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.
"Rush's exuberant, late-modern style feels as smooth and casual as freshly pressed khakis, but beneath it a sort of parasympathetic network courses with moral ambivalence. . . . In Subtle Bodies, as in so much of his work, confronting the world returns Rush to his central question: What matters, in the end? That we do what we can is the author's refrain. Even if all we can do-all any two people can do-is form a country of our own, whose flag is love."-Michelle Orange, Book Forum
"[Rush] attends so closely to his characters-their thoughts, words, beliefs, relationships-and landscapes-physical, social, political-that he brings them utterly alive, with often-exhilarating aptitude and insight."-Rebecca Steinitz, The Boston Globe
"Norman Rush has suddenly become one of America's must-read novelists. He crept up on us, because his two previous novels, Mating and Mortals, were such enormous books that you could easily tell yourself that you'd read them next year. . . . Now Subtle Bodies has arrived, at just 256 dense, colloquial, inviting pages, and you're out of excuses."-Clancy Martin, New York Observer
"Rush's defining gift might be his incredible awareness-about politics, about human nature, about the world-which he bestows upon his characters. . . . It makes the reader's lens of the world a little clearer, a little sharper. If you've never read Rush, . . . Subtle Bodies is a more than fine place to begin."-Jill Owens, The Oregonian
"By turns, tragic, bittersweet, insightful and laugh-out-loud funny, with its numerous references to pop-culture, radical politics, obscure philosophy, and hysterical monkeyshines of obnoxious college kids: Kraftwerk lyrics one moment, 19th century Russian anarchist the next."-The Frontier Psychologist
"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
