{"id":84334,"date":"2015-04-02T16:24:30","date_gmt":"2015-04-02T20:24:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=84334"},"modified":"2015-04-02T20:05:24","modified_gmt":"2015-04-03T00:05:24","slug":"5-if-i-overdwell-on-this-it-cant-be-helped","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/04\/02\/5-if-i-overdwell-on-this-it-cant-be-helped\/","title":{"rendered":"5: \u201cIf I Overdwell on This It Can\u2019t Be Helped\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

From \u201cGrace Acts\u201d through \u201cGrace, Again,\u201d pp. 90\u2013116
<\/em><\/p>\n

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

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

\u201cSo here he is, after all this setup: Denoon.\u201d That\u2019s how Joshua Cohen began his post last week<\/a>, and the moment when we finally confront our \u201cgenuinely goodlooking man\u201d does feel exactly that dramatic. It\u2019s a strange kind of meet-cute: girl meets boy at furtive political symposium; girl is foisted on boy by boy\u2019s not-quite-ex-wife.<\/p>\n

This section takes in two run-ins between our narrator and Denoon: the first inside the guesthouse of the USAID director\u2019s opulent home, the second near the outhouse on the Tutwane family plot in Old Naledi. After this, our narrator shares a meal with Grace, the not-quite-ex, at the humble Carat Restaurant, \u201cwhich was doomed to fail because they gave you too much food for your money.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cohen wrote that last week\u2019s one-act \u201coperat[es] on multiple time lines,\u201d but so does the novel as a whole: our narrator writes from an undefined future, looking back on life pre-Denoon until we \u201cplunge into Denoon and what followed.\u201d As hints accumulate of the disagreements, passions, and disappointments ahead, our expectation grows fevered, even as the details of the meeting itself remain wonderfully unknowable. Even though we\u2019ve been working our way toward this encounter, and even though we know that this is where the story truly begins, the moment still feels wildly significant. The narrator speaks of \u201ca feeling of fatedness\u201d: \u201cThe feeling was that this was supposed to happen, according to the stars in their courses.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n

If I overdwell on this it can\u2019t be helped: love is important and the reasons you get it or fail to are important. The number of women in my generation who in retrospect anyone will apply the term \u201cgreat love\u201d to, in any connection, is going to be minute. I needed to know if I had a chance here. Love is strenuous. Pursuing someone is strenuous \u2026 Of course even as I was machinating I was well aware I was in the outskirts of the suburbs of the thing you want or suspect is there. But at this moment in my life I was at the point where even the briefest experience of unmistakable love would be something I could clutch to myself as proof that my theory of myself was not incorrect. Theories can be reactionary and still be applicable.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Dan Piepenbring divided this book\u2019s prose<\/a>, roughly, into \u201clong, prolix sentences\u201d and \u201csimple declaratives,\u201d and the latter here seem particularly apt\u2014fated, even. We are moving quickly. Indeed, in this section, it is love\u2014more so perhaps than Denoon himself\u2014that constitutes the main event. Mating<\/em> is no longer a love story told in past perfect. Love seems to clarify our narrator\u2019s wanderings, to give them shape after the fact. Everything snaps into focus. Because this is, with apologies to Sade, \u201cno ordinary love\u201d:<\/p>\n

\n

What beguiles you toward intellectual love is the feeling of observing a mental searchlight lazily turning here and there and lighting up certain parts of the landscape you thought might be dubious or fraudulent but lacked the time or energy to investigate or the inner authority to dismiss tout court. The searchlight confirms you. I\u2019m thinking of Nelson\u2019s comments on the formerly famous Norman O. Brown, or on deconstructionism, although all this came much later. Denoon was an answer to something I was only subliminally aware was really bothering me, namely the glut of things you feel you ought to have a perspective on, \u00e0 la core-periphery analysis or the galloping hypoth\u00e8se Girardien.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u201cLazily\u201d is doing some beautiful work in that first sentence. It\u2019s precisely the self-directedness of an intellectual lover\u2019s mind that makes it so seductive\u2014that mind can \u201cconfirm\u201d all kinds of things you wanted confirmed not out of stridency or intention, but because its movements harmonize so well those of your own mind. Here is intellectual partnership at its purest.<\/p>\n

The story\u2019s multiple time lines make our narrator something of a mystery in this section. She speaks of this love as if it\u2019s already grand, but the victories themselves are provisional at this point: they\u2019ve only just met. And it\u2019s not as if the strangeness of the circumstances fails to make an impression. The narrator knows that Grace, as Denoon\u2019s former beloved, is about as nondisinterested a party as one can imagine\u2014and that Denoon\u2019s impression of her is contingent on this most unlikely Cupid. (\u201cWas revenge in it somewhere or was she trying to involve me with him in order to get some legal advantage? This was my realpolitikal lobe speaking.\u201d) Yet:<\/p>\n

\n

Of course, Grace was drunk. It was crystalline. I had led a drunk to this occasion but not seen it until now. How I had missed it was a case study in the effect of motivation on perception. He would have to be feeling that without me she would never have been there. <\/em>[emphasis mine]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A few lines down:<\/p>\n

\n

It was now awkward or impossible for us to say anything to each other, unless I could come up with something.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

These moments threaten \u201cfatedness,\u201d yet the narrator doesn\u2019t dwell on them. Nor\u2014in her second meeting with Denoon, when she (well, her urine) jeopardizes the fate of third-world agriculture\u2014does she dwell on her spectacular uric faux pas, to use Piepenbring\u2019s phrase. And why should she be coy? We know, by now, that she and Denoon will get together; to affect suspense on this point would be misleading. But then, when Denoon flexes his intellectual muscles, our narrator wonders:<\/p>\n

\n

No question he was showing off for me with this\u2014but why, if any further association with him was as out of the question as he seemed to want me to understand?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This is a strange bit of aporia, no? She knows <\/em>why!
<\/em><\/p>\n

To be clear, I find this considerably less<\/em> disingenuous than the alternative approach Rush could\u2019ve taken\u2014to lead us through these meetings with a false sense of uncertainty. Reserve and steadiness aren\u2019t always more appealing than self-doubt, but they are here. And they\u2019re more honest, too. It\u2019s just a little cheeky, is all.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve exceeded my word count, but I\u2019ve missed so much! The second run-in with Grace, for one thing. (Is Grace \u201cstupid or just drunk\u201d? She is neither or she\u2019s both, but she understands, perhaps before the narrator does, how successful her speculative matchmaking has proven to be.) And Meerkotter, Grace\u2019s highly unpleasant rebound\u2014Colonel Joll with a stronger sex drive. Not to mention all of the miraculous, tossed-off insights (a grim word, but that\u2019s really what they are) I\u2019ve failed to honor. So, in partial atonement, an especially juicy one:<\/p>\n

\n

British anti-Americanism was hardly worth noticing because it was just one more facet of the larger phenomenon of British self-worship.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Now, onward!<\/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

Noli me tangere (p. 90, \u201csince my middle name is noli me tangere\u201d)<\/em>: a warning or prohibition against meddling or interference.
<\/em><\/p>\n

Celerity (p. 103, \u201cThe celerity with which people recognize something\u201d)<\/em>: swiftness of movement.<\/p>\n

Tout pardonner (p. 106, \u201cI developed a more tout pardonner perspective\u201d)<\/em>: all is forgiven.<\/p>\n

Bolus (p. 107, \u201cAnthropology: a bolus, incidental\u201d)<\/em>: a small rounded mass of a substance, especially of chewed food at the moment of swallowing.
<\/em><\/p>\n

Thews (p. 112, \u201cHe was very proud of what Edgar Rice Burroughs would have called his thews\u201d)<\/em>: muscles and tendons perceived as generating physical strength.
<\/em><\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

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

Mark Krotov is a senior editor at Melville House.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From \u201cGrace Acts\u201d through \u201cGrace, Again,\u201d pp. 90\u2013116 This is the fifth entry in our\u00a0Mating\u00a0Book Club. Read along. \u201cSo here he is, after all this setup: Denoon.\u201d That\u2019s how Joshua Cohen began his post last week, and the moment when we finally confront our \u201cgenuinely goodlooking man\u201d does feel exactly that dramatic. It\u2019s a strange […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":813,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17319],"tags":[8758,17650,17649,2111,6260,17321,17320,813,17439,17322,7988],"class_list":["post-84334","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mating-book-club","tag-book-club","tag-hypothese-girardien","tag-intellectual-love","tag-love","tag-mating","tag-mating-book-club","tag-nelson-denoon","tag-norman-rush","tag-perspective","tag-reading-group","tag-sade"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n\u201cMating\u201d Book Club, Part 5: The Joys of Intellectual Love<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Mark Krotov on the beginning (at last) of the romance central to \u201cMating.\u201d\" \/>\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\/04\/02\/5-if-i-overdwell-on-this-it-cant-be-helped\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"5: \u201cIf I Overdwell on This It Can\u2019t Be Helped\u201d by Mark Krotov\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"April 2, 2015 \u2013 From \u201cGrace Acts\u201d through \u201cGrace, Again,\u201d pp. 90\u2013116 This is the fifth entry in our\u00a0Mating\u00a0Book Club. 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