PEARL K. BELL
291
goes on to some predictable adventures in London and Paris. But
Pinckney regains his stride toward the end of the book, when the young
man in search of authenticity but distrustful of enthusiasm and wary of
commitment returns to the Old Country on a visit which induces very
different thoughts and feelings than those he had as a child. The
mournful reverie of the closing pages, as he walks over the bridge from
Georgia into South Carolina, reveals a soul no less divided than in his
earlier years, but fiercely honest about the understanding he has reached,
not without difficulty, about his blackness and himself as an individual in
relation to his race. In a beautifully unsentimental passage toward the end
of the novel, Pinckney writes: "I minded the strict rules of conduct and
the tribal code that said that I, as a black, had a responsibility to my
people, to honor the race. Now I am sorry that I went to such lengths
not to be of much use
to
myself just so no one would be able to ask
anything of me. To have nothing to offer was not, after all, the best way
to have nothing to lose." No longer teetering on the ambiguous knife–
edge of irony, our young hero is now free to grow up.
The blacks who appear in Norman Rush's
Mating
are African and of
course have nothing in common with Darryl Pinckney's world. They
form the context of the story, and play minor roles now and then, but
they are only incidental to the romance - the quest for a mate - at the
heart of the book. Like the narrator of
High Cotton,
the woman whose
voice we hear throughout
Mating
remains nameless: while Pinckney is
obviously writing about himself, the anonymity maintained in
Mating
is a
puzzling annoyance . Is she nameless because Rush sees her as
Everywoman? That can hardly be the case, since she is absolutely one of a
kind, suigenerical, as our heroine might put it, to a fault. She is, in fact,
the most beguiling, exasperating, funny and endearing woman to appear
in a work of fiction for years. That she is the creation of a male novelist,
who insinuates himself so effortlessly into her mind and soul and body, is
all
the more remarkable.
Our
nameless heroine is a nutritional anthropologist in her early
thirties who has come to Botswana in 1980 from Stanford to do her
thesis research on the link between fertility and the seasonal food supply
in a tribe of hunters and gatherers. To her dismay, she discovers that her
gatherers are now eating cornflakes and canned beans supplied by relief
agencies, which effectively blows her thesis out of the water. Ferociously
self-questioning and self-analytical, she decides, after a visit to the Victoria
Falls that fills her with "enormous sadness" about loneliness and
mortality, that she needs a man who will fill the gaping hole in her life
without threatening her feminist dedication to independence and dignity.
