People like it and I'm trying to figure out why. I guess I should buy it and find out. Naaah. I have other books I want first.

UPDATED 07-26 - Blogcritics review - Rodney Welch

Good as it was, Whites was no preparation for what came next. Mating, Rush's first novel, was a ferociously intelligent love story and an extraordinary literary performance. Where Whites was sparing and contained, Mating was an explosion of verbal fireworks that dazzled from the first page to the last. The narrator is an unnamed anthropology student who recounts in random and meticulous detail her intellectual and romantic conquest of her academic hero, Nelson Denoon, a quirky theorist who establishes the female utopia of Tsau in the Kalahari Desert. Her goal is to absorb every speck of information she can; to not only be as close to Denoon as she can get, "inside the moat," as she puts it, but to be him, to soak his genius into herself. Her favorite word for their relationship is bolus, or "rounded mass," and that's what the book is; it swells from inward to out. Just as Tsau is a "guest organism superimposed on a large organism, the desert," so is she on Denoon; she wants to be remade by him and to remake him, to master all the kinks of his character that he can't master himself. It's a great, strange, exhilarating modern romance, and the voice that glides through it is brainy, vulnerable, and like none I've ever heard.

If Mating was about what joins, Rush's new novel, Mortals, is about what tears apart; and this time, love - and a lot of other things - are scrutinized from the perspective of a declining male rather than an ascending woman.

NY Times Book Review: Grand Illusions in Botswana
[or, how to title your book review so no one reads it]

''Mortals'' is a disillusionment, a black comedy of blown covers, botched intimacies, bad manners and worse politics in a southern Africa on which, as if it were a sand screen, the West projects its own dementias.

So ''Mortals'' isn't another ''Mating'' — no windmills, solar panels, dung carts or boomslangs. Not every novel, even by Norman Rush, can be a parable of sex and utopia, an allegory of Mother Africa, a romance of political economy and a rewrite of Botswana's social text in discursive feminism.