Mating by Norman Rush
Published 1991 · 480 pages · 120,000 words · about 13 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is Mating to read?
Mating scores 60 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 62 out of 100
- Rush's narrator is brilliantly, exhaustingly articulate, deploying a vast vocabulary across registers from academic anthropology to romantic longing. Her voice is intellectually demanding in the best way.
- Sentence structure: 65 out of 100
- The sentences are long, complex, and densely parenthetical, following the narrator's associative, self-qualifying mind. Rush reproduces the experience of talking with someone formidably intelligent.
- Abstraction: 68 out of 100
- The narrator thinks constantly—about gender, Africa, utopia, Nelson Denoon, herself. Ideas are her medium, and she examines everything with relentless analytical energy.
- Information density: 62 out of 100
- Rush packs the novel with anthropological observation, political analysis, romantic comedy, and the texture of Botswanan life. The density is extraordinary and sustained.
- Narrative indirection: 58 out of 100
- The narrator controls her story completely, shaping what you know and when. Her reliability is part of the novel's subject—how much can any narrator be trusted?
- Symbolic density: 60 out of 100
- Tsau, Denoon's utopia, becomes a symbol of idealism's possibilities and limits. Rush develops this through exhaustive documentation rather than symbolic gesture.
- Ironic distance: 62 out of 100
- The narrator's self-awareness creates constant ironic commentary on her own romantic pursuit. Rush gives her enough distance to see herself without the distance to change.
- Resolution withholding: 58 out of 100
- The novel follows its romance to a conclusion that satisfies the plot while leaving the narrator's self-knowledge productively uncertain. Rush resists tidy resolution.
- Structural complexity: 55 out of 100
- The novel follows the narrator's journey to and through Tsau, organized by her developing relationship with Denoon. The complexity lies in the voice, not the structure.
How Mating is regarded
Mating holds a literary regard score of 61 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.