What are the motifs in Mating by Norman Rush?

Acting out childhood issues is a recurring idea. Both Nelson and the narrator are obsessed by and determined to deviate from some of the traits expressed by their parents; things that caused them pain as children. Nelson admired his father's radical politics and attitudes but also felt damaged by his father's alcoholism and hypocritical attitudes. Nelson also saw and apparently empathized with what his mother experienced as a wife. Yet Nelson is in many ways much like his father in temperament and intellect and at times treats the narrator like the codicil and burden to a man's more important dreams and theories that his mother was in his family. The effect of alcoholism on Nelson's father's personality is something that was probably poorly understood by his young son. On the one occasion Nelson drinks heavily in the story he is horrified to find himself both out of control with the drinking and acting much as his own father did.