“In Africa, you want more, I think.”
—from Norman Rush’s Mating

As sentences go, it’s not much, really—doesn’t plunge us into the sensuous muck, paint indelible images on our inner eyes, doesn’t thrust us into back-blistering Kalahari sun (soon), doesn’t Google Street View us into a village or even a country, doesn’t try to dazzle us with wordplay, turning a town “traditionopolis” or a nervous animal “postlion,” hasn’t yet unleashed the steady barrage of allusions, like that of a “fine grit [floating] like a painting of bedlam in the sfumato style,” that will send us groping for reference books (now Wikipedia); no, it’s really rather plain, actually, this opening sentence, blunt and exposed like bleached bone, a straightforward foray into a novel that will veer off and ruminate on nutritional anthropology, lust, the prospects of utopianism, the differences between men and women, the travails of post-colonial Africa, but not yet, as if the sentence (the author? no, the sentence has agency, has slipped away from “author,” can tie its own shoes thank you very much), fully aware of what is to come, realizes that bigger, fuller things are just around the corner and knowing this, leads with a firm handshake, quietly confident, meeting our gaze, brazenly assertive even when allowing some doubt to creep in, moving to the diminished seventh, the irresolution of one confident enough to admit to some limitations, to know subjectivity is no liability but part of the big ticket draw, why we’re here, what pulls us in and on, wide-eyed, hungry, no, famished—sialorrheic, damnit, Rush might put it (think saliva)—a sentence that withholds almost everything and in nearly every way, assured that it is not what it is about at all that matters but what it is doing, and what it is doing, among other things, is what it has to do, namely making you—without a clue who this is about or where it’s headed, without a rebel yell but most definitely in the midnight hour—want more, more, more.

Tim Horvath is the author of Circulation.