A review by nicolebonia
Corpos Subtis by Norman Rush

2.0

I’m not fully sure what I expected when I picked up Norman Rush’s Subtle Bodies. The premise is simple but promising. Ned and Nina are a married couple trying to get pregnant with their first child when Ned is called away to attend the funeral of an old college friend (the ringleader of their witty, irreverent nonconformist clique) with whom he has had little contact for twenty years. Furious that he has left in her most fertile time of the month, Nina takes off after him and arrives to ensure their offspring, and to navigate Ned through the analysis of the brief friendship which shaped his life. Rush is a wonderfully observant writer and there is much that he gets right about the haunting dynamics of lost friendships, and the insular concerns of career and marriage, but there was a lack of emotion connecting the threads, and some insufferable characters, that made this a slow and tedious read. The characters are given to long winded political rants and lengthy conversations that lack a true conversational feel, and seem to serve more as an arena for the presentation of very big ideas (invasion, war, Jewish and Palestinian problems in the Middle East). Hopefully Rush’s other acclaimed work will more prominently feature the emotional impact missing from this one.