Love and Other Unrealizable Utopian Projects

Norman Rush's "Mating"

William Kentridge, The Unstable Landing Point of Desire (2021)

Here is something that we haven’t done before in this publication. You, voyeur, get to watch me abandon my skeptical eye. You get to watch me enraptured, all defenses down. I’ve been writing here regularly for nine months and change. I have written on several books I loved, a few I didn’t care for, and a few that were flawed but had some essential question at their heart that made discussing them an interesting prospect. Now I am going to enter a mode as yet unseen in these pages: complete infatuation. I hope you will indulge me.

Martin Amis in Experience:

“It was Hitchens who introduced me to Bellow — as a reader. ‘Look at Humboldt’s Gift,’ he told me, with a serious inclination of the head, on the staircase at the New Statesman, in (I think) 1977. I looked instead at The Victim and after very few pages I felt a recognition threading itself through me, whose form of words (more solemn than exhilarated) went approximately as follows: ‘Here is a writer I will have to read all of.”¹

I thought of that quote from Amis around page 15 of Norman Rush’s 1991 novel Mating. By page 50 I had ordered everything else Rush had ever written (Only three other books, luckily—for that certain sense of dutiful recognition to creep up upon you the oeuvre must be manageable). After I read the indelible final four words of Mating, a daring, almost unthinkable thought flashed immediately into my head: I think this might be the best book I’ve ever read. Realistically, that’s the afterglow speaking. Moby-Dick is probably better. But how appropriate that one of the last century’s great novels of love should so sweep me off my feet. I’m writing this in the afternoon, I finished Mating this morning, and I’ve been walking around all day with a sense of satisfaction so deep it feels it should be reserved for the tangible things in life like marriage and children and not for secular worship of the novel, which is clearly an absurd thing to dedicate much of your life to. But what can I say? The promise of occasional experiences like this is what keeps me in the game.

i. The Basics

Mating is narrated by an unnamed American anthropologist. Stranded in Gaborone, Botswana with an “exploded thesis,” she falls for Nelson Denoon, a charismatic American intellectual and the founder of Tsau, a mysterious matriarchal commune in the Kalahari desert. The book follows her journey to Tsau and her romance with Denoon as they attempt to craft a relationship in which both parties are equal partners. It is a very discursive, philosophical novel that asks serious questions about the nature of love. But it is also a social comedy (in the first section, when the narrator is adrift among the white population of Botswana), an adventure novel (in the second section, when she journeys alone through the desert to Tsau), and a fascinating portrait of an alternative society (Tsau’s political economy is discussed in great detail). It feels like a novel that has managed to combine the social-romantic tradition that flows from Jane Austen to Sally Rooney with the quest narrative tradition that is as old as chivalric romance or ancient myth, as old as storytelling itself. It is grand, romantic, and ambitious. But it is also funny, charming, relatable, and never, ever boring.

Rush was in his fifties when he wrote this novel in the voice of a 32-year-old woman. “Hubris made me do it,” he said when asked about his choice of narrator. “I know it sounds absurd, but I wanted to create the most fully realized female character in the English language.” If he didn’t succeed, he came as close as any man has come since Molly Bloom. Mating’s narrative voice is its first and greatest virtue. It is wickedly intelligent as well as funny and self-aware. It ping-pongs between the demotic and the high rhetorical; there are many words that require looking up. There are many smart and aphoristic passages on the nature of love, which are often quoted in essays like this one, to give an idea of the novel’s main concerns. Here is one:

I had to realize that the male idea of successful love is to get a woman into a state of secure dependency which the male can renew by a touch or pat or gesture now and then while he reserves his major attention for his work in the world or the contemplation of the various forms of surrogate combat men find so transfixing. I had to realize that female-style love is servile and petitionary and moves in the direction of greater and greater displays of servility whose object is to elicit from the male partner a surplus—the word was emphasized in some way—of face-to-face attention. [...] Equilibrium or perfect mating will come when the male is convinced he is giving less than he feels is really required to maintain dependency and the woman feels she is getting more from him than her servile displays should merit.[...] I should remember this inescapable dyad at the heart of mating because it was not what I had come this far to get.

But I don’t think those statements of intent, which make things so easy for critics, are entirely representative of the appeal of Mating’s narrative voice. Here is a less declarative passage that particularly struck me. The narrator, having crossed the Kalahari alone at great peril, is approaching Tsau. The “rough beast” is her donkey. The “chiming and jinking” is a series of glass wind chimes that mark the path into the settlement. Exhausted and half-crazed, she finds herself with an odd craving for garlic:

Never say I am not mine own social worker. My liberal self now gently tried to lead me to entertain the idea that my garlic urge was homeostasis speaking, my body crying out for phosphorus, say. But then my true self said that if I wanted phosphorus it wasn’t garlic I wanted, it was watercress, and that marching fixedly toward Tsau as if the main point of reaching it was to get a giant helping of boeuf en daube was silly. Denoon was absurd on liberals and had a sulk I ultimately detonated him out of after I told him his aphorism for liberalism—id est To alarm and soothe in the same moment of policy—was a fake and groundless. I think probably we should all be liberals. When things were disintegrating between us, and I regret this now, I even said I will give you a thousand dollars if you show me why you shouldn’t be defined as a liberal, given what we have definitively established as your political baseline. In any case my liberal incubus was now telling me that, la la la, maybe Tsau would be the place, like a spa, where I could stop being operated upon by the buried cultural mechanisms of my adolescence and/or absurd cravings like this one for garlic. I and my rough beast staggered toward Tsau. Meantime the chiming and jinking continued, the accompaniment.

For whatever reason, I had the same feeling reading this as I did reading (Bellow again) this particular section of Herzog, one of my favorite passages in all of fiction. I promise to curtail the excessive quotation going forward—doesn’t the eye have such an urge to skip these?—but indulge me once more:

An oriole's nest, in the shape of a gray heart, hung from twigs. God's veil over things makes them all riddles. If they were not all so particular, detailed, and very rich I might have more rest from them. But I am a prisoner of perception, a compulsory witness. They are too exciting. Meantime I dwell in yon house of dull boards. Herzog was worried about that elm. Must he cut it down? He hated to do it. Meanwhile the cicadas all vibrated a coil in their bellies, a horny posterior band in a special chamber. Those billions of red eyes from the enclosing woods looked out, stared down, and the steep waves of sound drowned the summer afternoon. Herzog had seldom heard anything so beautiful as this massed continual harshness.

There is a musicality to both of these passages, a sense of satisfaction like a chord resolving. They’re addicting. One wants to stop the book and just bask in their glory. Probably there is some technical explanation for this—the balancing of Anglo-Saxon and Latinate words, the specific rhythms of the sentences—but the content is meaningful too, the wit and the self-awareness and the blending of high and low and the sudden jump-cuts between topics, the sense of consciousness in motion. They are both, to me, examples of the English language at its apogee. But, as many have noted in their considerations of my beloved midcentury, though Bellow has many gifts, those gifts often do not extend to writing half of the human species as anything other than voluptuous sex goddesses or shrieking harridans. So my elevator pitch for Norman Rush is as follows: a writer as good as Saul Bellow—as rhythmic, as philosophical, as humanistic, as ebullient, as purely pleasurable—only he actually likes women. Who could ask for anything more?

ii. The Discursive Environment

I’m going to detour briefly into the question of audience, which may seem frivolous but I do think is worth considering, because it gnawed at me a little. A novel that has a particularly fervent cult attracts its audience because of its inherent qualities, of course, but its place in our literature is also inexorably partially defined by that audience. On the Road would be a very different book if it were a little-known curiosity dug up by NYRB Classics.

The people I have known both virtually and IRL who really love Mating are often highly accomplished and literate. Call it the Princeton-to-Paris-Review pipeline. It is “a novel for people who particularly love novels,” as the New York Times called it. People in elite MFAs love it, as do people in the publishing industry. The first person who recommended it to me went to the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Said Times trend piece on why everyone (“everyone”) is reading Mating quoted Christian Lorentzen, Lauren Oyler, and two editors from The New Yorker and The Paris Review, to give you an idea. Now, there is nothing wrong with this, necessarily. Don’t think I’m indecorous enough to spiral into intra-class resentment. But I do think it’s worth noting because of a trait I share with the narrator of Mating: there is almost nothing that depresses me more than the contemporary bourgeois notion of love. The cramped, small world of “Cat Person” and sex diaries in The Cut and situationships and posting screenshots of people’s clumsy attempts to flirt in the group chat and so forth. I think it has all gone very badly wrong. It’s horrible to me. I loathe it. I realize I am far from alone in this, and that many people if pressed would agree, yet a jilted and skeptical attitude towards affairs of the heart remains the baseline among our cultural elite.

Mating is basically the opposite of that. It believes love, though beset by power imbalances and misunderstandings and small tragedies, is not only real but the most important thing on earth. It believes one should be willing to cross a desert for love. If this novel strikes such a chord in this type of person in particular, it must be partially because, even as it casts true romance as a rigorous intellectual project rather than a gauzy happily-ever-after, it offers an appealing vision of love free of the cynicism, wariness, and mind-numbing therapy-speak that is de rigueur among the officer class.

So it seems to me we are all stuck in a sort of prisoners’ dilemma. Obviously, most of our degraded culture around love is downstream of certain material conditions. Dating apps and algorithms were not invented by the editorial staff of The Drift or whatever. But I still think the popularity of this novel among this specific set of people should tell us something. We all individually hate these contemporary attitudes towards love and yet we continue to propagate them. It gives me sympathy for a lot of people who I thought sincerely believed this stuff. Maybe we can all trust one another enough to shrug off our chains at the same time, at least a little bit.

iii. Tsau, or What Price Utopia?

Back to the novel. Mating is fantastically detailed on Tsau itself, which gives the book the rare pleasure of a very concrete example of a utopia that you can use to interrogate your own ideas (in this it very much resembles The Dispossessed). The population of Tsau is made up largely of formerly destitute or exiled women, generally those who have escaped abusive environments. Besides Denoon, there are a few other men—men are allowed as dependents and relatives, but the structure is matriarchal. Only women can inherit property. The economy runs on a “voluntary labor credit system” in which each morning, tasks that need doing are posted in the center of the village and volunteers earn scrip, which can be spent on goods at the main storehouse. Though there is trade with the outside world, much of Tsau is self-sustaining and based on clever uses of solar power, water retention, and crop rotation. There is entertainment: lectures, music, sports, discussion groups. Occasionally, movies are screened. Interpersonal strife eventually enters the picture, as it must in a novel, but for the most part it is idyllic.

Still, the first serious crack in Denoon and the narrator’s relationship occurs the first time he brings up, idly, the prospect of staying in Tsau indefinitely. She panics:

But what about Jews? was my absolutely peculiar first thought. I felt panic. Staying in Tsau with Nelson could hardly be considered durance vile, but there were no Jews there. All of my best friends were Jews. The only male colleague friends Nelson ever alluded to with signs of feeling were Jewish, I had happened to note. Then there was a surge of feeling about my mother. I would never see her.

Then, irrationally, it was the graveyard, everything about it plus the prospect of ending up there, that chilled me. I knew what I would hear from Nelson if I alluded to it: If you don’t like a particular custom or usage here, you can change it, or try to, you can propose your own. That was the central virtue of Tsau, supposedly. The same applied to culture. Tsau was Paris compared to ninety-eight percent of the villages of the world. I would hear again how deeply he believed in the village qua village. Any book or periodical in the world could be brought into Tsau. There were villages in Austria today less culturally open and advanced than Tsau.

What I really wanted was to shout at him about the gigantic quid pro quo he was presenting, as in We can be together forever but only on the head of a pin, in Tsau.

I would have had the same reaction. What is it about utopias that feel so stifling? After I read this section, I tried to make some notes about what society I would want to live in. I was quite surprised by the three words that suddenly surfaced in my consciousness. Those three words—my first thought—were “Dr. Johnson’s London.”

Dr. Johnson’s London? I’ve never even read Samuel Johnson or even Life of Johnson! (Though, in another strange coincidence, Johnson and Boswell are brought up several times in the very next section of Mating, which I had not yet read). Anyway, London seems nice, but the weather’s better here in Los Angeles. And how far from a utopia! The city ringed by Blake’s dark satanic mills, full of poverty and disease and desperate people living cheek by jowl, never to rise above their station. What a fundamentally poor character I must have, to fantasize about joining some tiny class of layabouts running intellectual cover for a rapacious empire, sitting comfortably upon the back of so much suffering.

But looking back it’s clear what she means by her odd first thought about Jews, and what I meant by my sudden strange reverie for the 18th century. Modern subject that I am, I doubt that I could live happily in a small community, under the watchful eye of a thousand cousins and uncles, with no privacy and no chance to reinvent oneself or ride the bus or sit alone in a diner with a book. Jews and Johnson respectively stand for cosmopolitanism, bustle, the freedom of the crowd, the smoky pub, the exchange of ideas that comes from different people living in the same place. The exact type of environment, as it happens, that gave rise to the novel as a form. The modern world may be alienating and hostile, but it is full of possibilities for intelligent and driven people that no isolated village could provide, and one has to sit with the troubling thought that eradicating some of the worst aspects of society may also sweep away some of the best. As nice as Tsau might be, could it produce something like Mating? Is any amount of suffering worth that? These are questions I cannot answer, but they are the sort of productive ambiguities that the best and fairest fictional portrayals of alternate modes of organizing society can cause to linger in the mind.

iv. True Romance

I realize I have not given too much time to the relationship between Denoon and the narrator, which forms so large a part of the appeal of the book. Suffice it to say that it is one of my favorite happy relationships in all of fiction despite—or because of—the fact that it is a little bit annoying. Narrator again:

Causing active ongoing pleasure in your mate is something people tend to restrict to the sexual realm or getting attractive food on the table on time, but keeping permanent intimate comedy going is more important than any other one thing. Naturally it was living with Denoon that gave me this notion in its developed form as opposed to the bare inkling I got during the evening in question. I’m not talking about having a sense of humor you apply to the ups and downs of living together. I’m talking about being comedically proactive.

Not only is this good advice, an inordinate amount of time is spent in Mating on the various minor in-jokes, puns, neologisms, and other things that make up the secret language of two people in love. The result is a relationship of touching verisimilitude, because, at least in my experience, any random few minutes of private conversation between two intimate partners are as likely as not to sound to an outsider like the ravings of two lunatics. Rush is rare among writers of the first rank in having enjoyed a long, mostly happy, and productively collaborative relationship with his wife, Elsa, of whom he readily admits the narrator of Mating is “pretty much a straight lift.” Mating is not an advice book, far from it, but as models for this sort of intellectual love go, one could do much worse.

Another way in which the book ventures into risky territory and survives is in its deployment of grand romantic cliche. The first night that Denoon and the narrator consummate their relationship, there is a sudden, violent rainstorm over the desert. I mean come on! That sort of thing is only supposed to happen in books with Fabio on the cover (or the Elf Smut books that are its modern equivalent). And yet, because the development of the relationship until now has been so careful, and because the narrative voice has been one we know would not be easily taken in by such things, the moments of surrender—surrender to love, on the narrator’s part, and surrender to a sort of majestic, mythic, even corny mode on Rush’s part—hit that much harder. There are even small, very brief and subtle suggestions of the supernatural or mystical. In one of my favorite moments in the novel, the narrator, deep in ardor, is watching Denoon reading Blake:

What I almost idly wished for as I crept up on Nelson was for some apposite line out of the whole blur and ruck of William Blake to come to me. That would be perfect. And lo, out of nowhere, and thanks to cryptomnesia being a real capacity, I retrieved the line He rested on the Desart wild. I felt mediumistic. Nelson rolled over in shock. It turned out that he had just been going from browsing the Four Zoas to reading the Additional Fragments and Notes section, where in fact my line came from.

This must be the right life, I thought.

v. Finis

(Here I discuss the ending of Mating, so go forth at your own peril.)

It all comes to grief, of course. There is a social crisis in Tsau, an accusation of murder. Denoon sets out to ride to the closest nearby village, his horse is bitten by a snake, and he spends eight days alone in the desert with a broken leg, on the verge of death, beset by strange hallucinations (Or perhaps something else; this is another moment in the novel that allows for the possibility of the supernatural.), before he is rescued by a passing group of traders. When he returns, he is distant and reserved, buddhistic, infuriatingly blissful, changed by an experience that the narrator, with her rigorous intellect and fierce rationality, cannot access. Of course, anyone who has been in a disintegrating relationship will recognize the broad strokes. The invisible wall goes up. The connection to the other, once so effortless, becomes difficult if not impossible. You share your bed with a stranger. The narrator realizes something has shifted, probably forever. She returns to America. Before she goes, in a real stab in the reader’s heart, she all but arranges a liaison between Denoon and a beautiful young State Department intern, just as Denoon’s ex-wife, who she met at the beginning of the novel, played matchmaker with her and Denoon.

So that’s it. There was something beautiful, for a time, but it couldn’t have lasted. Denoon, like many older intellectuals in relationships with younger women, was more of a cad than he seemed at first. The narrator couldn’t commit to what life in Tsau would really entail. Call it what you will. Sometimes it doesn’t work out. Unless…

At the novel’s end, the narrator is listless, working a dull job at a university press. “Being in America,” she says “is like being stabbed to death with a butter knife by a weakling.” She gets a mysterious, vague phone message from Tsau. It doesn’t tell her too much, one way or the other, only that the trouble over the accused murder has been resolved and that Bronwen, the State Department intern, left Tsau after a week. She doesn’t know if the message was left by Denoon or someone else. She doesn’t know if she’s being obliquely asked to return, or just offered closure. She debates with herself. She consults the Tao Te Ching. She fears she is being manipulated. Finally, she decides to wager it all. “Je viens,” are the last words of the novel. I’m going². “Why not?”

Interpretations of the ending will inevitably differ. There is a cynical reading. In this reading, the novel is basically a tragedy. How could the narrator, having experienced life and love at their limits, ever settle down in mundane American society again? Either she will remain unfulfilled, never again able to recapture the exhilaration she felt, or it will fade and she’ll rejoin the ranks of consumer society, a depressing ending either way. Of course she’s the type of brilliant woman that can’t get over a bad boyfriend. Of course she throws it all away, foolishly, self-destructively, on the novel’s heightened equivalent of a crude u up? text. What could she possibly find there that would satisfy her? Why chase something that will always be receding? Why throw good money after bad?

My preferred reading is the optimistic one (Rush also describes it as optimistic, for what it’s worth). Maybe it will fail. The dream of a romance of equals does face innumerable obstacles, after all, particularly when the woman is an unsparing intellect who won’t stand for even a small dishonesty and the man is a charismatic, stubborn revolutionary with a high-grade messiah complex. But it would be wrong to abandon the possibility of salvaging things and leave herself wondering what might have been. Going back might be stupid, it might be foolish, it might be a thing people do in Victorian novels and 90s romantic comedies that has no relevance to our world with its talk of focusing on yourself and setting boundaries and not defining oneself through the attentions of others. But still, at the end of the day, it’s the only miracle that exists. Rationality is great, but it has its limits. There are forces out there more powerful than us. You only get one life to live.

Why not risk it all for love?

1. By incredible coincidence or at least heartening confirmation that my aesthetic priorities are clearly defined, not only was Bellow the last writer who gave me this feeling as well, the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of The Victim is by none other than Norman Rush.

2. Leaving this up as a record of my dumb anglophone brain but this actually means “I’m coming,” as helpfully pointed out by Derek Neal in the comments.