A little life in the Big Easy

Whew, I finally finished the opus that is Mating (by Norman Rush) this morning. That’s not to say I struggled through it, but I’ve just not had time lately to devote to reading as much as I’d like. I enjoyed the book a lot, though, and am sad to say goodbye to the neurotic narrator.

Mating won the National Book Award back in 1991, and the little shiny emblem on the front of the book is likely what attracted me to it in the bookstore. I’d never heard anyone talk about it, never had anyone tell me to read it, nada. I’m just a sucker, a veritable magpie really, when it comes to those little “prize” emblems. Maybe I shouldn’t admit that, but hey, it’s true.

Mating is, not surprisingly perhaps, about love — about finding someone you like, about that first burst of seemingly limitless euphoria, where you’d give up anything and everything to be with that person, about the act of getting to know someone and the natural, normal tempering of the euphoria, and about the reality that is the fact that despite loving and knowing someone, there is always some part of them you can’t reach, always some part of them you can’t fully know. You can get close, but people surprise you again and again.

At its heart, this is what Mating is about. But it’s wrapped in this expansive text that covers so much ground it can be nearly overwhelming. The book is set in Africa in the 1980s. Our narrator is an unnamed American anthropology grad student who has become disconnected (both emotionally and academically) from her thesis and is trying to figure out her next steps.

The fact that a male writer so convincingly writes in the feminine first person for this entire book is astounding. Her voice is one I related to — she’s smart, funny, obsessive, self-critical but also proud, and driven nearly nuts by the love she feels for the main male character, a sort of retiring star on the stage of theories about developing world economies. The book addresses economics, geo-politics, feminism, culture, and yes, the state of the human heart at the beginning, middle, and perhaps end of love.

There’s a lot going on here, but throughout it all, the narrator is there, guiding you through, at times frustrating you, at times making you realize you’d have done the same exact things she did. And her vocabulary? Well, I had to keep a dictionary handy, which hasn’t happened for me with a piece of fiction in quite some time. It doesn’t come off as trite or false, though. It’s believable that she would talk and write that way.

This book has set on my shelves for years, made it through several moves, without being read, poor thing. I’m happy I finally was drawn to it and put the time in to appreciate it. Highly recommend it.