Mating

Five years after making one of the most auspicious literary debuts of the decade with his story collection, Whites, Norman Rush gives us a major novel -- a comedy of manners on the grandest scale. It revolves around two Americans on the loose (one of them on the prowl) in developing Africa.

She is an anthropologist in her early thirties, a woman men are drawn to ("Not that I'm so beautiful, unless hair volume determines beauty. I'm robust, shall we say, but my waist is good. I apparently look Irish"). She has a bankrupt thesis project and a solvent alternative plan to bend her extraordinary talents to the pursuit of, and mating with, Homo sapiens sapiens.

He is a fit, late-forties utopian (considered by even his most critical colleagues to be both brilliant and charismatic) who has set up a miraculous, improbably self-sustaining Eden in the middle of the Kalahari Desert, run by and for destitute African women.

The place: Botswana in the 1980s -- resonating with the dreams, ambitions, noble plans, and mischievous schemes of Africans and expatriate whites of all nationalities, descriptions, and intentions.

The action: She gets him in her sights, and one of the most stimulating and satisfying courtships in contemporary fiction ensues. Before the novel has run its remarkable course through the shifting sands and comic turns of mating, the woman -- it is she who tells the story -- and the man she pursues will have turned their world, and perhaps our own, inside out.