“To me, there’s no pessimism in it,” said Mr. Piepenbring, who coordinated The Paris Review’s “Mating” book club in 2015, when he worked at the magazine. “That was exactly the kind of relationship I wanted to be in.”
Korby Lenker, a singer-songwriter, artist and writer in Nashville, said he was introduced to the novel through his godmother, who thought it might help him expand his vocabulary. In a review on his YouTube channel, Mr. Lenker, 46, described it as a “funny, smart love story about two people trying to discover what love between equals might look like.”
Some readers have noted that a largely positive portrayal of love relationships in general, and heterosexual relationships in particular, is a rarity in fiction. “From the American novel since 1960, you learn next to nothing about what love between a grown-up man and woman might entail, beyond adultery and alcoholism,” the critic Benjamin Kunkel wrote for The London Review of Books in 2013.
“I was doing a sort of retrospective analysis of how people who had come to, maybe not a consummate relationship, but a compelling relationship with a significant other,” Mr. Rush said.
Ideas about heterosexuality have changed considerably in the more than three decades since “Mating” was published. While most Americans still identify as heterosexual, the writer Asa Seresin in 2019 noted the rise of “heteropessimism,” the belief that being straight is “drab and predictable,” to the point that “indictments of heterosexuality have become something of a meme.” So while love remains among the greatest subjects for fiction writers, heterosexual love is, well, perhaps a bit passé — particularly the notion that a woman might devote so much energy to landing a man. In “Mating,” the narrator sets off on a harrowing journey across the desert to get hers.
“I think, for obvious reasons, heterosexuality is not particularly fashionable — indeed, it’s highly suspect,” said Hermione Hoby, the author of the novel “Virtue.” “So in some ways it makes sense that this book from 30 years ago should now find that talismanic force. It reads almost like a blueprint.”
