292
PEARL
K.
BELL
Not the sort of man she's been casually sleeping with in Africa, but one
whose intellectual seriousness and sophistication can match and challenge
her own. As she puts it, "I grew up clinging to the idea that either I was
an original in an unappreciated way or that 1 could be original - this
later - by incessant striving and reading and taking simple precautions like
never watching television again in my life." She is nothing if not deter–
mined.
At a party in Gabarone, the capital of Bostswana, she has her first
sight of the handsome and charismatic paragon who will more than ful–
fill her requisites for the mate she craves. He is Nelson Denoon, a famous
specialist in Third World rural development, with dozens of books to his
credit, who is the guiding force of a utopian community, Tsau, in the
Kalahari Desert, run mainly by once destitute and abandoned black
women of Botswana. As she listens to Denoon's informal lecture to the
guests about his ideas for village development, she realizes that he is the
one, and, "at heart a congenital academic," as she admits, her love song
takes a comically grad-student form: "He was so interdisciplinary! Eco–
nomics, anthropology, economic anthropology, you name it in the pol–
icy sciences, not to mention development proper and" much, much
more along these lines. But in fact the intellectual crackle of her 477-
page monologue is generally much richer than this echo of a college
catalogue. And when Denoon offers his famous dictum - "Capitalism is
strangling black Africa. Socialism will bury her!" - she finds his words
strangely erotic.
After this first ecstatic taste of Denoon, she is so obsessed with the
pursuit of intellectual love that she recklessly decides to trek alone across
the desert to Tsau, and comes close to ruining her health in the attempt.
Once she gets there, the mating dance begins, though it takes a long
while to consummate. And as they go through the motions, we learn a
great deal about the matriarchal organization of Tsau, the way its solar
technology works, the kind of food plantings the women harvest, the
way they dress, how the houses are decorated. Like Richard Powers,
Norman Rush pours a great deal of information into his story, but in
Rush's case, unlike Powers', the overflowing cornucopia of detail is in–
trinsic to his fictional scheme, even when it has more than a few
longueurs.
As the narrator ruefully admits at one point, "My story is
turning into the map in Borges exactly the size of the country it repre–
sents, but 1 feel 1 should probably say everything." And indeed she does.
What revives our interest throughout, though, is the high-flown
sparring and feinting between the lovers - yes, they do become lovers
eventually - and the extraordinary wit and range of ideas that Rush
nimbly packs into their comments and observations, often literary, always
at the highest level of high culture. The range of intellectual figures that
