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crop up in their unending conversation is extraordinary: from Ovid to
the Hungarian economist Janos Kornai.
Rush is fully aware that
all
this has its comic side, and he makes the
most of it. At one point, a crisis occurs over whether Denoon lied to
the nameless one when he claimed to have read
Middlemarch
(he did lie;
she forgives him). She tells us she carries a paperback Boswell everywhere
"as a fallback in case I broke a leg somewhere where reading matter was
a problem." At another point she warns gullible women: "One thing
you distinctly never want to hear a man you're interested in say softly is
that his favorite book in the whole world is
The Golden Notebook.
Here
you are dealing with a liar from the black lagoon.. .. " When they
quarrel, she accuses Denoon of "giving me cognitive dissonance, so stop
it." He is shocked that she's never heard of Ignazio Silone; she becomes
impatient with his depressions about the state of affairs in Poland. But she
loves him because he's such an impeccable feminist, he would never use
the imperative mode to a woman unless she were in the path of a run–
away bus. When serious trouble threatens this perfect meeting of minds,
she blames it, characteristically, on the shortcomings of anthropology.
If this description makes the reading of
Mating
seem an ordeal, that is
unfair to Norman Rush, who has clearly forgotten nothing about his five
years in Africa with the Peace Corps. For he has written a superbly witty
and engrossing erotic comedy which is also an academic satire, a novel of
ideas about many serious matters and, above all, a portrait of an arresting
woman who will remain deeply etched in our minds. In
Mating
Rush has
proven himself a master of what John Updike has defined as "depicted
realities to which meaning clings, and which transfer this meaning ... to
our consciousness." The realities that Norman Rush has woven into an
invented world take such tenacious possession of our imaginations that it
becomes part of our own reality.
Over the past twenty-odd years, Robert Stone has staked out a
powerful claim, in five novels, to the grim authenticity of his vision of
the American present. His vagrant men and women lead lives of noisy
desperation at the edge of the abyss. Strung out, doped up, hung over,
they are nearing the end of their rope. Stone's favorite noun is
dread,
his
favorite tone is
mordant,
his favorite adjective is
dangerous,
with
disturbing
and
sinister
not far behind. In
Dog Soldiers
and
A Flag at Sunrise,
Stone
sought to underscore the political implications of his narrative, through
heavily admonitory symbolism, offering his jittery world of addiction and
panic as a counter-image of American society in the waning years of the
century - corrupt, paranoid, out of control. In the sixties Stone was in–
volved in the California counterculture, and some glib remnants of those
