These Mortal Coils

By Norman Rush Knopf, 715 pp., $26.95

Norman Rush details a marriage from the inside out.

by Justin Bauer

Norman Rush is not the sort of writer to rush into anything half-cocked. One suspects that, even fully cocked, it takes him a while to get going.

Mortals, Rush's weighty new novel, offers a case in point. It's only his second novel, and it follows on the heels of his National Book Award-winning Mating. By 12 years. And at 700-odd pages of lapidary prose, it's entirely possible to imagine Rush working, daily, on the novel for that entire span of time.

Between the covers of the book, as well, Rush shows himself a deliberate writer. Mortals pays intense attention to small points: a conversation between husband and wife goes on for 30 pages, a discussion of errors in the Bible another 30. And the book closes with an intense and lengthy sex scene between the married couple, a scene that all but exhausts the stock of English terms -- from medical to vulgar -- for the female anatomy.

What Mortals maps with such precision is a marriage. Or, rather, a husband's grappling with the contradictions of his private and public lives. Ray Finch, almost 50, an English teacher and a contract CIA agent in Botswana, loves his (rather younger) wife, Iris. But the sharp divisions he has set up between home and work, between the intimacy of marriage and the demands of covert service, begin to break down. A recent arrival, an African-American holistic therapist named Morel, arouses Ray's professional curiosity at the same time he begins treating Iris' depression. Soon, Ray's worlds are forced together uncomfortably, and both his role as husband and as spy are drowned in a gout of misgivings and imagined slights. Rush examines, at great length, Ray's reactions and doubts and fears -- of Iris' relationships with Ray's brother, Rex, and with Morel; of his new ugly-American station chief, Boyle; even of his physical inadequacy (one long chapter is titled "I Would Like to Reassure You About My Penis").

Mortals, with its African setting, its mix of marital and post-colonial politics and its examination of guilt and jealousy, all but demands comparison with Graham Greene's novels. Rush mines the same territory as much of Greene's best work, and his aging and disappointed hero bears a more-than-passing resemblance to Greene characters like The Heart of the Matter's Scobie. But, even with apologies for the obviousness of the comparison, the parallel between Rush and Greene is instructive. For all of their similarities, Rush is no Greene; for all of Mortals' excellence, it deals with the demands of character and theme in considerably different fashion.

Greene's great strength, after all, was understatement. In both his serious novels and his "entertainments," he showed flawed men struggling with foreign settings, but let us know that their struggles and their wounds were largely self-inflicted. His characters delude themselves and damage themselves, but Greene conveys this without extensive introspection or narrative exposition -- events tell his stories, and he trusts his readers to pull clear implications from characters' experiences. His stories work from the outside in. Greene's novels are relatively short, the language is plain, but the atmosphere and the impact of his characters' crises are deep and clear.

Rush, on the other hand, shows Ray Finch destroying himself from the inside. While Mortals may be written in the third person, we are restricted to Ray's thoughts and his perceptions of events, and we receive them at length and with comprehensive detail. Ray's inner struggle takes center stage, rendered in an explicit self-analysis that leaves no uncertainty about his inner life. And Ray's preoccupations overwhelm the external action of the book. During the climactic sequence of the plot that dominates the latter half of the book -- a CIA intervention in a local political struggle -- Ray's action-hero charge into battle is overlaid with his internal domestic struggles. Advancing, literally naked, into the fray, he can only think about the details of his jealousy of his wife. Ray's excruciatingly detailed inner world overwhelms even the most intense external action.

That Mortals comes up wanting when measured against The Heart of the Matter is no surprise; few novels wouldn't. But the comparison highlights Rush's greatest strength as a novelist -- the complete and detailed picture he provides of a character's inner world, and the way those private thoughts dominate his perceptions and actions. Rush's detail is sometimes (well, often, given the length of his books) maddening. But even so, much of Ray's internal monologue remains vivid and believable, and succeeds in showing his core-deep anguish.

Norman Rush reads, Tue., June 24, 7 p.m., free, Free Library of Philadelphia, 1901 Vine St., 215-686-5322.