Is True Love Possible? Readers Are Turning to This 1990s Novel for Answers. – The New York Times

Norman Rush’s “Mating” has achieved handshake status among younger readers thinking seriously about romantic relationships.Send any friend a storyAs a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share.“Mating” is a novel for people who particularly love novels. Lately it has found its evangelists by word of mouth.Credit…Rachel Stern for The New York TimesKatherine Champagne had never heard of “Mating,” the award-winning novel by Norman Rush, until one afternoon in 2020, when she popped into a random room on Clubhouse in the early days of that social media app.“It was me and a group of true strangers talking about books we liked,” said Ms. Champagne, 35, who lives in Queens and works at a start-up. A woman recommended the novel without giving anyone in the chat room much to go on. “She was just straight up like, ‘This is the best book I’ve ever read,’” Ms. Champagne recalled.César Acevedo, a bartender in Brooklyn, bought “Mating” within 24 hours of seeing a tweet posted in December by John Phipps, the fiction editor of the literary magazine The Fence. In the tweet, Mr. Phipps said he was wondering “why everyone isn’t always talking about this
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