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Loquacious Utopians
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19534 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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11 / 1991 |
4,526 Words |
| Author
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Bruce Bawer
Bruce Bawer is the author of Diminishing Fictions: Essays on
the Modern American Novel and Its Critics (Graywolf Press). He
has three books forthcoming in 1992: Prophets and Professors,
a collection of essays on modern poetry and its critics; The
Screenplay's the Thing, a compilation of pieces about films,
and Coast to Coast, a volume of poetry. |
MATING
Norman Rush
New York: Knopf, 1991
487 pp., $23
In an era when first novelists tend to be smooth-checked, writing-program graduates barely out of their teens, Norman Rush made his literary debut in full-bearded middle age. His first book, the widely publicized short-story collection Whites, appeared in 1986, after he had spent several years as an English teacher and rare-book dealer in the United States and a five-year stint (1978-83) as codirector of the Peace Corps in the southern African nation of Botswana. The six spare stories in Whites drew heavily on Rush's African experience; like much English fiction, but like very few works by Americans (the only name that comes readily to mind is that of Ernest Hemingway, whom Rush rather resembles in his dustjacket photograph), they examine the experience of foreign caucasians in black Africa. Whites received mixed reviews: critics praised Rush's perceptive eye for social minutiae and atmospheric details, his intimate understanding of southern African society, and his keen attention to the moral contingencies of the white presence in Africa; at the same time, however, many found fault with Rush's story ideas, his sense of dramatic structure, and the psychological indistinction of the expatriates and diplomats that populate his stories.
Rush's first novel, Mating, is set in Botswana, and focuses on two non-African Caucasians--American anthropologists--rather than on local blacks. One of them, a woman in her early thirties who was raised in "genteel poverty" and educated at Stanford and who is now an editor in the United States "in charge of Third World and Female Area acquisitions" for a small marginal academic press, is the narrator. The novel is a memoir of her sojourn in southern Africa, with excerpts from her African journals interpolated, here and there, in italics. For her, the allure of anthropology appears to have much to do with the opportunity it offers to slip silently into an alien culture:
I blend in, if I want to. A core fantasy of mine from before high school was that members of the most puzzling cultures were going to divulge secrets to me out of hardly noticing my intrusion, or thinking I was almost one of them.
She explains that she first went to Africa to research a thesis in nutritional anthropology; her purpose was
to
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