Subtle Bodies

July 8, 2013
Norman Rush is famous (and popular with readers who like their novels dense with word play and complication) for very long books set in Africa. Only 256 pages and set mainly in the Catskills, this work is a departure, but it’s still recognizably Rushian. Although Nina, one of two point-of-view characters, isn’t invited, when her husband, Ned, flies off on hearing of the death of the leader of his middle-aged band of college friends, she hops the next plane—she’s ovulating and time is of the essence. Good thing: the Rush responsible for Mating’s distinctive female narrator is still a deft hand at creating smart, funny, complicated women. Ned is likable, too, and it’s nice to see a happy marriage, a rare beast in fiction about the middle-aged. Unfortunately, the rest of Ned’s band of reunited smarty pantses are pills of varying kinds, especially the recently deceased Douglas, whom Nina calls “the world’s champion” of “walking out on foreign films he personally found highly overrated and taking his pack of stupid fool friends along with him.” As events in Douglas’s Catskills castle play out, with the friends coping with their middle-aged selves, the orchestration of Douglas’s funeral, and the byzantine rollout of information about Douglas’s life, marriage, and finances, even Nina can’t save the book from growing talky and claustrophobic. 50,000 first printing.

Starred review from August 15, 2013
Rush's third novel is an outlier--a slim book not set in Botswana--but his concerns with our carnal and intellectual lives remain pleasurably, provocatively intact. The modern classic Mating (1991) and its 2003 follow-up, Mortals, were hothouse experiments in human behavior: Take a bright couple, drop them in a foreign milieu, and watch their primal instincts slowly emerge. This book does much the same thing, though it's set in Rush's native United States. At its center is Ned, a middle-aged activist who has hastened to the castlelike home of his college friend Douglas, who has died in a riding-mower accident. Following close behind is his wife, Nina, who is outraged at Ned for leaving just as she reaches the peak in her fertility cycle; she wants to conceive. Its life-and-death themes settled fast, the novel largely explores the personalities of Ned and three other friends of Douglas who have arrived for the memorial. Douglas was a lifelong provocateur, and in college, this clan was hellbent on undoing social norms, but reconvened, they largely have memories of old bons mots and a widow who's trying to stage-manage the memorial to the last utterance. The setting is funereal, and Rush dwells much on the futility of warring against our natures, yet this book abounds in wit, particularly in its exploration of Ned and Nina's marriage; alternating between their perspectives, Rush ping-pongs their thoughts about lust, love and accomplishment. The brevity of the story highlights its contrived setup--the everybody-stuck-in-the-castle arrangement has an unintentional whiff of an Agatha Christie mystery--and a subplot involving Douglas' troubled teen son is left frustratingly unresolved. But this is a weaker novel only in comparison to Rush's earlier triumphs. His skill at revealing our interior lives is undiminished. Easier to lug around than its predecessors but with plenty of heft regardless.

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August 1, 2013
Ned and Nina are working hard to get pregnant. But when Ned suddenly flies across the country to attend the funeral of college friend Douglas, Nina follows in hot pursuit. When she finally catches up with him, Nina finds her husband holed up in Douglas' upstate New York compound, surrounded by his former NYU roommates, instantly immersed in the rivalries and politics of their student days. Nina's role as an outsider gives her a unique perspective on the group as she watches them grapple with the death of their revered Douglas and attempt to reappraise their lives, relationships, and futures through the clarifying lens of the passage of time. Rush, author of the National Book Awardwinning Mating (1991), has written a quiet, contemplative novel, bringing together a group of people whose pasts and presents have suddenly come face-to-face as they struggle to make sense of their personal histories. Subtle Bodies is a funny, deeply satisfying look at friendshipswhy we make them, why we keep them, and how they change us over time.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)

April 15, 2013

From 1978 to 1983, Rush and his wife served as codirectors of a Peace Corps project in Botswana, and his three works of fiction--including the National Book Award winner Mating--are all set in Africa. Here, the geography is different and the tone frothier, but the sharp observations about negotiating adulthood remain. When the charismatic Douglas dies suddenly, college friends gather at his Hudson River estate as narrator Ned ponders what really bound them together.

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