Mortals

Rating:
Summary: After Mating, a disappointment
Review: Mortals features much of what I love about Rush's writing style as it takes us back to an Africa perceived through the eyes of disaffected, jaded ex-pats. However, Rush seems to be recycling many of his entertaining/enlightening quotes and observations found in Mating. What was he (and for that matter, his editor) thinking? I groan every time I see a regurgitated "Zeno's arrow..." or bon mot from Mating. There's also a gratuitous appearance by the Denoons, which makes me wish they'd perchance died in a car accident in the intervening years. Despite the disappointments, I am still enthralled by Rush's characters and his slice-of-life descriptions of Africa.

Rating:
Summary: Amazing writing
Review: Mortals is a novel about a lonely man whose only friend is his wife, and what happens to him both psychologically and in his real and adventurous life when he begins to suspect that the wife he adores, and depends on for his feeling of connection with the world, is in love with her doctor, a black American physician living in Africa (as do the man, Ray, and his wife, Iris. The novel takes place in the country of Botswana.) Ray's loneliness becomes understandable to the reader, he is a spy for the CIA. He has no close friends, mostly for this reason. There are other factors that isolate him. His only sibling, his gay brother, Rex, and he hate each other. All this is in the background of the obsessive love he feels for his beautiful, and intelligent, wife. She loves him, also. But... her feelings are more complicated than his--and her doctor fascinates her.

This novel is a story about obsessive love and jealousy, but it is also an adventure story and a political thriller. Rush seems to be interested in many philosophical and political matters, not to mention in literature and its effect on life. In the sections that interest you, you'll want more of this. In the sections that don't, you'll skim. Personally, I skimmed most of the parts about religion. Seemed interesting, but not necessary, in my opinion.

Mortals is worth reading for the prose style alone. It is amazing writing. The perceptions make you want to write things down so you won't forget them. But to me, the exploration of the relationship between a man and a woman was the most fascinating and memorable aspect of Mortals.

One other little thing that I enjoyed was the chapter devoted to "The Denoons" from Rush's previous novel, Mating. You get an update of what the heroine of Mating and her husband, Nelson Denoon, are up to and we (at long last!) learn that she does possess a name--Karen. It helped create a bit of continuity that I appreciated, and satisfaction in knowing what became of the characters.

This is a book that stays with you. It is both an education and a pleasure. I highly recommend it as a wonderful summer read!

Rating:
Summary: Mind meld with Mortals
Review: Mortals is like a rich 19th Century novel. If you like those long books where it becomes part of your mind and life until you are finished reading, you'll love Mortals. If you like short books about nothing much, you won't. You can tell what I like. I won't ever forget the characters in this novel.

Rating:
Summary: A great novel, for the reader willing to meet its challenge
Review: Mortals is not for everyone; this is abundantly clear from even the most cursory review of reader opinions. There are some who admire the book and some who despise it; as with any ambitious work of craft, these opinions reveal far more about those who hold them than they do about their subject. Mortals, like all of Norman Rush's work, is ambitious. Rush strives for greatness, and achieves it, though the same method that enables this success renders it inaccessible to readers who lack the patience or the wit to walk a sometimes tortuous path.

Rush writes, without shame and without regard for current fashion, about intellectuals. Not surprisingly, the characters in his novels speak and think as what they are. They are elusive, sometimes contradictory, often infuriating, though one might easily dispense with superfluous adjectives and simply say that they are real. Readers who want books populated by individuals plainly drawn and instantly characterized, by lovable white-hatted heroes and despicable black-hatted villains, might be better advised to read Tom Clancy, or to watch television.

Rush's characters converse, with other and with themselves. These conversations sometimes meander, or are truncated, or seem to lead down dead ends, though again it is easier to say that they are real. Rush lets characters reveal themselves, in their own words, one piece at a time. As with any gradual process, there are times when the picture seems incomplete, and steps in the process that initially seem pointless. Readers with the patience to embrace the journey will be rewarded, those who prefer dialogue in neat blocks, limited to the minimum number of words necessary to directly advance the plot, will fall by the wayside. Mortals is not a TV script: this is praise, not criticism.

Some readers are uncomfortable with the abundance of detailed physical description in Rush's work. The same criticism might be leveled at the Hieronymus Bosch paintings that very appropriately adorn the covers of Rush's works. The viewer who wants to see a cartoon will surely be frustrated by a richly woven tapestry, but that frustration is hardly the fault of the tapestry.

Some reviewers protest that Rush's work is not "about Africa", and that its reportage of Africa is incomplete or uncertain. This in many ways true, because Rush is not a journalist and is not striving to write a documentary about a continent. Rush writes about people, primarily Americans, not about a place. The utterly foreign backdrop to the story serves as a lens enlarging the characters, and forcing the details of their relationships, with each other and with their culture, into a harsh and revealing light. In taking this course Rush walks in distinguished company, and is completely worthy of his place there. His prose cuts to the point with none of the prettiness or pretension of a Greene or a Maugham, and we have to go back to Conrad to find a Western author who walks this terrain as successfully. Conrad, of course, achieved his purpose with far fewer words, and if one may praise with faint damnation, it could be said that Norman Rush's greatest failing is that he is not Joseph Conrad. Neither is anybody else, and against this deficiency we may set the redeeming fact that he is Norman Rush, and that as long as he is writing we can expect a continuing, if infrequent, series of exceptional and challenging works of literature.

Mortals is not for everyone. Readers who are willing to accept its challenge, willing to accompany a great writer on an unusual and sometimes difficult path, will find Mortals and its predecessors infinitely rewarding. Those who are unwilling will not achieve the same reward, and may find their failure frustrating. A climber who fails in attempt to scale a challenging peak will not gain the same reward as another who succeeds. Climbers in this position generally have the honesty to blame such failures on themselves, rather than on the mountain, and readers would be well advised to take the same approach to Norman Rush's work. Those willing to meet the demands of the novel will be rewarded; those who fail to earn the reward should accept that the failure is their own, not that of the novel or the novelist.


Rating:
Summary: An amazing and great book
Review: Mortals is stunning. It takes you to another world and another life, full of humor, pain, angst and thrills. It is so beautifully written you don't so much read this book as feel it.

It is rich, complex and involved, and that's the beauty of it. All I can say is that the people who don't like this book are chowderheads.

Rating:
Summary: Literature for thinking human beings
Review: Mortals is the product of ten years' work by one of the most erudite novelists of our time. It's no beach book, no weekend read. It's literature for people who enjoy thinking about history, politics, and gender relations.

Yes, it helps to have a bachelor's degree (and thus some exposure to that old chestnut of Lit.One: Paradise Lost)and the willingness to slow down and give passages like the following some time to settle:
"Kerekang was unified with the suffering that had brought these men to his cause. It was more than a matter of pity, which was the limit of the usual feeling evoked by poverty and injustice. It was sympathy, but a different order of sympathy, it was embodied."

I won't give a synopsis of the plot or characters because other reviewers have done it well, though I want to add that I found this book laugh-out-loud and read-to-your-spouse funny, a good balance for the harrowing exploits and serious subject matter in some chapters.

Readers who are looking for a novel that gives great reward for close reading will be very pleased with Mortals.

Rating:
Summary: Lush Language
Review: Several excellent reviews on this site cover the plot and the characterizations. What fascinated me was the writing style. The dialog between Ray and Iris is 5 stars on target: witty, true, anguished, and showing that for seventeen years each has paid total attention to the other's reactions and thought processes. Frequently Ray anticipates exactly what Iris is thinking or is going to say, and in her next utterance turns out to be completely on target or (less frequently) stunningly and unbalancingly wrong.
The word plays and turns of phrase that flood every page convinced me that the author has kept notebooks of arresting phrases he has heard or produced from his own imagination over the last forty years, and has poured two thirds of the contents of these notebooks into this novel, providing a language lover's feast.
The most subtle delight of the book is the author's sense of conversational idiom. Not only the dialog, but the narrative stretches are written the way people really talk. As a result, every few pages you encounter a narrative sentence you have to re-read once or twice to understand, because it's written exactly the way someone would say it (without the benefit of intonation that would make the sentence immediately transparent to a listener rather than a reader). As a result, you sit there and marvel at the complexity of how we talk.
All this makes the book a slow read for anyone who wants to zip through the story and a delightful experience for anyone who just plain loves language. Yes, it's a little too long...and I found myself wishing it were longer.

Rating:
Summary: A mixture of Rashkolnikov and Othello
Review: The maze-lie, self-referential mind of Ray Finch, introspective to a fault, paranoid, and full of self-doubt may seem like a dubious place to roam around. However, this articulate, anguished, and witty novel is a delight for literate readers. Its complexity mirrors the modern world, and its hero struggles to do the least wrong thing, as right is not an available option.
The many witty book titles, little jokes, and ironies alone are worth the read. Better even than MATING. Norman Rush has written a brilliant novel (How pleased Ray would be at that adjective!)--too good for most of the hack reviewers to appreciate, alas, but a landscape readers will want to explore through the entire journey.

Rating:
Summary: Well worth the wait!
Review: The reason I read Mortals is because the reviews in Elle and Vogue and the Village Voice were really good and I loved Mating. I like Mortals even more. It has more emotional suspense and made me laugh alot, even when what was happening in the plot was awful. It's sexier than Mating. Here's a quote I liked from the Village Voice review.
"Morel has said that he longs for "a place where the rude fact that we are all dying animals transfigures every part of life," and Ray has reached that place. He has no time to waste. He's accepted the basic logic that if you're going to put marriage first in your life, you'd better have more in your life than marriage. And maybe, just maybe, he can make that logic work."

Rating:
Summary: An excessively detailed character study
Review: This is a mammoth, elephantine piece of work. Complex, multi-layered, and intellectually astute, Mortals unfortunately suffers from being just far too long. Rush probably needed a good editor to cut some of the endless pages of pointless conversation and overly embellished philosophical analysis. Iris and Ray, the main protagonists are conveyed as brilliantly complex characters, and every single detail of their relationship is dissected from their sex lives to their domestic habits. Much of the story is seen from the perspective of Ray's thoughts, as he reacts to his wife's relationship with Davis Morel - a Doctor newly arrived in Botswana, and rousing "irreligious" fervor among the locals. Ray, a contract CIA agent, operating undercover as an English instructor recounts his neurosis, paranoia's and insecurities in explicit detail, as he begins to see Morel and his colleague Samuel Kerekang, as not just subversives but also the "enemy" who is trying to spread their own brand of atheism and irreligion throughout Botswana. There are pages and pages of Ray "free associating" as he tries to counter his suspicions that Iris is having an affair with Morel.

Although I found some aspects of the novel interesting - particularly the duel themes comparing Catholicism in the Western world with Africa - much of the novel was unfortunately rather cluttered and dull. Rush comes across as being incredibly well versed in philosophical aspects of world religion, but his effects to weave an engaging and intricate plot into his metaphysical diatribes didn't really work for me.

His ruminations on the state of affairs in present day Africa are very interesting. Through Ray's perspective, Rush postulates that White European Catholicism is responsible for many of the problems in Africa today - from the rampant poverty, warring tribes, to the ravaging from AIDS. Perhaps if Africa had been left on its own to develop its own "enlightenment" without European influence, Africa may have been a very different place today.

The novel is also peppered with Ray's gay brother's letters from back in America, written to Iris, and giving an account of life back in the West. Ray hates his brother - not through any sense of homophobia - but through a sense that his brother was the favourite in the family. His brother like most of the other people in his world is the enemy. Much of the story also recounts Iris's relationship with her sister back in California who has just become a new single mum. The lives of these two, and the decisions they make are juxtaposed with Iris and Ray's life back in Botswana. Mortals is a challenging and complex read but a book that is certainly not for everyone.

Michael