Michael Dirda
A young professor looks for happiness in literature -- but finds real love instead.

By Michael Dirda
Sunday, September 10, 2006

TOLSTOY LIED

A Love Story

By Rachel Kadish

Houghton Mifflin. 325 pp. $24

J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is essentially a sword-and-sorcery fantasy made literary. By slightly transmuting the elements of typical Westerns, Thomas Berger created a serio-comic masterpiece in Little Big Man . A.S. Byatt called her Booker prize-winning novel Possession "a romance." Any genre, no matter how seemingly common or commercial, may serve as the foundation for a work of art.

Perhaps even chick-lit.

Consider the plot of Tolstoy Lied , by Rachel Kadish: A young New York professional woman -- in this case, a 33-year-old college teacher named Tracy Farber -- works in a highly competitive, dog-eat-dog environment (the typical English department of academic fiction). Tracy is coming up for a crucial job review and her big chance for advancement (tenure). However, an important colleague (an older female colleague) has taken a dislike to our hard-working protagonist, and the two start to clash repeatedly.

Meanwhile, Tracy has been worrying about her love life. Recently, she ended a long relationship with the "dependable, kind, smart, prudent" Jason because the fire simply wasn't there. Now he's marrying Somebody Else. Tracy's family -- a well-meaning Jewish clan that includes the de rigueur nosy aunt -- repeatedly hints that she needs to settle down already. After all, her former roommate Hannah is about to have a baby. Why, even close girlfriend Yolanda is regularly dating or at least sleeping around and having her heart broken. Both offer advice, as does Hannah's street-smart younger brother.

Needless to say, Tracy does all her worrying in the first-person, and a brisk sassy first-person at that. She refers to herself wryly as "our dashing heroine." She tells us about "the Marriage Mafia, those concerned citizens who recite dire matrimony statistics to single women over thirty." And she obsesses constantly about wedded life with a kind of Seinfeldian humor:

"Long ago I came to the conclusion that all married people are with the CIA. . . . During the ceremony brides and grooms take a vow of secrecy. Afterward, they could tell you what makes their marriage tick; they could explain how they manage day to day without throttling one another; whether they have regrets; and why, in fact, the institution of marriage is desirable in the first place. But then they'd have to kill you."

Oh well. Love, a man, family, who needs them really? Tracy has pretty much decided to live as an intellectual hermit, spending her Saturday nights reading at an all-night diner or working away on her next big research project: an examination of happiness in literature. She's convinced that Tolstoy got it wrong or even lied when he wrote, at the beginning of Anna Karenina , that "happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

But then, one evening, at a reception at her friend's office, Tracy notices "an angular, blondish man . . . in a dark sweater sipping from a cup of seltzer." She reflexively thinks to herself, " Not my type ." Right, sure. Soon enough, our dashing heroine accidentally drops her plate of hors d'oeuvres, and George, to soften her obvious embarrassment, deliberately tosses his own food into the air as well. Clearly, love is born. But will it last this time? Is it the real thing?

The above details appear in just the first 25 or so pages of Tolstoy Lied , but Kadish clearly aims to give all these stock items an intellectualized twist. Naturally, Tracy's best friend at work is a witty, gay guy, but he's also a hot professor of British Literature. Tracy's graduate student Elizabeth is not only sensitive and brilliant, she's diligently writing a dissertation on Emily Dickinson. When the new lovebirds go on their first date, it's to a play based on the poet H.D.'s infatuated and doomed relationship with Freud. Back at the office our heroine keeps a photograph of Zora Neale Hurston on the wall.

Dorothy Sayers once used the whodunit format to create a modern "Woman Question" novel in the satirical yet deeply moving Gaudy Night . Similarly, in Tolstoy Lied Kadish hopes to build a more serious edifice on a chick-lit foundation. Women appear as colleagues, enemies, friends, advisors, daughters, wives, mothers, deae-ex-machina. At the book's various crises Tracy must choose what matters most, each time risking her profession, her man, her obligations to a suffering friend in crisis, her fidelity to herself as a human being. Kadish increasingly blends office politics with the politics of sex and domination, and the novel dramatically, even melodramatically, darkens as it proceeds. By its end Tolstoy Lied will include a poison-pen letter, spiritual vampirism, mental illness, attempted suicide and cowardly appeasement. And that's just in the English department.

At least George is perfect, apart from the fact that he wants to rush into marriage, would like a half-dozen children almost immediately and is burdened by the heritage of a stern, unbending father and a fundamentalist Christian upbringing. At times, he even seems unnervingly old-fashioned, especially to our feminist professor. But is she being too doctrinaire? After all, as Tracy eventually confesses, "Feminism taught me how to critique the world, but not how to live in it."

Despite its admirable ambition to use the chick-lit formula to examine some major issues in the lives of modern women, Tolstoy Lied doesn't really succeed. The depiction of Tracy's colleagues owes more to familiar academic satires than to reality. Kadish's professors, with one or two exceptions, seldom act like real people who happen to teach literature. Neither is Tolstoy's notorious assertion about happiness dealt with in a significant manner; it ends up as little more than a plot device. As for the relationship with George, any English major could point out that "the course of true love never did run smooth."

And yet. When a man opens a novel so clearly oriented to women readers, he can't help but wonder if he's missing the point. Perhaps my view of Tolstoy Lied as an attempt to "transcend" the chick-lit genre is simply an aggressive, masculinist misreading. If a book isn't breaking down barriers, going boldly where no author has gone before and generally swaggering around as if it were in an American Masterpiece competition, then it's hardly worth bothering with, right? Before starting Rachel Kadish's novel, I thought the book's title referred to the German word for an art-song, Lied (pronounced leet ): Tolstoy Lied suggested something wise and mournful, like Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde or the lieder that make up Schubert's Winterreise. But Tolstoy Lied , i.e., Tolstoy prevaricated, fibbed, told a whopper, sounds brusque, a little vulgar or even whiney, in other words, the kind of snappy title you might give a reasonably entertaining academic chick-lit novel. Just don't expect Schubert. ·

Michael Dirda's e-mail address is mdirda@gmail.com. Each Wednesday at 2 p.m., he conducts a book discussion for washingtonpost.com.