Subtle Bodies

In his long-awaited new novel, Norman Rush, author of three immensely praised books set in Africa, including the best-selling classic and National Book Award-winner Mating, returns home, giving us a sophisticated, often comical, romp through the particular joys and tribulations of marriage, and the dilemmas of friendship, as a group of college friends reunites in upstate New York twenty-some years after graduation. When Douglas, the ringleader of a clique of self-styled wits of “superior sensibility” dies suddenly, his four remaining friends are summoned to his luxe estate high in the Catskills to memorialize his life and mourn his passing. Responding to an obscure sense of emergency in the call, Ned, our hero, flies in from San Francisco (where he is the main organizer of a march against the impending Iraq war), pursued instantly by his furious wife, Nina: they’re at a critical point in their attempt to get Nina pregnant, and she’s ovulating! It is Nina who gives us a pointed, irreverent commentary as the friends begin to catch up with one another. She is not above poking fun at some of their past exploits and the things they held dear, and she’s particularly hard on the departed Douglas, who she thinks undervalued her Ned. Ned is trying manfully to discern what it was that made this clutch of souls his friends to begin with, before time, sex, work, and the brutal quirks of history shaped them into who they are now––and, simultaneously, to guess at what will come next.Subtle Bodies is filled with unexpected, funny, telling aperçus, alongside a deeper, moving exploration of the meanings of life. A novel of humor, small pleasures, deep emotions. A novel to enjoy and to ponder.From BooklistNed and Nina are working hard to get pregnant. But when Ned suddenly flies across the country to attend the funeral of college friend Douglas, Nina follows in hot pursuit. When she finally catches up with him, Nina finds her husband holed up in Douglas’ upstate New York compound, surrounded by his former NYU roommates, instantly immersed in the rivalries and politics of their student days. Nina’s role as an outsider gives her a unique perspective on the group as she watches them grapple with the death of their revered Douglas and attempt to reappraise their lives, relationships, and futures through the clarifying lens of the passage of time. Rush, author of the National Book Award–winning Mating (1991), has written a quiet, contemplative novel, bringing together a group of people whose pasts and presents have suddenly come face-to-face as they struggle to make sense of their personal histories. Subtle Bodies is a funny, deeply satisfying look at friendships—why we make them, why we keep them, and how they change us over time. --Carol Gladstein Review“Subtle Bodies seems—to paraphrase Virginia Woolf’s description of Middlemarch—like one of the few novels written for grown-up people. . . . Rush’s characters (the women more than the men) want to fall in love, to laugh and enjoy themselves.   Their quirks, opinions, compulsions, and the cruel or considerate ways in which they treat their rivals and allies are all aspects of the personalities that keep us engrossed—along with the clarity and precision of Rush’s sentences, the freshness of his observations, and our awareness that we are reading something quite rare: a remarkably nonjudgmental novel about people who are perpetually and often harshly judging themselves and one another.”—Francine Prose, The New York Review of Books“Rush is the best kind of comic novelist . . . superbly sustained narrative drollery.”--Geoff  Dyer, The New York Times Book Review"Fans of Rush's previous opuses will recognize the witty wordplay and intense, erotic eloquence of the married couple as they muse about their own ethereal--or subtle--selves.  But even the uninitiated will appreciate the brilliance of Rush's clear and comedic characterization that causes this meditation on death and masculinity to crackle with energy and mirth."--Chris Wallace, Interview Magazine"Playfully erotic, hopelessly addictive . . . features a marital reckoning between a wife intent on getting pregnant and a husband who can't decide if he's ambivalent."--Vogue"Rush dwells much on the futility of warring against our natures, yet this book abounds in wit, particularly in its exploration of Ned and Nina's marriage . . . His skill at revealing our interior lives is undiminished [and] his concerns with our carnal and intellectual lives remain pleasurably, provocatively intact."--Kirkus, Starred review"The verbal play and digressions one might expect from Rush, author of the major works Mating and Mortals, but briefer and more accessible. Readers will be immediately drawn into the acutely rendered world swirling around Ned and Nina."--James Coan, Library Journal