Tragic heroine

I finished ‘Mating’ this morning and I’ve been in a bad mood ever since. What an odd book. When it was published in 1991 it won the National Book award and got a ‘C’ from Entertainment Weekly, whose reviewer disdained its never-named anthropologist narrator for “utter[ing] unspeakable sentences like ”The original conceit was that I was going to be hedonic, think passim about my life.”’ That kind of thing can be funny, though, and fun, if you’re in the mood and have got the time to run to the dictionary every few minutes in search of definitions for ‘escutcheon’ and ‘introitus.’ (‘Shield’/'ornamental or protective plate around keyhole’ — though the narrator is using it to mean ‘pubic hairstyle’ — and ‘vaginal opening,’ respectively. Now you know! No doubt you’ll be using those in a sentence later on today!)

But more substantively, EW’s reviewer took issue with the book for being inadequately “artful,” especially in terms of its central “irony,” which is, basically, this lady is so smart (she knows all these huge words!) and yet, when it comes to this one guy, she is so dumb. A sometime grad student at somewhat loose ends in Batswana, she hears a dashiki-clad, ponytailed, middle-aged guy spelling out his socialist theories at a party — actually, she’s introduced to him by his estranged wife, who seems unhinged — and she decides they could fall in Intellectual Love. Together now: “Ohhh, girl.”

But you don’t understand! He’s perfect! He’s brilliant, for one thing. He — his name is Nelson Denoon– has founded a utopian semisocialist ecologically faultless society in the Kalahari desert which is a refuge for poor or damaged women whose villages have rejected them. Everyone takes turns doing every kind of work, from emptying the specially designed composting latrines to cooking the plain but delicious food to sewing the regulation yet attractive uniforms. In addition to being a socialist he is, it almost goes without saying, a self-described feminist. His penis is “considerable.” After the first night they spend together he asks her whether she’ll mind if he does all the cooking.
Obviously the thing for the narrator to do is insinuate herself seamlessly into both the workings of this village and Denoon’s life, making herself invaluable and outstanding — in a place where no one is meant to stand out, but let’s ignore that for now because things are going so well! She and Denoon lie in his bed in the afternoon, pillowtalking about ways their utopian community could become even more utopian. She describes their deep conversations and little private games in minute, yes anthropological detail, and this is the book’s great strength — that it captures that manic, magical aspect of Falling In Love when you two are suddenly the world’s smartest, funniest people and you just want to mash him up into a ball and put him in your pocket and take him with you everywhere. And that feeling in and of itself, of course, is what spells doom, because its very intensity makes it unsustainable. Clinging hard with both hands eventually turns whatever you’re holding quicksilver in your sweaty grip.

This narrator’s excuse is anthropology but come on, girls, who hasn’t entered into that dangerous period in the early to mid part of any relationship where you want to know everything there is to know about a person so you start asking all kinds of bad questions (“Did you love her?” “Prettier than me?”) Another thing is this category is starting bullshit fights just because sub or semiconsciously you want to be reassured that He Cares, a tactic that is guaranteed to work increasingly less well each time you employ it, which you know, of course, but you still can’t stop. And a third thing in this category is when you realize that what attracted you to the person in the first place was that he genuinely has these passionate feelings about, for instance, his work, and that you liked this because you felt the same way about, say, your work! But now he’s still thinking about the same things he’s always been thinking about, and you’re thinking mostly about him. Obviously you hate and resent this, that love can become so central to you in a way that it just can’t, in your experience, for men. Again, the most important and most vexing aspect of all of this is that you know what you’re doing and you know it’s not good and you still can’t stop.

Just because ‘Mating’ succeeds at capturing this feeling I am going to have to part ways with Entertainment Weekly and give it a solid ‘B+.’

3 comments to Tragic heroine

  • Jack

    it’s relatively simple:

    “A man in love … is the master, so it seems, but only if his lady friend permits it! The need to interchange the roles of slave and master for the sake of the relationship is never more clearly demonstrated than in the course of an affair. Never is the complicity between victim and executioner more essential. Even chained, down on her knees, begging for mercy, it is the woman, finally, who is in command … the all powerful slave, dragging herself along the ground at her master’s heels, is now really the god. The man is only her priest, living in fear and trembling of her displeasure.”

    PAULINE RÉAGE, introduction, The Image

  • Chris McCann

    In observance of the “What’s Probably Good For You Is Probably Bad For Moi” Law of 20-Something Relationships, guys eat it up when you ask us those bad questions. Observe the vaguely unctuous if not shit-eating grin that usually results. It’s futile, and your insecurity only gives us power over you – the last thing you want (or is it?) We’re prone to misuse that power; we rarely go the Spidey route with it. If you must, we recommend scheduling such questions as close to sex as possible – in foreplay, postcoital, or, ideally, during climax. It’s been my experience that no matter how much I try to show a girl I care, it’s never quite enough. So there. (obviously I hate and resent this…) And if you were the center of his universe, how boring would be that be (for both)? Bottom line: Don’t break the spell. Just have lots of sex. I kid. Just with the mysterious category-defying types. I kid… A+ post.

  • I have some (a lot) of thoughts about this, but they might be better expressed in the form of an e-mail. inbox fodder soon.

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