Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Surely someone has already
pointed out the irony of the surname Rush for a writer who can devote a long
paragraph to uneven paving tiles. Mortals--the follow-up to Norman
Rush's National Book Award-winning Mating--is
a complex, unhurried tour de force; the beautifully rendered story of the
end of a marriage. Ray and Iris Finch are white American expatriates in
Botswana. A school principal and Milton scholar, Ray is also a contract
agent for the CIA. But Ray's new boss doesn't want to see the gorgeous
reports into which Finch has channeled all the talent and ambition that
might otherwise have gone into poetry. He is asked to submit only his notes.
This is clearly a demotion, and it occurs at the same moment that Ray's
adored wife begins to develop feelings for her doctor, a charismatic black
American with dangerous political ideas. Like many brilliant novels,
Mortals has an Achilles heel. The book is too long by as much as 200
pages. Those pages aren't without interest, and if--like the author--you
find the narrative voice of this novel compelling in itself, you will not
mind the lengthy anecdotes, hair-splitting, and digressions that Rush
indulges in. Other readers may do a little judicious skimming in the second
half of the book and still experience the pleasures of this masterful and
psychologically acute novel. --Regina Marler
From Publishers Weekly
From the beginning, the tone of
Rush's eagerly awaited new novel is edgy and febrile-a harbinger of the
unsettling events that will ensue. Ray Finch, a Milton scholar who teaches
in a small secondary school in Botswana during the 1990s, is having an
identity crisis. After many years as an undercover CIA agent, he has lost
his emotional equilibrium, and he's strung out with suspicion and fear. Is
his adored wife, Iris, on the verge of an affair? What's with Iris's warm
relationship with the brother Ray despises-gay, witty Rex? How long can Ray
suppress his growing disillusionment with the agency's arrogant and ruthless
methods? When Ray's chief sends him into the interior to hunt down the
idealistic leader of a fledgling rebellion, Ray's fears transmogrify into
living nightmares, and the novel, already a textured, erotic portrait of a
disintegrating marriage and a society in flux, becomes a political thriller
infused with violence. Ray is acutely aware of the cultural dissonance
introduced by Western society. According to Iris's lover, a black American
doctor, Christianity has wrecked Africa; the AIDS epidemic threatens another
kind of destruction; and idealistic attempts at reform are doomed to failure
(the Denoons, from Rush's prize-winning novel, Mating, show up here, their
crusading ardor much diminished). The decadent excesses of rich Americans
compared with the disciplined simplicity of life in Botswana add an element
of satire. Rush's attempts to meld political reality with domestic
tragicomedy occasionally make the narrative unwieldy, and suspense is
sometimes fractured during the action sequences in the desert as Ray's inner
turmoil spins into tortured mental riffs. Still, the richness of Rush's
vision, and its stringent moral clarity, sweep the reader into his
brilliantly observed world. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Like Rush's National Book Award winner, Mating
(1991), this huge, stirring novel is about middle-class Americans in
Botswana, Africa. And Rush tells it with the same enthralling mix of
intimacy and politics, sex and war, commitment and cynicism, literature and
farce. But now the protagonist is a minor secret CIA agent in the early
1990s with the region in turmoil as Mandela struggles to come to power
across the border. Ray's not quite sure how he landed in his spy job, but he
quite likes it. He's sure he's never been involved with anything really
bad. What matters to him is his beautiful wife, Iris. After 17 years,
he's still totally obsessed with every part of her body, every glance, every
funny word. But is she having an affair with Morel, the black American
doctor who believes the way to fix broken Africa is to get rid of
Christianity? When Ray is sent on a bungled mission and lands up with the
brutal apartheid paramilitay, Morel comes to the rescue, and the two bond in
a prison cell "like characters in Beckett's plays," arguing about love and
Milton while pandemonium rages. Some readers may skip the religion debates,
others may gloss over the military adventure. But all will find the radiant
love story both erotic and hilarious. Most moving is the gritty idealism:
despite the antic postmodern irony, commitment, Rush argues, isn't
irrelevant. OK, the truth won't set you free and all that, but the
individual is responsible, and small things can make a huge difference.
Hazel Rochman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Book Description
The greatly anticipated new
novel by Norman Rush—whose first novel, Mating, won the National Book
Award and was everywhere acclaimed—is his richest work yet. It is at once a
political adventure, a social comedy, and a passionate triangle. It is set
in the 1990s in Botswana—the African country Rush has indelibly made his own
fictional territory.
Mortals chronicles the misadventures of
three ex-pat Americans: Ray Finch, a contract CIA agent, operating
undercover as an English instructor in a private school, who is setting out
on perhaps his most difficult assignment; his beautiful but slightly foolish
and disaffected wife, Iris, with whom he is obsessively in love; and Davis
Morel, an iconoclastic black holistic physician, who is on a personal
mission to “lift the yoke of Christian belief from Africa.”
The passions of these three entangle them with a local
populist leader, Samuel Kerekang, whose purposes are grotesquely
misconstrued by the CIA, fixated as the agency is on the astonishing
collapse of world socialism and the simultaneous, paradoxical triumph of
radical black nationalism in South Africa, Botswana’s neighbor. And when a
small but violent insurrection erupts in the wild northern part of the
country, inspired by Kerekang but stoked by the erotic and political
intrigues of the American trio—the outcome is explosive and often
explosively funny.
Along the way, there are many pleasures. Letters from
Ray’s brilliantly hostile brother and Iris’s woebegone sister provide a
running commentary on contemporary life in America. Africa and Africans are
powerfully evoked, and the expatriate scene is cheerfully skewered.
Through lives lived ardently in an unforgiving land,
Mortals examines with wit and insight the dilemmas of power, religion,
rebellion, and contending versions of liberation and love. It is a study of
a marriage over time, and a man’s struggle to find his way when his private
and public worlds are shifting. It is Norman Rush’s most commanding work.
From the Back Cover
“Marvelous . . . a portrait of
a marriage and a political thriller . . . Rush merges the two successfully
and somewhat shockingly.”
–Time Magazine
“Rush’s first novel, Mating, was magnificent.
Mortals, as hard as it is to believe, is even better.”
–Erik Tokells, Fortune
“Marvelous . . . One wants to call Rush the best
writer of his generation, but one imagines that he would reject the
category.”
–John Homans, New York Magazine
“Rush has now produced three books so full of
brainwork, contour, sinew and laser light that we don’t want to leave home
without him.”
–John Leonard, cover, New York Times Book Review
“Rush has a canny understanding of Africa, a
profound appreciation for the fine points of romantic love, a muscular style
of description, and an eye for character [that is] frighteningly sharp.”
–The Economist
“A surprisingly old-fashioned plot-driven spy yarn, set
against an expansive backdrop of unresolved romantic and intellectual
conflict.”
–Chris Lehmann, The Washington Post Book World
“Hugely complex, deeply intelligent . . . No review
can do justice to the impressive quality of the thought or the multifarious
nature of the ideas [here].”
–William Boyd, L.A. Weekly
“Delightful . . .as Ray and Iris slowly tumble toward
the recognition of real trouble in their marriage, the book illuminates them
with a playful, intelligent light that any adult will find useful to see
by.”
–Alan Cheuse, Chicago Tribune
"Ambitious and spellbinding . . . Rush's words [dance]
on the boundary between prose and poetry . . .[full of] thought-provoking,
smart and often hilarious nuggets."
–Molly Knight, The Baltimore Sun
“Like Cervantes and Garcia Marquez, Rush achieves
an overall effect of delirious comedy–dizzying, audacious, strange, and
often sad, informed by the gravest of concerns.”
–James Gibbons, BookForum
“An astonishing accomplishment . . . a 700-page
detonation of talent that threatens to incinerate competitors for miles
around.”
–Ron Charles, The Christian Science Monitor
“Wild and wonderful . . . Whether the matter under
scrutiny is marital wrangling or guerilla rebellion, Rush’s observations are
brutally accurate–and funny.”
–Michael Upchurch, The Seattle Times
“Brilliant, moving and dense . . . The reader is not
likely to find a better novel this year.”
–Adam Kirsch, The New York Sun
“Rush is a real seer, and he captivates us with his audacious
fictional vision. He has given us masterful slices both of Africa’s
indelible beauty and of its on-going chaos.”
–Lisa Shea, Elle Magazine
“An enthralling mix of intimacy and politics, sex and
war, commitment and cynicism, literature and farce. A huge, stirring novel.”
–Booklist
“The richness of Rush’s vision sweeps the reader into
his brilliantly observed world.”
–Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Absorbing . . . For readers hankering after a novel of
ideas, it doesn’t get much better than this.”
–Jennifer Egan, The Observer
“Brilliant . . . The reader is immersed in an exotic
culture and its political and social history rendered vivid by Rush’s
prose.”
–Gordon Weaver, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“Mortals envelops the reader in a manner that
modern fiction too rarely attempts . . . no one caught in its sweep will
want the experience to end.”
–Don McLeese, Chicago Sun-Times
“Intensely readable . . . Rush achieves. . . the sort
of bold plotting more familiarly encountered in the great novels of
Dostoevski or Dickens.”
–James Leigh, San Diego Union-Tribune
“An experience not to be missed.”
–Kirkus starred review
“Mortals is a deeply serious, deeply
ambitious, deeply successful book . . . Reading [passages from it], one
recalls what fiction can supremely do with the mind, and how very rare is
this kind of mastery, let alone this preoccupation, in current American
writing.”
–James Wood, The New Republic
“Rush’s prose, wit, and insight provide . . . many
delights . . . Both major and minor characters are drawn in broad strokes,
and despite the novel’s serious moral concerns, an element of humor infuses
almost every encounter.”
–Steven Yarborough, The Oregonian
“Rich and densely textured . . . a thriller-like
plot . . . and a dazzling array of intermingling thematic movements. Indeed
the sheer energy and ambition of Mortals seems to mock its creator’s
earthbound status.”
–John Freeman, Charlotte News and Observer
About the Author
Norman Rush was raised in
Oakland, California, and graduated from Swarthmore College in 1956. He has
been an antiquarian book dealer, a college instructor, and, with his wife
Elsa, he lived and worked in Africa from 1978 to 1983. They now reside in
Rockland County, New York. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker,
The Paris Review, and Best American Short Stories.
Whites, a collection of stories, was published in 1986, and
his first novel, Mating, the recipient of the National Book Award,
was published in 1991. Mortals is his second novel.
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