Volume 38, Number 16 · October 10, 1991
Good Intentions
By Thomas R. Edwards
Mating
by Norman Rush
Knopf, 480 pp., $23.00
Brazzaville Beach
by William Boyd
Morrow, 316 pp., $21.00
In both Mating and Brazzaville Beach, a smart young female scientist comes to Africa to do field research, encounters an older man who is an academic celebrity, and finds her life radically altered by the experience. These are of course timely matters: post-colonial anxiety in the white West, the tribulations of women in patriarchal professions, current debates about scientific dishonesty and the authority of science itself. But these books are quite different in effect, if only because each author has a different sense of Africa. William Boyd, an Englishman still in his thirties, was born in Ghana; two of his four earlier novels—A Good Man in Africa and An Ice-Cream War—considered the ironies of white rule at its zenith and in its twilight. Norman Rush, an American in his late fifties, served in the Peace Corps in Botswana from 1978 to 1983; his much-admired collection of stories, Whites, drew on his experience there, and, like Whites, Mating, his first novel, examines Western good intentions in a non-Western world.
Review, 3001 words
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