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…