Tolstoy Lied: A Love Story

While wandering Barnes & Noble to pick up Notes from Underground (previously discussed on this blog), I picked up a copy of Tolstoy Lied: A Love Story by Rachel Kadish.  The book was written with much support from the fiction awards, prizes & fellowships structure.  But what caught my attention is that the book is meant to be about a belief in happiness.

One of the other things the novel must face is a belief in the novel itself.  In the new millennium, how do you are write something meaningful when the culture is skeptical whether there is anything meaningful to be written?  Or, as Kadish has her character think about falling in love:

How are you supposed to conduct yourself when you believe you've had some kind of soul connection with a stranger, but-- being a modern rather than a character in a nineteenth-century play-- you are still have to suffer the petty indignities of dating?  Indignities about which you are, as a habit, skeptical? (p. 59)

The reader has picked up this awarded & fellowshipped author rather than a simple romance novel because, actually, really, you don't believe the romance formula.  And yet for the formula to work, you secretly do have to believe in it.  The disappointment of the girl-loses-guy turn cannot be completely expected; you had indeed been hoping for something else.  It is impossible that this attempt at love wasn't good enough.

Love is real... And it is impossible in this world. (p. 253)

Such is the thought that crosses the heroine's mind.  I'll leave it to the reader reaching the end of the book to find out if she was right or not.  (Meanwhile, for more on the romance novel formula, I suggest this essay from the Raleigh News & Observer by the author of the blog Breakfast with Pandora.)

The heroine is a literature professor, and along with the romance-formula for the man in her life, she and a student she labels "the canary in the coal mine" also follow the same ups-and-downs in their love for literature.  The emotional turmoil and perils-to-career being more hazardous for the canary, of course.  Some wisdom about the hazards of love comes early in the novel:

...don't pursue love against the interest of your own health, like an addict in need of a fix. (p. 12)

Advice about love, of various quality and from various sources, weaves through the rest of the novel.  The heroine is attentive, shocked, dismayed, uncertain.  Developing certainty for herself is of course part of the chick lit formula, and in this book it weaves through both love stories.  Developing certainty in the ability to obtain happiness, and how to do it, was of course advertised as the main theme of the book and culminates in a good essay on courage.  (For more on courage, I highly recommend Courage: A Philosophical Investigation by Douglas N. Walton, which is no longer in print and will have to be found at your local university library.)

Being a woman of my era, I expect the heroine to find happiness in her certainty.  Chick lit is about kicking romantic concessions to the curb.  Being a woman of philosophy, I expect happiness to be detached from the happenstance of events and made to stand on its own.  I don't know what is required to write The Novel That Matters, but I know one thing is that it must be true.  This novel is not true; it a takes a fairy godmother to wrap it up in a bow.  The bow, alas, says, "turn of this century chick lit," not "Truth."  It almost seems as if that is all the novel could possibly be: very good.

And it is very good.  Nearly every paragraph, page after page of them, present a fresh and creative idea or view of the world.  Even her sex scenes are fresh, without delving into originality of the prurient sort.  I myself have doubts about the continued Progress Of The Novel, where Thomas Pynchon-level (mentioned in the book) strangeness seems to be required to do anything original.  The high level of quality of this book, which none the less doesn't quite get there, makes me feel even more dark about that particular subject.

Meanwhile, the subject of Anna Karenina must be addressed.  The title Tolstoy Lied of course refers to the opening lines of Anna Karenina:

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

I have to admit it has been more than 10 years since I read the book.  (The novel, by the way, assumes that you have read the book, just like it guesses you may have read Pynchon, but you won't miss anything if you haven't.)  I did make reference to it in the letter I wrote to my church releasing my ex-husband from certain religious obligations to me.  As I remember it, Anna Karenina is not an indictment of hope, but an indictment of cruelty.  In my letter, I was making a commitment to avoid being cruel.

Each character in Anna Karenina is free to find happiness in the circumstances of his and her life; there is the Truth in the book.  Happiness, in that novel and in life, isn't about a fairy grandmother giving you what you want; it is the one thing a person can create their own certainty about in a world where nothing else is certain, indeed, where everything else seems to be anarchy.  It is perhaps the brilliance of that novel that it can illustrate this fact without actually showing it.

After all of that, my advice is this: read Tolstoy Lied on the plane.  This fellowshipped and awarded woman is a lovely writer and deserves for you to buy her book.  Read Anna Karenina with the tea and the cat: you deserve to read about an unhappiness that is real, and see the reality of happiness that lurks in those shadows.

*PS: Thinking over this novel keeps turning my mind to the lyrics of the Garbage song, "Sex Is Not the Enemy." Youtube here.  It's a tangent, but at several different angles.

And here a link to a blog post and many more links about Tolstoy Lied.  The amazon link at the beginning of the post contains a very good review from Publishers Weekly.