The Boston Globe: The Unquiet American.

If Norman Rush's garrulous, sprawling second novel has one pop-culture parable, it is simply this: Beware the frailty of the macho man. The protagonist, Ray Finch, is a walking-wounded CIA agent stationed in Botswana in the early 1990s; he is also, to equally negligible effect, a passable Milton scholar - as interested in cracking the code of ''Paradise Lost'' as he is in delivering the goods on native insurrections. But Ray's real calling, which he contemplates early on in ''Mortals,'' is to surround his wife, Iris, with a veritable biosphere of love.

Washington Post: Paradise Lost

Rush has written his new novel, Mortals, as the second installment in a trilogy on Western encounters with Africa, and in both its wry-yet-forceful narrative style and its generous conceptual reach, it is a worthy successor to the restless, cerebral and searing work that Mating was.

Seattle Times: Norman Rush returns to Botswana for another brilliant, inventive novel

Now, at last, we have Rush's second novel, "Mortals." It's even more jumbo-sized than its predecessor. And it's just as wild and wonderful.

Again the setting is Botswana (early 1990s, this time). And the troubled character in whose head we stay immersed for 712 pages is a CIA agent whose tendency to "overinterpret" doesn't bode well for his marriage or career.

In prose no less eccentric (but a little less dense) than that of "Mating," Rush inhabits the restless syncopative rhythms and associative bedlam of a male mind consumed by jealousy, disillusion and fading altruistic dreams.

Addtl. review
SLATE: Christopher Caldwell - review

It's the story of a radical anthropologist, Nelson Denoon, who founds a feminist cooperative in the Kalahari Desert, as narrated through the field notes and reminiscences of a grad student who falls in love with him. Adrift in Botswana, the narrator is pedantic, glib, unreliable, allusive, high-strung, and politically correct. She is simultaneously very sexual and icily calculating; simultaneously self-hating and arrogant. She is a hell of a character - I find her repugnant, but I'm in a minority of readers on the matter.