Mating (novel)
And important secondary characters in Tsau, even given the narrator's focus on Denoon and her own self-absorption, are sketchily drawn," Shepard nonetheless extols Rush's "vigorous and luminous prose."Knopf editor for Mating, Ann Close, commends Rush's "facility in conveying the voice and sensibility of his amusingly self-absorbed narrator, a feminist anthropologist whose pursuit of a famous social scientist is a timely riff on a perennial theme, What do women want?"[6] She criticizes the book for having "too much detailed sociology," but "in the main readers will be captivated by the narrator's quirky, obsessive voice and the situation she describes: a game of amorous relationships complicated by feminist doctrine and an exotic locale."The Virginia Quarterly Review mentions the first-person narrator's "emotional and intellectual entanglement" with her beloved, but concludes with the general, positive statement that "The context of their encounter and of the ensuing relationship plays a significant role in their experience, and is forcefully depicted in the sophisticated, thought-provoking novel.[12] In reviewing his most recent book, Subtle Bodies (2013), Rachel Arons in The New Yorker mentions his previous two, "both of which included delectable digressions on Marxism, economic policy, African development, and literature."[13] Arons added that "Rush has a genius for depicting language that grows out of sustained romantic partnership—what the unnamed narrator-protagonist of “Mating” called an “idioverse,” a private patois made up of shared references and sayings, occasional neologisms, and common words that have taken on new meanings."