Book Review: Tolstoy Lied: A Love Story by Rachel Kadish

Well, I’m not disappointed. That’s the most important takeaway, I suppose. The novel is not nearly as good as The Weight of Ink, but I wasn’t expecting it to be, and I could still see the budding skill and voice that bloomed in her later book. 

In Tolstoy Lied: A Love Story, you can definitely tell the author is a literature lover who wrote this novel for an audience of literature lovers. There is an abundance of literary references, and the protagonist is a literature professor. I’ve never really considered the politics of a literary collegiate world, and reading a sample of it was very interesting. But this book is probably way too niche to make it in the mainstream literary market. You have to be really deep into the world of literary analyses—and really enjoy being in that world—to enjoy this book. And hola! I’m one of those people.

I enjoyed the entirety of the novel, but I nearly consumed the last half. I think I read the latter half of the novel in a day. The book definitely got better as it progressed. A bit of a slow burn. 

I did feel like the book was occasionally too politically heavy-handed. I read books to escape politics, so while there’s nothing wrong with putting politics in a book, it’s just not my cup of tea. But by the end, I was actually impressed by how Tracy grew politically and how she connected her politics to reality and her experience in living in a real world rather than an idealized one. But while she impressed me, I could still have done without it. But there were just political snippets, and it was realistic in a book whose main agenda was being realistic, so a flaw easily forgiven.

Minor spoiler alert: the romantic couple have a falling out in the middle of the book. I was initially bummed out at the plot point, because I felt like there were no stakes. I just knew they were going to get back together at the end. I mean, the entire premise of the novel is to belie the literary canon of tragedy. But after a little while, Kadish actually made me question if she was going to flip the novel on its head and have her end up alone or with someone else. No spoilers about the ending, but I wasn’t sure which way I wanted the romantic relationship to go. I actually think it is an utterly realistic effect for Kadish to make: we could be happy either way, whether our protagonist ends up with her lover or not. Being with someone isn’t the end-all-be-all for anyone. And I really appreciate that in a romance novel.

Now I want to get into the nitty gritty that is more of a response to her “thesis” rather than a review, per se. The premise of the novel was, in essence, a rebuttal of Tolstoy’s claim that “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Or, in other words, Rachel Kadish was trying to prove that happiness isn’t boring. So I’m going to treat this book like a literary analysis through the lens of fiction.

At times I was wondering how Kadish was going to wrap up the entire book and connect it back to her thesis: whether being happy was actually as interesting as being unhappy. I was worried that our protagonist’s colleagues were correct in saying such a thesis was too broad. Too often have I suffered from the same issue when writing literary analyses: I want to talk about everything and how I go too broad. But Kadish totally brought it all together in the last chapter. I was impressed. But I didn’t necessarily think she proved her point.

I feel like I could write a literary analysis derivative of her literary analysis. Kadish wanted to demonstrate that happiness is interesting, and everyone is happy in a different way. But, obviously no book can be without conflict, and this book had its fair share of unhappiness. I would argue that this book was most interesting when the protagonist was unhappy. And this book was basically like every Jane Austen novel: it was about the journey to happiness, and it didn’t prove that happiness is interesting. 

Kadish did make some really good, poignant points about happiness in general, but I’m not sure she succeeded in proving her thesis. She says that both literature and people avoid happiness like the plague and are drawn to tragedy: proved. She says that happiness brings enemies: proved. She says that happiness isn’t the absence of trouble, but the ability to live well alongside trouble: proved. She says that happiness is just as interesting as unhappiness: I really, really want to believe her, but it is yet to be proven by Kadish.

But it did make me think. If “happiness” is like Kadish posits: “Happiness is the ability to live well alongside trouble,” is there a book in which a character is generally happy throughout the book and proves that happiness is interesting in its own way?