#13: Mortals by Norman Rush

9 comments:

1. Of course this should be higher up the list, but it’s good to find it listed in any case. I chose a passage from Mortals to be read at my wedding; yes perverse and yes pretentious, maybe, but where else do you turn for love in this language?

   Or the idea was to so charge her life with his appreciation that some morning she would sit up and say What the fuck is going on with us, I am so happy. The idea was to let this single flower bloom until it was something monstrous, like an item in a Max Ernst collage, something that fills the room and the occupant says Oh, this is you, this is you, my beloved friend, my love, now I see, something along those lines. He was going to float her in love and she would be like those paper flowers that open up. Water rising around her. She didn’t know about him that he could get an erection just thinking in passing about her and that on one occasion…

   Rush’s talent is obscene, which means, I suppose, that he’s the right man for an obscene job. Christ, what a book.

2. Thank you, Garth. This is a wonderful book.

3. Congratulations to this blog for promoting Norman Rush’s work — he is the most neglected major writer in America. Like Garth Hallberg, I definitely hear echoes of Bellow; but Rush is unclassifiable, as you also suggest, and I think his next book — his first to be set in America — will be unlike anything he has written before.
   James Wood

4. For those playing along at home, Rush’s next has been in the works since 2003. Set in the Catskills on the eve of the Iraq War, it’s got the working title Subtle Bodies, and examines friendship, as Mortals looked at marriage, and Mating examined…well, mating.

5. Three years ago, I was lucky to attend a reading at the 92nd Street Y, featuring Martin Amis and–hooray!–Norman Rush. Rush read from “Subtle Bodies,” and, while I have loved every one of his sentences I have read, and while, like Mr. Wood, I think his work is unjustly neglected, there was indeed something different about this new work–something fresher, more poignant, more human (if that is in fact possible, given the great humanity of Rush’s previous novels). While other so-called “major” writers have written themselves into self-aggrandized corners (and I think we all know who I’m talking about here), Rush has held back. I like to think of him as a kind of American JM Coetzee, if such a thing is possible: a public intellectual who has, in only the most interesting ways, rebuffed the role of the public intellectual; a novelist who draws emotional power from restraint, and who is capable of locating the being in the nothingness that surrounds us.

6. You all have to be kidding or retarded regarding Mr. Rush. He is a dreadful
   writer. As the NY Times critic said about , “Mortals”:

   ”Mortals” is a long, tedious and thoroughly haphazard production — a kitchen sink of a book that possesses none of the pointillist detail of ”Whites,” the author’s haunting debut collection of stories (1986), and all the flaws of his 1991 novel, ”Mating” — and more. Though ”Mortals” gradually gathers speed and focus near its conclusion, only the most persevering of readers are likely to slog through the book’s 700-odd pages to get there.

   Despite (or perhaps because of) all this bad Lawrentian writing, their marriage never seems like a real relationship. It’s hard to believe that after 17 years of marriage, Iris and Ray discuss their feelings about religion for the first time — ”so you were a believer for how long?” — or that they say things like ”I just wanted to touch voices” when she calls him at the office to say hello.

   Despite (or perhaps because of) all this bad Lawrentian writing, their marriage never seems like a real relationship. It’s hard to believe that after 17 years of marriage, Iris and Ray discuss their feelings about religion for the first time — ”so you were a believer for how long?” — or that they say things like ”I just wanted to touch voices” when she calls him at the office to say hello.

7. I read Mating for the first time a few weeks ago. It had been on my TBR list for awhile and life had simply gotten in the way. I was blown away and purchased Morals right away. NOw I am about 100 pages into Morals and loving it – expansive- I am expanding into its world – and with pleasure. Still not sure why this writer is under the radar – so smart, so funny, I am enjoying it so much and dreading getting to the end.

8. And Rick, remember who said it was a “long, tedious and thoroughly haphazard production”. If Michiko Kakutani likes a book I know to run the other way!

9. Does anyone care, can anyone care, what Kakutani says in any of her recent reivews? If any other reviewer’s works were so inconsistent and lacking in understanding of the books under review then they would have been fired long ago. She works hard at getting noticed but deserves to be ignored.