysses. There are moments of great tenderness, humour, pathos, and tension. The ending is a surprise (spoiler alert at the end of this review!).

Mating opens like this,

In Africa, you want more, I think.

People get avid. This takes different forms in different people, but it shows up in some form in everybody who stays there any length of time. It can be sudden. I include myself.

Mating is long. At one point the narrator says: “My story is turning into the map in Borges exactly the size of the country it represents, but I feel I should probably say everything.” To some, this will be off-putting, but as that opening says, Mating is avid. It is a novel of desire, enthusiasm, and vigorous pursuit. It is intellectually, narratively, and morally ardent. It is serious but also compulsive. You could have a seminar about Mating or read it for your book club: readers who want a serious novel of ideas will enjoy the dialectics; those who want a beginning-middle-end story will get that too. Mating never drags; it is witty and entertaining. It is energetic. 

Rush’s “moral entrepreneurship” is another reason for Mating’s ongoing popularity: it is honest, open and genuinely enquiring  about relationships in a way that has become less apparent in recent fiction. “If such a book were published today, it’s likely that its narrator would invite more scrutiny,” wrote Marie Solis in the New York Times. For the critic Lauren Oyler, the novel’s appeal is that it pre-dates the current hetero-pessimism of (some parts of) modern feminism: in Mating, the narrator is “active, intelligent, purposeful”—a strong independent woman—but also one a woman obsessed with a man who devotes herself to their relationship. 

This combination means that—at a time when many young novelists are obsessed with “craft” (careful but pointless literary writing) but refuse to write about “unacceptable” subjects, and when reviewers are increasingly unwilling to assess the merits of a work of art aside from its moral content—Mating is a serious and refreshing alternative.

That’s why, when the New York Times wrote about “Why everyone is reading Mating” in 2023, they said it had become a talismanic novel for young people as they think through how to achieve a romance of equals.

The book plays to other aspects of ’90s nostalgia. (In Mating, there is no internet, no smart phones, no dating apps.) But it is not retrograde. As Rush told the Times, his aim was to re-write the standard love story, asking himself the question, “How would one set out to arrange things to a greater moral satisfaction?” 

The book’s spirit of inquiry has kept it fresh. That’s why people keep reading it.

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II. “no-one would ever say, if he or she had been convinced that life was totally random and accidental in origin and evolution, that he or she had found the meaning of life.”

Here is one representative passage.

Intellectual love is a particular hazard for educated women, I think. Certain conditions have to obtain. You must meet someone—I would specify of the opposite sex, but this is obviously me being hyperparochial—who strikes you as having persuasive and well-founded answers to questions on the order of Where is the world going? These are distinctly not meaning-of-life questions. One thing Denoon did convince me of is that all answers so far to the question What is the meaning of life? dissolve into ascertaining what some hypostatized superior entity wants you to be doing, id est ascertaining how, and to whom or what, you should be in an obedience relationship. The proof of this is that no-one would ever say, if he or she had been convinced that life was totally random and accidental in origin and evolution, that he or she had found the meaning of life. So, fundamentally, intellectual love is for a secular mind, because if you discover that someone, however smart, is—he has neglected to mention—a Thomist or Baha’i, you think of him as a slave to something uninteresting.

That could almost describe Rush himself, who says that when he met his wife Elsa in college he was a “sectarian leftist” a “stage atheist.” Not a slave to religion, but to another sort of “hypostatized superior entity”. For a while, after graduating, they tried living in communes, which Elsa disliked. The story of their marriage is of a gradual “ideological convergence” which Rush said is the basis of all intense successful marriages. 

After the commune experiment, they moved to the Lower East Side, where Elsa bought a loom, eventually becoming a designer at a textile firm, and Rush became a rare book dealer. This happened by accident. He was in a rare book dealer’s office one day and answered a customer’s question that he had overheard. (This was not atypical behaviour for the young Rush, who often gave reading recommendations to people whose opinions he thought little of.) For many years, living upstate, they raised their children, weaved, dealt in rare books, and Rush wrote unpublished, unpublishable, novels. He attributes his late blooming to too much reading and drinking and the calamitous early influence of James Joyce. Elsa tried to tell him that even smart people wanted to read books that don’t require a seminar, but he seemed unable to change, writing overly dense and complicated novels. In some ways, he was the stereotype of the failed writer, in others he was singular—he was obsessed with the Marxist thought of the pre-1925 period, uncomfortable in the modern world.

The change came when they went to Botswana, selected, somewhat mysteriously, to run the Peace Corps, which they did from 1978-1983. Rush had published a few short stories in the 1970s, but not much. Africa changed him. Elsa believes Botswana put him among a new group of people, getting him away from old influences and opening up new ones. He made many notes and collected all sorts of papers, returning to the US with boxes full of material. First he wrote a short story, published in the New Yorker, which led to an agent, a publisher, and Mating.

Norman and Elsa Rush’s marriage is a large part of the source material for Mating. The narrator is “pretty much a straight lift” from Elsa, who provided large amounts of editorial work, though one or two lines Rush insisted on keeping in, only to have reviewers point out that no woman would ever say them. The idea of an “ideological convergence” is at the heart of the book’s relationship and at the heart of the Rushes. That Rush outgrew his uncompromising socialism and atheism in his marriage to Elsa is surely related to his development from a stern, opinionated, book-recommending, seminar-novelist to the man who could write a novel that has become something like a cult classic. 

One way of describing Mating is to call it a story about a brilliant self-impressed man, living in a remote utopian colony he is trying to create, finding love with a woman who refuses to scold or “mother” him but whose own insistent, confident intellect challenges him and helps to modulate the extreme aspects of his personality. In the process, it allows the woman to find an acceptable way to get what she wants: romance without the imbalance of patriarchy. Rush’s novel is written from the perspective of the woman in the story, but it can be read as an account, or metaphor, of his own marriage, his own personality, his own career.

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III. The conflict of rationality and pragmatism

Mating was published the year before Men and From Mars, Women are from Venus. It contains snippets of advice, such as this frequently quoted passage about the greater importance of sustaining humour in a relationship than sex or delicious food:

Causing active ongoing pleasure in your mate is something people tend to restrict to the sexual realm or getting attractive food on the table on time, but keeping permanent intimate comedy going is more important than any other one thing

But it is more exploratory than self-helpy. The question quoted at the start of this essay (how to achieve mating based on souls rather than physicality) is constantly broken down, throughout the story, into more specific questions, such as “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?” 

Rush’s narrator worries about falling into a relationship that conforms to the usual stereotypes, that the “male idea of love” is to get a woman into a state of “secure dependency”, renewed with occasional affectionate gestures, while his real concentration goes into his work. In turn, women become servile to secure male affection.

…the object is to  reduce the quantity of servile display needed to keep the pacified state between the mates in being. 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.

This is what she wants to avoid, and large parts of the novel are about how she can calibrate her relationship with Denoon around that equilibrium. Mating thus poses another central question: can there be a rational solution to the problems of romance, rather than a simply pragmatic one? 

In the debates between Denoon and the narrator, she often takes the pragmatic side, even though her whole narrative has the tone and perspective of a rationalist. This dynamic between the rational and the pragmatic is the dynamic of their relationship and of the novel more broadly. And it’s another part of what makes the novel interesting today. 

As Scott Sherman said, writing in 2021, the conflict between the two main character’s ideas of utopia—a new matriarchal settlement for Denoon and a world without lying for the narrator—“contributes to the novel’s dynamism, as well as to its enduring relevance in a period when the positions of liberals continue to face strong challenges from the left.” 

The conflict of rationality and pragmatism is not a new theme for fiction, but in Mating it is more explicitly part of the framework. Few fictional characters can think explicitly about those topics with credibility while being interesting. 

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IV. The hatred of lying

Rush is often praised for writing such a convincing first-person female character, a rare achievement for male novelists (his wife was his model and editor), but he ought to be praised, too, for writing a convincing social scientist and rationalist, which must be a much rarer achievement yet.

The narrator’s hatred of lying is the heart of her identity. It is the key to understanding Mating. Above all, Mating is about searching for the truth. Few large and serious novels can credibly sustain a first-person narrative of someone who can  properly integrate the way a social scientist would think into the narrative voice. 

As an example, let’s look at the way the narrator talks about her life being “overdetermined”. There are four instances of this important word in the novel. Overdetermined describes a situation that has more causes than are necessary for it to occur, or a situation where an event has multiple causes, each of which would be sufficient on their own.

First, she is “overdetermined for life in Africa” because she is from Minnesota and spent “years being disappointed by northern California with its indeterminate weather and freezing surf.” In Africa, she loves the sun bursting up every day “like some broken mechanism.” This is one of the first signs the narrator gives that, despite the fact that she is going to try and rationally choose and create a new sort of life—indeed, inside an experiment to make a new society—, she is overdetermined for her final choice. In her search for a relationship of equals, and her insistence on knowing the truth at all costs, she is able to recognise the limits on her agency: rationality makes her pragmatic as well as utopian.

The three following uses of “overdetermined” reinforce this. The second use is about her boyfriend before Denoon. He is a spy, which he obviously kept secret—but she already knew it from someone else, and this attracted her because of her quest for a relationship with no asymmetries. “I felt I had enormous leverage, for once. Everything I do is so overdetermined.” Third, she says her “aversion to mood in significant others” (her wariness about being involved with men who become suddenly despondent about, say, “a split in some Spanish labour union”) is “overdetermined and reality based” because of her mother’s erratic and distant mood cycles. As well as knowing she is overdetermined for Africa, she knows, in close detail, what traits in a mate will attract and disturb her and why. She comes close to seeing herself objectively.

The final usage is when, after months of telling her no wine is available in the settlement, Denoon brings out two bottles for guests, partly to show off, partly because they had brought wine and he was tipsy. She discovered not only that he lied to her, but that he has a propensity to drink, and is more pretentious and cares more about status in front of other men than she realised (which she dislikes). In their argument about his lies—and remember, she hates lying more than anything else—she eventually says, having gone through the various psychological tendencies in them both that created the situation, “Let’s just regard the whole situation as overdetermined and forget it.” 

In these examples, the social scientist’s care not to overrate free will and the significance of the individual is neatly made part of the narrative voice, rather than given as a sermonising interjection. 

Mating, then, is the work of a master novelist but also of someone who knows about the world far beyond other novels. (How many other novelists spent five years in the Peace Corps?) It’s written for smart people, but not just smart literary people. Like Helen deWitt, who understands probability and emails Andrew Gelman with queries about using R (her story collection Some Trick contains sections of code and charts she made herself), Norman Rush is an intellectual novelist, but not of the myopically literary sort. 

Mating is also witty. Rush can be really quite funny. I don’t want to give you the impression that Mating is merely a long narrative of ideas and self-reflection. Early on, there’s a lot of funny social observations about Westerners in Botswana, and their expat behaviours. The narrator has an especially amusing animus against Brits.

In every gathering of at least two hundred Brits there will be several people with hysterical surnames. I think this is the result of coming from a culture which has yet to wake up to the fact that it’s a thinkable thing to do to go down to the name-changing bureau and rid you and your offspring of these embarrassments. Or possibly they don’t do it just because Americans do, when they notice that people start falling about with laughter when they introduce themselves. Anyway, they were all there: Mr. Hailstones, Mr. Swinerod, I. Denzil Quorme, Mr. Leatherhead, and a plump couple, the Tittings.

The humour is often dry, as in this passage when the narrator is being pushed toward Denoon, shortly after she has first seen him and decided to pursue him. As she slowly approaches, being pushed by another woman through a small crowd, she makes a series of detailed observations about his appearance,

My slow progress towards Denoon was The Kiss in reverse. He looked better the closer I got…. Her superfices were good. The whites of his eyes were models of whiteness. He was smiling…and I could tell his gingivae were as good as mine, which is saying a lot. I attend to my gums. People in the bush don’t always attend to their oral hygiene, not to mention other niceties. There was no sign of that here. I of course am fanatical about my gums because my idea of what the movie I Wake Up Screaming is about is a woman who has to keep dating to find her soulmate and she’d had to get dentures. I have very long range anxieties.

Her reflections continue as she thinks of the literature on assortative mating. “I hate assortative mating, the idea of it.” She objects to the idea that everyone ends up with “just who they deserve”.

Mostly it comes down to the matching of faces. When I  first encountered the literature, I even referred to it privately as fascism. I will never adapt to it, probably. Why can’t every mating in the world be on the basis of souls instead of fundamentally on the match between physical envelopes? Of course we all know the answer, which is that otherwise we would be throwing evolution into disarray. Still it distresses me. We know what we are.

This almost resigned pragmatism—we know what we are—is what the narrator resists and debates throughout the book.

Another way of phrasing the novel’s central question is, can she overcome that status quo through rationality alone? 

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V. The world is what it is.

Early on, the narrator quotes V.S. Naipaul. “The world is what it is,” she says to a soon-to-be-ditched lover, “and you are what you are”. Ouch! She does not tell us this is a Naipaul quotation, and no discussion of his works is made. But the reference is telling. Not only is that sentence (the opening of Naipaul’s 1979 novel A Bend in the River) among the most significant lines of twentieth century literature, standing to its times as the famous opening of Anna Karenina stands to its own times a century earlier, but Naipaul also wrote about Africa, and in very different terms to Rush. Mating is, partly, a dialogue with A Bend in the River. (It’s also a dialogue with The Heart of Darkness, but that gets written about all the time.)

Rush’s narrator does not quote Naipaul in full. In toto, the quotation is harsher, blunter. “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.” Spoken by the narrator of A Bend in the River, Salim, it signals what the story will be about: Salim’s attempt not to allow himself to “become nothing” during a time of political upheaval in central Africa. He will not become, in other words, overdetermined.

It is strange, though, to find Rush’s narrator—liberal, international, modern, feminist—taking Naipaul’s sentiment as her motto. Naipaul’s novel, genius though it is, has been criticised for racism and cynical pessimism about Africa. And Naipaul himself was “problematic”, especially towards women.

A generous assessment of Naipaul would focus on his love of what he called “universal civilisation”, which allowed him, a poor boy from Trinidad, to become a famous writer. Or it would focus on his disdain for anything other than trying to tell the truth. Or on the facts he quoted such that, as he said, the respected African writer Chinua Achebe was not published in his own country. 

Professor Sanjay Krishnan defended A Bend in the River from accusations of racism in the New York Review of Books: “the novel begins with Salim making disparaging remarks about Africans; it ends with him being rescued from ruin by a principled African government official whom Salim had once disdained.” The true subject of Naipaul’s book is not that Africa’s future is hopeless, but a study of, as Krishnan says, “the mixed and uneven ways in which the historical transition to modernity unfolds in a decolonizing context.”

But there is more to it than this. Hilary Mantel was right to find an autobiographical impulse in Naipaul’s post-colonial pessimism: “he was the rational man who was afraid to see night fall, because it falls within himself.” Naipaul was often simply bigoted, happy to offer stark and cruel opinions in interviews. “Africa has no future,” he infamously told Elizabeth Hardwick in 1979. Elsewhere he confessed to feeling “a great hatred” of the entire continent of Africa when he sat down to write In A Free State. 

But look at what else Naipaul said when he said he hated all Africans:

I began my recent book about Africa with a great hatred of everyone, of the entire continent; and that had to be refined away, giving place to comprehension. If one wasn’t angry, wasn’t upset, one wouldn’t want to write. On the other hand it isn’t possible to get anything down until you’ve made sense of it, made a whole of it. To write one has to use all the senses; all the pores must be open.

No doubt, Naipaul had troublesome views, but he thought the purpose of fiction was to get beyond such “shallow emotions”. Rush did not follow Naipaul’s cynicism, his hatreds, his despair at Africa’s future, but the purpose of their fiction is similar: comprehension, making sense of the world, making a whole of it.

Naipaul said of the relationship between his emotions and his fiction,

I can get angry, impatient, like anyone else; I can be irritated, bored—but you can’t turn any of that into writing. So you have to make a conscious effort to render your emotions into something which is more logical, which makes more sense, but which is more, and not less, true.

Taken out of context, that could almost have been spoken by the narrator of Mating, who is constantly trying to find a logical route towards a romantic situation that doesn’t leave her hostage to the evolutionary gravity of emotions, to something more, and not less, true. At one point, she says, “I wanted to incorporate everything, understand everything, because time is cruel and nothing stays the same.” Or, as Salim says of Arabic rule in parts of coastal Africa: “It could be blown away at any time. The world is what it is.”

In the section when the narrator of Mating crosses the Kalahari desert solo to find Denoon and begin her new life with him (often noted as one of the great segments of modern fiction), she says “Anyone who thinks crossing the Kalahari by yourself is boring is deluded. It’s like being self-employed in a marginal enterprise: there’s always something you should be doing if your little business is going to survive.” Salim, of course, is self-employed in a marginal enterprise. He, too, crosses Africa, looking for a new town and a new life.

Naipaul’s influence runs deep in Mating. They are two books about how our lives are overdetermined and whether we can find rational means of escape.

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VI. “We were people who simply did what we did.”

Rush wrote about Naipaul once, a review of Naipaul’s travel book The Masque of Africa. “It is hard to be fair to V.S. Naipaul,” he begins, noting that what we know of Naipaul personally always intrudes upon the work. Revelations of his appalling treatment of women, Rush says, mean “some readers will be tempted to pick up the lens of abnormal psychology in order to interpret much of his work.” 

And yet, Rush is very fair, noting that we do not really know what Naipaul thinks. He cannot be an Empire loyalist, since he fiercely criticised the settling of Trinidad in The Loss of El Dorado. He champions the insulted and injured, but only sometimes. The one thing we do know, Rush concludes, is that Naipaul loves animals and is a vegetarian. There is some criticism here. But Rush is careful to note that Naipaul is always a novelist, always trying to turn his feelings into comprehension. Just as happens in Mating. 

Rush and Naipaul present very different views of Africa, very different views of women. Naipaul’s pessimism and haughtiness is matched by Rush’s liberal hope in the reality of a better future. Naipaul writes about failed societies, Rush about the attempts to make utopian ones. In A Bend in the River, Salim says,

Those of us who had been in that part of Africa before the Europeans had never lied about ourselves. Not because we were more moral. We didn’t lie because we never assessed ourselves and didn’t think there was anything for us to lie about; we were people who simply did what we did. But the Europeans could do one thing and say something quite different; and they could act in this way because they had an idea of what they owed to their civilization. It was their great advantage over us. The Europeans wanted gold and slaves, like everybody else; but at the same time they wanted statues put up to themselves as people who had done good things for the slaves. Being an intelligent and energetic people, at the peak of their powers, they could express both sides of their civilization; and they got both the slaves and the statues.

This explication of hypocrisy is reflected in Mating in the way the narrator (and Denoon) mock and criticise many of the whites in Africa. Rush is often compared to Conrad in this regard, but Naipaul is an equal influence. Denoon does not want slaves, but he does want some status in his utopia; he is a newer, more liberal westerner helping Africans, a contrast to the “white saviours” and imperial looters, but he stands in that tradition. He is opposed to the lies of the empire; his utopian village is an act of resistance, including against the creeping influence of South African apartheid. He is trying to be a true idealist, against the past of hypocritical idealists exploiting Africa.

Everything we want in a society is what we find brought out in people in the moment of insurrection. Spontaneity! Spontaneous hierarchy! Self-sacrifice! Staying awake all night! Working until we drop! Audacity! Camaraderie! The carnival behind the barricades.

But, reality breaks in—his position is challenged. Demands are made: to keep rifles, to start churches, to reduce the matriarchal hierarchy of the village. Denoon cannot create an entirely rational society in his own image. There is a coup. His ideals fail. He goes into a decline.

Naipaul’s striving for honesty is reflected in Mating’s narrator’s intense hatred of lying: “I have a fear and loathing of liars.” Like Salim, though, she has to recognise that lies are essential to how the world works. “Lies led to my existence in the world. I wasn’t conceived through the association of ideas.” She has been constantly alert to keep her relationship with Denoon honest, but that does not stop it from failing, from Denoon’s depression and diminishment pushing them apart, and from another woman coming between them.

The world is what it is. We know what we are. It was probably overdetermined.

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VII. Overdetermined ambiguity…

In both Naipaul’s and Rush’s novels, the protagonists are trying to find their way in the world towards some ideal, against the current of deceit and the inevitable. Both are trying to find the truth about individual agency in a world that feels overdetermined. At the end of A Bend in the River, Salim has to leave in hurry as the government has become corrupt and the society is breaking down. The steamer he departs on runs adrift and the novel ends in ambiguity, for Salim and for the town he leaves.

Something similar is true of the end of Mating. The narrator, now in America, which she hates for lacking avidity, hears that Denoon is recovered, his position restored. She considers going back. The message she receives, though, is short and ambiguous. Is she being asked back? By who? What for? No answers are available. The future lies in uncertainty: “it feels highly possible to me that I have been manoeuvred by a liar somewhere in all this.” Nelson knows what lying to her means. But still, what should she do?

Je viens. She says. “Why not?”

The ending’s ambiguity, you might say, is overdetermined. The narrator’s unflinching commitment to truth means she has to accept Denoon, accept herself, accept the way things are—accept that the heart wants what it wants. Her rationalism compels her to be honest, to go back, to accept ambiguity in her quest for an ideal.

After all, the world is what it is. We know what we are.