Shepard, Jim (22 September 1991). "The Perfect Man, the Perfect Place, and Yet. . ". New York Times . Retrieved 28 January 2016. Young women’s affinity with “Mating” might also have to do with Rush’s female narrator, through whom he gives voice to his thoughts on love, sex, feminism, the infrastructure of Denoon’s experimental all-woman society and just about every other topic under the sun. Mating shouldn't work on any level. A first person narrative about a young failing female anthropologist falling in love with an older American man who has founded an egalitarian feminist commune in the heart of Southern Africa is just too cutely exotic, too cheaply high concept to work. His understandable antipathy to anthropologists -- "Most of the official great names in anthropology were mediocrities. Some were creeps" -- complicates matters too.

As one would expect, the heart of the novel takes place in Tsau and focuses on Nar's relationship with Nelson Denoon. Many are the opportunities we as readers are given to peer deeper into the character of both Nar and Denoon as they perform many phases of their mating dance (perhaps I should say mating ritual since we are in Africa). Here are four snapshots I found particularly provocative: There were a couple of cases, I won’t say which, where she said that examples of feminine behavior were not truthful,” Rush said. “I fought her on a couple of them, and it turns out that she was right.”

More good mail days.

I went with it right from the beginning — you either go with that or don’t,” she said. “I thought she very well represented an enormous number of women at that time.” If such a book were published today, it’s likely that its narrator would invite more scrutiny. Ann Close, Rush’s editor at Knopf, said she had no problem with it. The best rendering of erotic politics…since D.H. Lawrence…The voice of Rush’s narrator is immediate, instructive and endearing.” — The New York Review of Books

Does the narrator make the right choice by leaving Denoon and Africa? Is she correct in thinking Denoon had suffered a nervous breakdown and become "insanely passive," an "impostor," after his ordeal in the desert? Or did Denoon have a genuinely mystical experience? Flirtatious banter ensues, in English and Setswana, and she inquires if Tsau—a closed experimental community—would accept her as a volunteer. “You tempt me,” retorts Denoon, “but I have to say no. Of course what would make you irresistible would be if you know something about cooperage. Or taxidermy, say.” “Sorry, I said.”New-York Historical Society explores the social and cultural consequences of the environmental crisis through art

At the end of the novel, after she has returned to the states, the narrator argues that the major affliction of our age is “corporatism unbound.” She goes on to say “What is becoming sovereign in the world is not the people but the limited liability corporation . . . that’s what’s concentrating sovereign power to rape the world and overenrich the top minions who run these entities”; and, finally she asserts that the “true holocaust in the world is the thing we call development . . . the superimposition of market economies on traditional and unprepared third world cultures” [p. 471]. Have events in the past decade, in the United States and around the world, confirmed or refuted these arguments?

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All of this is presented in an allusively freewheeling first-person narrative that provides exhilarating evidence of an impressive intelligence at work and play. Readers receive a palpable sense of having their education sternly tested -- and expanded -- by Mr. Rush's novel. Geography, history, political science, economics, literature, biology, popular culture and utter trivia -- the narrator and her beloved Denoon hash everything out, and in doing so are encyclopedic in the extreme, segueing from bats to Boers to Borges to Botswana. (...) Mr. Rush has created one of the wiser and wittier fictive meditations on the subject of mating. His novel illuminates why we yield when we don't have to. It seeks to illuminate the nature of true intimacy -- how to define it, how to know when one has achieved it. And few books evoke so eloquently that state of love at its apogee" - Jim Shepard, The New York Times Book Review Pashman, Joshua (Fall 2010). "Norman Rush, The Art of Fiction No. 205". The Paris Review. No.194 . Retrieved April 10, 2021. NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER• Is love between equals possible? This modern classic is a delightful intellectual love story that explores the deepest canyons of romantic loveeven as it asks large questions about society, geopolitics, and the mystery of what men and women really want.