Rec Room: Meakin Armstrong: Mating

It took some convincing to get me to read Norman Rush. I expected his first novel, Mating, to be an obvious cross between Saul Bellow and a Victorian romance. It took me a while to realize this: that’s not such a bad combination.

The Bellow half of Mating gives the novel its propulsive drive—the kind coming from what the characters want, not from any external plot point. The unnamed protagonist, a woman whose graduate anthropology thesis is an incomplete failure, finds herself wafting along at the edges of Botswana’s upper crust white society—at a time when nearby South Africa was still practicing Apartheid. She wants a lover. She goes through several of them, until she comes across her ultimate challenge: Nelson Denoon.

Denoon broods and uses his intelligence as a weapon. He’s charismatic. What will come of their relationship? Finding out is where the Victorian romance comes in.

I read Mating when I was in college, suffering through a mountain of literary warhorses. Mating made me want to go to Africa and have an adventure. I loved it, but found myself wondering why Norman Rush had chosen to have a female narrator. Back then (I’ve since changed my mind), I considered this a flaw. Perhaps other readers will also dislike this choice; it's a powerful one: a man has decided to put the reader into a woman’s mind, seeing what she sees, and wanting what she wants.

But Mating is rife with binary opposition—relations between man and woman, between post-colonial whites and blacks, the rich and the poor—perhaps it could be said that the narration itself only adds to that conflict. Don’t worry: the book’s finely wrought language will carry you through.

It’ll be interesting to see Norman Rush on the panel of the April 26 Guernica/PEN event, The Diversity Test: Gender and Literature in Translation. I’m hoping this matter will be approached—are others curious why he chose a female voice for the narrator?


Bio: Meakin Armstrong is Guernica’s fiction editor. Read his last recommendation of Jakob Dylan's album Women and Country here.

Tags: books, gender, novel, pen world voices, recommendation

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