{"id":84058,"date":"2015-03-26T12:12:04","date_gmt":"2015-03-26T16:12:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=84058"},"modified":"2015-03-26T12:12:04","modified_gmt":"2015-03-26T16:12:04","slug":"3-blasts-and-lurches","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/03\/26\/3-blasts-and-lurches\/","title":{"rendered":"3: \u201cBlasts and Lurches\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

From \u201cA F\u00eate Worse than Death\u201d through \u201cA Great Reckoning in a Little Room,\u201d pp. 59\u201371<\/em><\/p>\n

\"mating\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This is the third entry in our\u00a0<\/em>Mating\u00a0Book Club<\/em><\/a>. Read along.<\/em><\/p>\n

In their opening salvos to this celebration of\/cerebration on Norman Rush\u2019s Mating<\/em>, it seems only reasonable that my virtual clubmates, Popkey and Piepenbring, have focused on the voice of the novel\u2019s nameless first-person narrator. Without question, she\u2019s a unique creation. Piepenbring calls her, approvingly, \u201cstrange<\/a>,\u201d a strangeness that Popkey would have us appreciate for a believable femaleness<\/a>. I concede, as Popkey documents, that since Mating<\/em> received the National Book Award for fiction, in 1991, it has been a point of debate, among critics and readers, to assess the degree of plausibility of the femaleness of Rush\u2019s narrator (a nameless narrator who, in Rush\u2019s third-person second novel, Mortals<\/em>, has a brief walk-on part in which we learn both her pedestrian forename and her satisfying surname).\u00a0<\/p>\n

Setting aside here the question of a male novelist\u2019s capacity to imagine female prose (whatever that is), it seems to me that a deeper challenge, and the one by which we might measure Rush\u2019s capacities, is his ability to imagine a character with a complex, plausible intellectual life. Though the human heart tested to its limits is amply central in the history of the novel, a human mind functioning at the peak of its powers is less well represented (and, when amply charted, is more typically criminal: Charles Kinbote and Humbert Humbert, for two). As such, I\u2019m less concerned about veracity of voice than I am with memorableness of mind. No one I know talks like Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, but that doesn\u2019t stop me from believing in him. And no one I know takes in the world quite the way the narrator of Mating<\/em> does. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt became the kind of scene,\u201d Mating<\/em>\u2019s narrator tells us at the outset of the novel\u2019s second part, \u201cthat makes you want to be a writer so you can capture a transient unique form of social agony being undergone by people in every way, the observer excepted.\u201d I love her \u201ctransient unique form of social agony\u201d both for the conceptual punch delivered by the comma-free collision of adjectives and for marrying \u201csocial\u201d and \u201cagony\u201d\u2014that eternally codependent couple. I also like Rush\u2019s boldness, as we\u2019re walking into this huge party, in giving his narrator the claim that what we\u2019re about to get is the kind of scene that a writer should be able to capture. Rush is raising his own bar and claiming he\u2019ll clear it. It isn\u2019t bragging if it\u2019s so.<\/p>\n

The narrator is at a party being held by local directors in Botswana of the USAID mission. She\u2019s there because of the man she calls Z., \u201cmy last relationship before Nelson Denoon.\u201d A British spy with a terrible comb-over, Z. has gotten the narrator into this grand house under the expectation that there is a chance that Nelson Denoon\u2014the man who, as my compatriot Popkey puts it, \u201chas been hovering on the novel\u2019s margins since its very first pages\u201d\u2014might be in attendance. So while Z. goes off in search of a beer, the narrator, who has up until now been navigating us through the lively but perilous precincts of Gaborone (Gabs, she calls it) wanders through this fine house, a sudden shuttle into high society (think Kitty\u2019s arrival at the ball in part one of Anna Karenina<\/em>\u2014such high hopes!). Mating<\/em>\u2019s party isn\u2019t that splendid, but there is an Anna-and-Kitty vibe: the narrator notices, as she looks for Denoon, \u201cpretend[ing] a fixation on seeing every piece of chinoiserie there was, which naturally took me off the beaten track and into the private rooms at the back of the house,\u201d that a woman is following her:<\/p>\n

\n

She was following me because I was American and seemed so at home and she was looking for someone she could impose on for something. Underneath the extremis she was in she was the way you would die to look at forty, forty-two. Sorority person, I said to myself. She was in a couture version of safari attire, which she had to know was a mistake. The invitations had specified formal and she was barely touching smart casual. She definitely looked rich, which made me not sisterly toward her. I have a vulgar marxist reaction to the rich, which is part of me. Not that I\u2019m a marxist of any kind. I would have made a wonderful marxist if I\u2019d been born into it, probably, which is the only way it could have stuck. Too bad for marxism.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"couture\"<\/a>

\u201cA couture version of safari attire\u201d: a haute couture safari jacket from Yves Saint Laurent.<\/p><\/div>\n

I love the way Rush has of shuttling between the narrator\u2019s eye (\u201ca couture version of safari attire\u201d) and her mind (\u201cI have a vulgar marxist reaction to the rich\u201d), all the while advancing us to the moment when the narrator and the woman collide:\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n

She was about to be a spectacle, unless I helped. Her eyes were red and her left hand looked like one of those claw feet on nineteenth-century furniture clutching an orb, except that the orb in her case was composed of damp Kleenex. I realized that her safari coatlet was in fact perfect for her situation because of its accordion pockets. Even as I watched she reached into one for yet another Kleenex, which she passed across her nostrils before adding it to the orb she was creating. My first act was to gently relieve her of her collection and force it into a stoneware urn.<\/p>\n

I want to go to my husband, she said. But I\u2014<\/p>\n

What? I said.<\/p>\n

But I, they\u2014<\/p>\n

What? I said.<\/p>\n

These men. There are men.<\/p>\n

Be more consecutive, I said. I don\u2019t know why I was so butch with her, but she elicited it, and she also seemed to respond to it. She seemed unsteady. Thank god the shrimp tree is empty, I thought, because it looked as though she might collapse into it.<\/p>\n

Would you go with me? she said.<\/p>\n

For a second I could see something a little ulterior in her distress, but I lost my grasp of it when she said she was Grace Denoon. Instantly I was her sister.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And suddenly we\u2019re hooked into the hugeness of what is about to unfold: Denoon!<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Vocabulary<\/strong><\/p>\n

Mating\u2019s narrator boasts a daunting lexicon. We\u2019ve looked up a few of the more abstruse words so you don\u2019t have to. <\/em><\/p>\n

Proleptically (p. 60; \u201cHe had toothpicks with him and handed me some proleptically\u201d)<\/em>: prolepsis <\/em>is the anticipation and answering of possible objections in rhetorical speech. The narrator seems to like this word\u2014she uses it often.<\/p>\n

Cui bono<\/em> (p. 63; \u201cLooking for the cui bono or materialist explanation is nearly always correct\u201d)<\/em>: Latin, of course\u2014\u201cTo whose benefit?\u201d<\/p>\n

Arboricola (p. 68; \u201ca big potted arboricola near the door\u201d)<\/em>:\u00a0<\/em>a flowering plant native to Taiwan, better known by its common name, the Dwarf Umbrella Tree.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Wyatt Mason is a contributing writer for\u00a0the <\/em>New York Times Magazine and teaches at Bard College.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Norman Rush will receive <\/em>The Paris Review\u2019s Hadada Prize at this year\u2019s Spring Revel<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Next: Joshua Cohen on the Solar Democrat himself, Nelson Denoon.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From \u201cA F\u00eate Worse than Death\u201d through \u201cA Great Reckoning in a Little Room,\u201d pp. 59\u201371 This is the third entry in our\u00a0Mating\u00a0Book Club. Read along. In their opening salvos to this celebration of\/cerebration on Norman Rush\u2019s Mating, it seems only reasonable that my virtual clubmates, Popkey and Piepenbring, have focused on the voice of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":810,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17319],"tags":[8758,1102,1526,11797,6260,813,747,17570,17322,795],"class_list":["post-84058","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mating-book-club","tag-book-club","tag-feminism","tag-hadada-prize","tag-humbert-humbert","tag-mating","tag-norman-rush","tag-novels","tag-raskolnikov","tag-reading-group","tag-revel"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n\u201cMating\u201d Book Club, Part 3: Party Life in Botswana<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Wyatt Mason on Norman Rush\u2019s approach to a classic literary set piece: the party scene.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/03\/26\/3-blasts-and-lurches\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"3: \u201cBlasts and Lurches\u201d by Wyatt Mason\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"March 26, 2015 \u2013 From \u201cA F\u00eate Worse than Death\u201d through \u201cA Great Reckoning in a Little Room,\u201d pp. 59\u201371 This is the third entry in our\u00a0Mating\u00a0Book Club. 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