Norman Rush

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Norman Rush (born October 24, 1933 in Oakland, California) is an American writer whose introspective novels and short stories are set in Botswana in the 1980s.^[1]

He won the U.S. National Book Award^[2] and the 1992 Irish Times/Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize for his novel Mating.

Life

Rush was born in San Francisco, the son of Roger and Leslie (Chesse) Rush, and graduated from Swarthmore College in 1956.^[3] After working for fifteen years as a book dealer, he changed careers to become a teacher and found he had more time to write. He submitted a short story about his teaching experiences to The New Yorker and it was published in 1978.

Rush and his wife Elsa were co-workers for the Peace Corps in Botswana from 1978 to 1983, which provided material for a collection of short stories he published as Whites in 1986; it was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.^[4] His Botswana experience was also used in his first novel and second novels, Mating and Mortals.

The Rushes live in Rockland County, New York. He has two grandchildren, Angus Rush and Isis Rush.^[5]

Published works

• Whites, Alfred A. Knopf, 1986, ISBN 978-0-394-54471-7 — finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction^[4]
• Mating, Knopf, 1991, ISBN 978-0-394-54472-4 — winner of the National Book Award for Fiction^[2]
• Mortals, Knopf, 2003, ISBN 978-0-679-40622-8

Reviews

Mating

Mr. Rush has created one of the wiser and wittier fictive meditations on the subject of mating. His novel illuminates why we yield when we don't have to. It seeks to illuminate the nature of true intimacy -- how to define it, how to know when one has achieved it. And few books evoke so eloquently that state of love at its apogee -- or, as the protagonist puts it, the way in the state of passion one feels oneself the "pale affiliate" of the storm, "acted on at some constitutive and possibly electrical level," the way one feels the intensity of the nourishment derived and that sense of a great sweetness to everything, that sense between lovers of surmounting all, seeming "to coast over everything, up and over, a good thickness of rushing water between us and the boulders underneath."^[6]

I had just about given up on finding answers -- any answers -- when I read "Mating," and the experience didn't convince me to do otherwise. But what it did do was remind me that I was still interested in the questions, and I have yet to read another novel that has raised more relevant ones.^[7]

Mortals

• The New Republic
• John Updike (June 2, 2003). "Botswana Blues: Orgies of talk in Africa". The New Yorker. http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/06/02/030602crbo_books1. 
• Reese Okyong Kwon (February 18, 2009). norman-rushs-novel-for-grown-ups/ "Mortals—Norman Rush’s Novel For Grown-ups". The Rumpus. http://therumpus.net/2009/02/mortals— norman-rushs-novel-for-grown-ups/. 

References

External links

• Joshua Pashman (Fall 2010). "Norman Rush, The Art of Fiction No. 205". Paris Review. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6039/the-art-of-fiction-no-205-norman-rush. 
• Keillor, Garrison. Writer's Almanac. October 24, 2006.

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