Mating by Norman Rush

My utopia is equal love, equal love between people of equal value, although value is an approximation for the word I want. Why is it so difficult? Assortative mating shows there has to be some drive in nature to bring equals together in the toils of love, so why even in the most enlightened and beautifully launched unions are we afraid we hear the master-slave relationship moving its slow thighs somewhere in the vicinity? It has to be cultural. In fact the closest thing I have to a religion is that this has to be cultural. I could do practically anything while he was asleep and not bother him. I wrote in my journal, washed dishes in slow motion if we hadn't gotten around to them. I was emotional a lot, privately. I wanted to incorporate everything, understand everything, because time is cruel and nothing stays the same.

Book 1 of 2025, let's go!

Norman Rush's Mating follows an unnamed American academic living in Botswana. When she hears that a famously contrarian anthropologist named Nelson Denoon is building a secretive community in the desert, she shows up unannounced--after a week-long, life-threatening trek through the Kalahari Desert--to become a part of it. She becomes Denoon's lover and accomplice in the project, a female-dominated village called Tsai.

These two threads, love and the village, dominate Mating. The narrator and Denoon are, in many ways, perfect for each other: they are intellectuals and skeptics, people of both body and brain, sensual, devoted to the physical act of love, and secretly rather needy. Mating, if it does nothing else, gives a convincing sense of two people whose romance makes sense, because their thoughts and feelings seem to vibrate on the same wavelength. This love might just be the kind of kind of "equal love between people of equal value" that the narrator dreams about, but even the most equal loves exist within the context of the larger world, and this fact hangs over their heads. Tsai is meant to be a self-sustaining community, led by and for African women, and Nelson's role as leader--in fact, his presence--are only meant to be temporary. Will their love be able to survive somewhere else? Or is it only here, in Tsai, that the relationship can prosper?

Tsai is, I think, the most interesting thing about Mating. Decisions in Tsai are made my a woman-only council; necessary labor is assigned a daily value according to its urgency and can be performed by anyone in the community in exchange for credits to purchase items from a village store. Tsai is clean and orderly, both off the grid and technologically cutting-edge; it relies on the abundant sun for solar power and makes use of several practical inventions created by Denoon himself. For Denoon, Tsai represents a thumb in the eye of "development," a word that captures the ignorant meddling of NGOs in the lives of Africans. Tsai is designed to be bottom-up, to give power to the powerless. And yet, the model fails to keep out malcontents and bad actors, especially among the token number of men, who resent Denoon's position and seem to be scheming for ways to reassert their traditional dominance.

I think my favorite part of Mating is the final movement, in which Denoon sets out on an urgent and controversial mission, but ends up nearly dying in the desert before being rescued by a group of nomads. Denoon returns from his ordeal changed, more Zen-like, shorn of his humor and his cantankerousness. No one else seems to register the difference, or they like it. Only the narrator is left feeling abandoned, because, of course, there is no equal love between an ordinary woman and a Christlike Denoon, a Zen master. It's an interesting moment, because it suggests that the love we share for each other is as much about our flaws as our virtues. And it made me wonder if the same is true for our political communities, even for places like Tsai--are conflict, enmity, and friction a necessary part of the way we live with others? Utopias cannot stamp them out, but even if they did, would we want them to?

Brent's Top 10 of 2024!

 Another year, another 35-40 books I read and didn't review. Last year, I didn't even get an end-of-year top 10 posted; this year, I am. 

As always happens, when I read through my list, I realized what a wonderful year of reading it had been. Of the 60 books I completed, I only disliked a couple (which shall remain unnamed) and even those, I considered worthwhile. There were less graphic novels and less new authors this year; there was more nonfiction--including Madwoman in the Attic, which I've been chipping away at for years; there was a little less international lit, which I hope to recitfy in 2025.

And so without further ado, here are the peaks of the pages for 2024. 

Honorable Mentions:
In the Eye of the Wild - Nastassja Martin
Who knew a book about being mauled by a bear could be so existentially upsetting?

The Children's Bach - Helen Garner
I was going to say that this reminded me of the Australian The Man Who Loved Children, then I remembered that's already Australian.

Falling Man - Don DeLillo
Not DeLillo's best, but the first 3/4ths reframe 9/11 in a way I wouldn't have expected to work at all.

A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
Finally got around to reading the "funniest novel of all time" and it was indeed very funny. And bleak, my god, it's bleak as hell.

Pew - Catherine Lacey
Another member of the 75%er club--I wasn't satisfied with the ending but the journey to get there was as compelling as it gets.

Monologue of a Dog: Poems - Wisława Szymborska
I rarely remember new poems for long, but the title poem of this collection is going to be with me forever.

My Documents - Alejandro Zambra
My second Zambra opens with one of the most jarring nd precise short stories I've ever read, and that's not nothing.

Lapvona - Otessah Moshfegh
This book is disgusting and probably nihilistic and I'm not sure it holds together really, but also, I liked it.

American Demagogue: The Great Awakening and the Rise and Fall of Populism - J. D. Dickey
If you want to know what George Whitfield and Donald Trump (who doesn't appear in this book) have in common, this is the book for you.

House Made of Dawn - N. Scott Momaday
This probably would've been in my top 10 if I'd reviewed it when I read it. A great modernist Native American novel.

My top 10 this year were fairly easy to determine, but unlike many years, actually ranking them was difficult, partially because of the amount of nonfiction that made the cut. So take this ranking with a spoonful of salt, and read all of these wherever I've ranked them.

10. Robinson - Muriel Spark
Spark's second novel could have been made for me in a laboratory. I love Robinsonades, Spark, locked room mysteries, and short funny books. This was all four, a ripping and cynical tale of a group of castaways on the titular island, at the mercy of the titular character. A little triumph.

9. The Changeling - Joy Williams
My least favorite of Williams' novels so far, The Changeling is still one of the best and strangest books I read this year. It's a mysterious and often macabre examination of woman-and-motherhood, almost a thematic retelling of Williams' State of Grace, but much weirder and bleaker. I still don't know what to 

make of the closing pages but the final sentence haunted me all year.

8. Reaganland - Rick Perlstein
The other magesterial work of nonfiction, besides Madwoman, that I read this year. My timing was spot on, since most of the book is really about Carter--it ends on election night 1980. I spent most of the book almost as frustrated with Jimmy as I was with Ronnie, and by the time I finished I'd resolved to read Perlstein's other 3 books on the rise of conservatism. And isn't that really the highest compliment you can pay an author?

7. The Wall - Marlen Haushofer
The second Robinsonade on my list is a much stranger beast on paper, and yet, maybe not in practice. While the premise--a woman wakes to find that she's been trapped in the country with no other humans behind an invisible wall--might sound like science fiction, the book itself has more in common with Robinson Crusoe than Under the Dome. Long and riviting passages about nature and survival butt up against shocking and inevitable climaxes.

6. Clock Without Hands - Carson McCullers
Another unexpectedly timely book, not because it's about racism, which is always timely, but because the form the racism takes, that of the proper, upstanding, even charming, Judge is so well-wrought that you can't help but see him in all of the kindly, helpful people in your life who nevertheless prioritize their own fears and prejudices over the well-being of others. 

5. H is for Hawk - Helen Macdonald
I've been blessed, for most of my life, to suffer very little loss, until the last decade when mortality came home to roost. And H is for Hawk captures the complexity of the grief of sudden loss better than almost anything else I've read. It really is a book about hawks too--it's just a book about Hawks that will probably make you bawl like a baby.

4. Too Much Happiness - Alice Munro
Every Munro collection is good; every Munro collection is dark. But this one was better and darker than most. Child's Play is surely one of the bleakest things in Munro's bibliography, and almost every story has a moment or two of shocking violence. Perhaps there's a little less anger here than in something like Runaway; or maybe the anger is just made more concrete here. 

3. The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse - Louise Erdrich
My fourth Erdrich novel is my favorite so far. An inveterate Graham Greene stan, I couldn't help but love a book about a priest who does the right thing in the wrong way. The explorations of gender, faith, and the American West all came together here in a way I found both techincally impressive--does anyone write prose better than Erdrich?--and moving at the same time.

2. Story of of the Lost Child - Elena Ferrante
I can't believe I've read all four of Ferrante's Neopolitian novels--for my money, the best extended narrative in modern literature--and haven't reviewed any of them. And part of me feels like this should really be my number one book, since it nailed the ending, wrapping up the story of Lenu, Lila, and their entire neighborhood over the course of 60 years as perfectly as anyone could.

1. Solenoid - Mircea Cărtăresc
I don't know what exactly to say about Solenoid. Like many of the other books I enjoyed this year, it feels impossible that it should work. It's too long, too strange, too gross, too avant garde, too indulgent--and yet, the surreal story of a man whose life is circumscribed by forces beyond his control or comprehension works perfectly, an expertly calibrated novel that takes ideas so bleak as to be nearly  Lovecraftian and winnows them to the fine point, repeated for 12 straight pages: HELP ME. And by the time the novel ends, we think there's a slight chance that someone--or something--may. 

And that's all! Here's to an ever better 2025. Thanks to the few readers of this blog and especially to my blog partner and friend Chris, without whom my literary life would be far less rich and this blog would be far more empty.