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


Review
“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


Review
?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


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 Inside Flap
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.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
I. Unrest

Paradise

At least whatever was wrong was recent, Ray kept telling himself, he realized. Because he’d just done it again, turning in to Kgari Close, seeing his house ahead of him, their house. Whatever was going on with Iris was different from what had gone on in earlier episodes, minor episodes coming under the heading of adjusting to Africa. This was worse because what was going on was so hard to read. He needed to keep in mind that knowing something was going wrong at an early point was always half the battle. And he knew how to stop things in their tracks. In fact that was his field, or one of them. Anyway, he was home. He loved this house.

He paused at his gate. All the houses on the close, in fact all the houses in the extension, were identical, but, for Africa, sumptuous. They were Type III houses built by the government for allocation to the upper civil service and significant expatriates like agency heads and chiefs of mission. The rooms were giant, as Iris had put it when they moved in. Throughout the extension the properties were walled and gated on the street side and separated internally from one another by wire-mesh perimeter fencing that had to be constantly monitored and kept in repair because there was a network of footpaths through the area that the Batswana insisted on using to get from Bontleng or the squatter settlements to their day jobs or for visits with friends or family living in the servants’ quarters each Type III house came with. The quarters were cubicles set well apart from the main houses, which had possibly been a mistake because it made monitoring the flux of lodgers and visitors that much harder. If the quarters had been connected to the main houses there might be less thousand clowns activity in them, although you’d lose yet another piece of your own privacy. The perimeter fences were constantly developing holes so that the paths could keep functioning as they had before the extension was built, and it was a fact that their African neighbors were consistently more lax than the expatriates who lived there about keeping the wire fences fixed up.

The houses stood on generous plots and there was nothing wrong with a Type III house. They were single-story cinderblock oblongs faced with cement stucco. Their house was salt-white inside and out. Every third house in the extension was painted tan. The floors were poured concrete. He’d had to push Iris into the house the first time they inspected it because she thought the floors were wet, they were waxed and buffed to such an insane lustre. They had the best plot on Kgari Close, the largest, at the apex of the horseshoe the close made. They had six rooms. He would admit that their moderne type furniture was on the ungainly and garish side. It was from South Africa. It seemed to be made for very large human beings. On the other hand it was provided free by the government of Botswana. Their bed was firm, and was vast. The corrugated iron roof, painted red to suggest terracotta tile, was a mistake, but only in the hottest part of the year, like now, when it converted the unshaded parts of the house into ovens, to which the answer was the airconditioners they had in their bedroom and living room, at least, at opposite ends of the house, except that unfortunately Iris saw herself as acquiring virtue by abstaining from using them exactly when the justification for using them was greatest. She always denied her attitude had anything to do with solidarity with Dimakatso and the other servants in the neighborhood out in their hot cubicles or with the un-airconditioned population in general, but he thought otherwise. She claimed it was because the airconditioners made too much noise for her. She was very sensitive to noise. Also she could be willful. For example, everything in the house could be locked up—regular closets, linen closets, cupboards, cabinets. The assumption was that you were going to be stolen from. The drill everywhere else was that the maid came to you to get the key when something had to be procured, and brought the key back to you afterward. But Iris kept everything unlocked even though their first maid had complained about it because she was worried that if anything went missing she’d be blamed. So nothing was locked, which was fine, she always did what she wanted. What was wrong now? He was tired of it.

Sometimes the yardman opened the gate, but usually it was the watchman, who came on duty at five. He overlapped the yardman’s tour by half an hour or so, but the yardman could be anywhere, doing anything, including napping someplace. The watchman would normally be at his post under the thorn tree to the right of the gate, sitting on a camp stool and having a cup of Joko tea and eating the very decent leftovers Iris provided—a chop, chicken thighs, and the sweets without which no meal is complete, to a Motswana. On weekends it could happen that there wasn’t much for lunch and he would think about the procession of chops and drumsticks that had gone out the kitchen door to Fikile that week, but he’d never complained about it. The watchman was coming. Ray liked Fikile, a short, energetic man in his forties. He wore the military jacket and service cap the Waygard Company supplied, but with them he wore heavy black woolen dress slacks too long for him and rolled up into tubes at his ankles. His ankles were bare. He was wearing shoes so cheap the leather of the vamp gathered up like the neck of a sack where the laces were drawn tight. They exchanged greetings and Fikile opened the gate. Ray walked into the yard. It was possible Fikile was illiterate. When he’d first come to work for them he’d always seemed to have reading matter with him, and then Ray had noticed that it was the same worn copy of Dikgang that they were seeing day after day. Then he had stopped bringing anything at all to read. Ray’s theory was that having the newspaper with him had been for the purpose of making a good impression and that now that Fikile knew they liked him and were going to keep him he was excused from having to pretend he could read. His English was minimal. Naturally Iris wanted to do something, but she felt blocked because to ask him if in fact he could read or not, after he’d clearly gone out of his way to give the impression he could, might insult him. Ray suspected that behind her agitation over Fikile was a short story she’d broken her heart reading in which one of the wretched of the earth is tricked into thinking he can learn to read by staring at a mystical diagram and repeating a nonsense mantra he has paid some charlatan his last nickel for. And to hand Fikile some piece of reading matter of their own, in Setswana or English, would seem like a test. Iris seemed to want her fiction to be excruciating. But that was the way she was and he was sorry he’d asked, when she’d given up right away on something light he’d recommended, probably Tom Sharpe, Isn’t it excruciating enough for you? He was always on the lookout for decent books for her, but being in Africa made it difficult and she made it difficult because she was cursed with good literary taste. She knew good writing from bad.

Here they had everything. He looked around. There were two discs of grayish struggling lawn flanking the flagstone path to the house where it diverged from the driveway leading to the garage. They were being kept alive by hand-watering. Someday the drought would be over and they could use the hosepipe again. Except for flowerbeds and the grass areas, the yard was bare red sand textured like a Holland rusk. The sand was raked every day in deliberate, sinuous patterns. He liked that. There were five palm trees spaced around the house, which he liked except when dead fronds dropped and banged on the roof at all hours. He loved his neighbors, and especially his immediate neighbors, for their lack of interest in him. One was the widow of the leader of an out-of-power Zambian political faction the Botswana government was partial to. Mrs. Timono was an actively furtive person. His other immediate neighbor, the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Education, was never at home. It was nice that no one had ever wondered, at least in his presence, why someone who was supposed to only be the head of the English Department at St. James College had been assigned housing in Kgari Close. He thought that was because the housing allocation process was known to be mysterious, and also simply because they’d been there so long. And he had been careful to let it be understood around that they were paying a serious premium for the house, which they could manage because Iris had received a small inheritance, lalala.

It was fun to put one of their uncomfortable metal lawn chairs in the center of one of the microlawns and sit there in the imperfect, lacy shade of the thorn trees. The trunks of the trees in the yard were properly limewashed to protect them from termites, except for the palms, which had some natural resistance. There was a crate by the wall to stand on in the event something interesting seemed to be going on in the street. His wall was pink. He even liked the street itself. He liked the broad, clean, faintly convex roadway and the astringent odor given off by the gum trees planted along it. If he’d kept on teaching in the U.S. they might well have ended up in a university town someplace in the Southwest that looked pretty much like this part of Gaborone.

It always made him happy when the gate clicked shut behind him. Paradise was from the Persian for walled garden, probably the first fact anybody tackling Milton learns.

He thought, I ask them, What do you think the word paradise means? and they say various things. Their definitions of paradise are so modest: They reveal themselves: They begin to think about it: Odd that nobody in Gaborone knows what paradise means except me and my students and Iris. He lingered on the stoop. It was time to go in. If he waited Iris might stop whatever she was doing and come to let him in. If he waited the entire lower sky to the west would turn burnt orange. Ray liked working in the heat, being conscious of it. It was tonic for him, for some reason. Fikile was wondering why he wasn’t going in, by now. You get a slight continuous feeling of virtue from working in the heat, on a level with wearing wristweights all day, he thought. He should go in. The best heat was now, in December. The west was solid orange and the peak of the sky was apple green. Woodsmoke drifting from cooking fires in Bontleng and Old Naledi would color the air for the next couple of hours, fading in and out, never overpowering, more a perfume, to him. Fikile would start toward him in a minute if he didn’t go in. I would have been nothing in America, Ray thought. When he imagined what he might have been if they hadn’t come to Africa it was painful. Not that Iris would credit any scenario in which his qualities went unused and unrewarded. She adhered to the great man theory of marriage. She loved him. Coming to Africa had been essential, but he had to be alone in knowing it and knowing why. That was the deal. It was unfair that something was going wrong with her just at the moment you might say all the moving parts in the machinery of his life were in order. He could walk to work. His health was fine, his weight was perfect. He thought, I love Africa, but not like the idiots who come over here and say Boy! Women with mountains of sticks on their heads. Look, an ostrich crossing the road!

Nothing is more useless than dwelling on grievances, he reminded himself, feeling himself about to twitch in that direction. He’d earned the right to some satisfaction. The easy part of his life had begun unannounced like a dream two years ago and he had a right to enjoy it. No one could know about it, obviously, but he was living in a state of triumph, and had been ever since Russia and all its works blew apart overnight. Before that he had been part of a war. What he was in now was more like a parade. Of course nobody knew who he was, except for Iris who had to know generally. She had no details. But when somebody wrote The Decline and Fall of the Russian Empire and Everything Connected with It he would be there between the lines. He couldn’t generate the right metaphor for amazing 1989. He had an image of something like a metal claw sunk into half the planet suddenly disarticulating, but that was a weak image. Or it could be like this, he thought: You have a goliath of an enemy dressed in armor about to smite you who sits down suddenly and looks faint and when you open up his armor you find only his face is normal, the rest is sickly, mummified, and then he dies in front of you and it’s all over.

This moment was what Iris was suddenly taking away.

The event was too huge for any image he had been able to come up with. It would take someone as great as Milton to come up with the appropriate image right off the bat. He felt he had no time to think, lately. Iris was full of mental homework for him to do that he didn’t want to do, such as answering the question of why they had been so attracted to one another when they met—but it had to be aside from the purely physical reasons she knew he was going to overemphasize.

He stood in the foyer. No one was around. He heard the kitchen door close. That was Dimakatso leaving for the day.

He entered the chill bronze gloom of the living room, where the airconditioner was laboring for his benefit, obviously, since no one else was on hand and the room looked as though no one had made use of it that day. He walked over to the main double window. The louvers of the blinds were tilted downward, almost to the closed position. All the windows in the house were barred and tightly screened. He was fanatical about the screens. There was malaria nearby. He was the force behind both of them continuing to take chloroquine. Iris got worse headaches from the chloroquine than he did, so he understood why she resisted him.

There was still no one.

But I’m fine, he thought, trying not to relive a moment from the walk home that had made him feel fragile. Near the school was a rundown property whose occupants kept a goat. The goat had run up purposively to the fence as Ray came by and for an instant Ray had thought something monstrous was happening, because the goat’s tongue seemed to be a foot long. He’d been frightened until he’d realized that it was only a goat eating a kneesock. Iris could be asleep. He would look for her, softly.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"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.

SYNOPSIS

“An astounding accomplishment. . . . [A] detonation of talent that threatens to incinerate competitors for miles around.” —The Christian Science Monitor

About this guide
The introduction, discussion questions, suggested reading list, and author biography that follow are designed to enhance your group’s reading of Norman Rush’s Mortals. We hope they will provide useful ways of thinking and talking about this greatly anticipated novel by the author of Mating, which won the National Book Award in 1991.

FROM THE CRITICS

Time

12 years [after his first novel Mating], we have the remarkable Mortals, which gives us the late-blooming Rush as challenging and surprising and uncompromising as ever.—Lev Grossman

The Washington Post

Rush has written his new novel, Mortals, as the second installment in a trilogy on Western encounters with Africa, and in both its wry-yet-forceful narrative style and its generous conceptual reach, it is a worthy successor to the restless, cerebral and searing work that Mating was. But where Mating charted obsessive affairs of the heart that opened out onto the wider world -- trailing in their wake everything from utopian socialism to feminism to Third World economic-development plans -- Mortals depicts from the outside a steady accumulation of inward torments: the collapse of certainties that guide a career and a political world, the unsettled business of a family's past, and most of all the dissolution of a marriage and all that goes with it, its reconfigurations of memory, hope and the most intimate sense of self. — Chris Lehmann

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. (June 1) Forecast: At almost 600 densely packed pages, this book is not an easy read, but it will be widely discussed. At a time when U.S. foreign policy is facing critical scrutiny, Rush's experience in Botswana, where he lived for five years, grants authenticity to his picture of our clandestine presence in West Africa. 75,000 first printing. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

It's been more than a decade since Rush won the National Book Award for his first novel, Mating, and after finishing this colossal tome, many readers still won't know whether it was worth the wait. The story is straightforward enough: burdened by memories of a maddening brother and his own thwarted ambitions as a writer, Ray works in early 1990s Botswana, ostensibly as an instructor at a prestigious private school but in fact as an increasingly alienated contract CIA operative. His much younger wife, the gorgeous Iris, is deeply discontent. On a routine assignment, Ray becomes interested in a crusading African American doctor whom he suspects of seditious tendencies-and of having an affair with his wife. His suspicions bring down chaos on everyone, of course. A bare-bones summary-which reveals nothing of the rich, dense, clotted, intentionally repetitive prose, and therein lies the rub. One can enter into the narrative and be lulled as if by the magnificent African sun, but after a while the entire enterprise seems to have ground to a halt. The story is so overextended that one hardly gets a sense of Africa-we're living inside the thickly padded minds of a few Americans, which may be the point. Is it brilliant? Is it ridiculous? This reviewer gives up. Important for literary collections, at least. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/1/03.].-Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal" Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews