Rush, who won the National Book Award for Mating, in 1991, has written a book that’s its equal, with a wonderful balance between the interlocking arcs of its plot ... Part of the privilege—and the burden, of course—of being an American is the complexity of this moral position, power being exerted in your name, learning how to live with it, or not. There’s no one writing who shows more insight into this question than Rush—and it’s never been a more interesting question ... Another quality that makes his books so charged is that Rush doesn’t shrink from describing the inequality and distortions of sexual relationships ... Implausible as some of the plot developments seem to be, Rush’s amazing rendering obviates the need for suspension of disbelief.
Rush is subtle, and never quite owns up to his comic intent. The whole thing is told with a straight face ... Neither is the humour ever unkind. Ray’s absurd complaisance as a husband is shown to be part of his decent, philosophical outlook ... Although Iris is clearly a major irritant, we are compelled to see her through Ray’s eyes and recognise her problems as well as his ... The fine detail of the African setting, the spy shenanigans and the interplay between the large cast of characters make the novel well worthwhile, provided you have a long enough while to spare.
Norman Rush's Mortals is serious and well written, but it operates on a scale that only blazing genius could justify. I've read and enjoyed every word, but my bond with the book felt mildly unhealthy, like the literary equivalent of Stockholm Syndrome, based less on the free play of literary pleasure than being separated for so long from other stimuli ... The book may be sophisticated as a piece of writing, but it's a relatively primitive example of construction. The reader becomes very familiar with Ray's mind, and no one else's ... The novel hardly notices its own slow transformation into a sort of action thriller. Crisis and deprivation send ripples across Ray's mental life, but the turbulence is minimal.
Rush’s attempt to see America from Africa, or, more accurately, to understand America and Americans in part through their effect on Africa and its effect on them, gives his writing distinctive resonance ... But the inevitable inner distance of his expatriates from their adopted setting also makes Rush’s Botswana and its native population more of a picturesque backdrop than a thickly realised world ... There may be no way for a contemporary author to permit himself to try to write fully from within another culture, but if it is ethically impossible to negotiate the antithetical traps of writing from abroad as either coloniser or tourist, that is a fascinating problem in itself, and it would be interesting to see a novelist of Rush’s seriousness engage with it more directly.
“Mortals” provides many pages of marital discourse, its mutual satisfactions only slightly tinged by intimations of disquiet ... Scene after scene tests the reader’s own credulism with fantastic juxtapositions—torture and song, fury and innocence—under an African sky of burning sun and blazing stars ... It is annoying, one could say, that a novel demonstrating so acute, well-stocked, and witty a sensibility is such a trial to read ... Such an earnest, droll, inclusive anthropology must have needed an African sojourn for its maturation; still, I would be happy to see a Stateside sequel, no longer than, say, Candide or The Great Gatsby, to this (quoting Rush in another context) 'unhelpful olla podrida' of a somewhat Miltonian epic.
Mortals is, among a lot of other things, a story of spies in a hot climate that turns into a meditation upon morality. Indeed, over the remarkable opening chapters broods the approving shade of Graham Greene. Mortals is, in some ways, a kind of 'our man in Botswana'. Except that the man in this case is American; and although Rush has absorbed and understood southern Africa in a way few of his compatriots have done, none the less this is a novel about political power and that, more than ever, means America ... The way Rush discloses his people by offering us their souls in sections is very fine. His burly, rolling prose is the perfect foil for quick, delicate insights. It is what makes him such a good writer of stories. And that, frankly, is the best of this novel: the delicate unpacking of tragicomic lives with which it opens. The disappointment for those who admire Rush's fiction is that what he begins so strongly, he does not sustain.
Mortals is so rich, so full of marvels, that one is tempted to create a Borgesian map to the book, an appreciation as large as the novel itself ... To a greater extent than almost any writer I can think of, Rush is interested in the rhythms of thought, in how we hear and speak to ourselves ... It is deeply concerned with moral questions. Not by moralizing—dear god, no—but instead in its understanding of the ways in which our intellects and intentions can fail us—can, in fact, lead us madly astray.
In Mortals, we want to avert our eyes as Ray and Iris spend 700 pages throwing away 17 years of marriage ... Although Mortals covers a lot of ground, except for excerpts from a manuscript by Ray's gay brother, Rex, who is dying of AIDS back in the States, and tape recordings of people being spied on, we are stuck inside Ray's head.
Finch is wrong about a great deal in this novel, and his opinions of many of the characters do change before we reach the end, but he is almost never wrong about what a certain attitude toward a certain text signifies ... Following such a relentlessly self-critical consciousness so closely through so much is often tedious. Many readers will not find the payoff sufficient for the effort that is required at several points in the book to go on to the next page ... I know of few other books that so powerfully convey the uneasy connection between intimacy and absurdity, the way that the minutiae of everyday domestic life can become so loaded with meaning in our most treasured relationships while to any outside observer they are ridiculously trivial.
Norman Rush writes as if none of these distinctions exist. He does all of the above not just well, but wonderfully ... Mortals doesn’t feel like a mere showcase for the various novelistic virtues. Rush is downright radical in his refusal to pass judgment on his characters or to let the reader settle into a comfortable ironic distance.
This enormously ambitious tale scorns to summarize or telescope: Rex’s inane effusions and Morel’s criticisms of scripture, for example, are reproduced at exhaustive length—as are Iris and Ray’s (sexy and charming) romantic and sexual banterings ... Mortals isn’t easy going, but Rush’s authoritative grasp of his subject, rich characterizations, and complex handling of issues of sexual and political fidelity, morality, and mortality make it a reading experience not to be missed ... Another National Book Award seems a distinct possibility.
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 ... The novel, already a textured, erotic portrait of a disintegrating marriage and a society in flux, becomes a political thriller infused with violence ... 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.
