I feel very mixed about this story of an a young English professor seeking tenure, a feat at a New York City University. Seeking to refute Tolstoy's idea that “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," Tracy at first thinks that her happiness is not based on love but when romance comes to her unexpectedly, she seeks to disprove this maxim. And that is where I had problems. The romance comes on suddenly with someone who doesn't seem to have any chemistry with Tracy. With its inevitable conflicts, it is difficult to empathize with her.

What was a better storyline for me was the politics of the English department. Tracy's attachment to her doctoral student despite warnings from colleagues to keep a distance. A force in the department who bullies her ideas through and views Tracy as an adversary. It was these passages that kept me wanting to read the narrative not the love story.

Ugh, does not want!

Pretentious, condescending pseudo-intellectual crap. Basically chick-lit, but not even that well-written. Kadish attempts to gain ballast by spewing her sophomoric word-vomit from the mouth of an "I'm way cooler than this petty academia" professor whose very "I'm way cooler"-ness defeats the purpose of the whole critique. A great read for people who really wish they were reading pulp but want to look smart.

Loved The Weight of Ink. Loved how the 2 main characters in this book met...she immediately drops her plate full of food, and he decides to drop his too. They have a charming conversation while cleaning up. He went downhill fast after that, while she spent most of the rest of the story tormented. So disappointed.

This book kind of did a number on me. I finished it on the last day of a trip, when I was feeling sort of tired and a little sick. So: reading, but with vulnerabilities. The novel's heroine is a literature professor who wants to debunk Tolstoy's line from Anna Karenina: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." She says that would mean that "a person must be unhappy in order to be interesting." So she tells us her engaging love story, which is really very well done. It feels so true -- exciting but not romanticized. A fleshy sort of love story, with the realness intact. She follows it past the early euphoria, through rough patches and a separation and back to equilibrium. So as in life, it's a big old log flume ride, and you go for it, but spend a lot of time wondering if it's worth the stress. In the meantime, there's great stuff about academic politics and good secondary characters. Just an enjoyable read.

The problem for me is that she begins as a happy and contented single woman. Not shunning romantic encounters but not actively seeking them either. Good naturedly fending off efforts by friends and family to get her paired off. She got my hopes up that we might somehow return to happy singlehood, instead of ending up with, as Bridget Jones calls them, the smug marrieds. Which is where everybody always ends up, now and forever, world without end amen. She winds up her story with the "what I've learned" chapter, which she has earned. But there's an air of "now that I love, I'm doing life's real work" that grates. Her lover's proposal of marriage represented an invitation to "stop watching the mess of human desire from the shoreline."

Sigh. I know, it said "love story" right on the cover. What did I expect? I'm such a sponge -- I absorb all these absurd messages and take them to heart. What am I, 13 years old? I can't think for myself? But these repeated demonstrations of how I am living but half a life in my singledom are so very, very tiring. Love can kiss my ass.

""

This book was on the exact two topics I had been ruminating on for the week or two prior to reading it: love and happiness. I had honestly been feeling rather depressed and consequently thinking a lot about happiness and what it took to achieve it and then maintain it. I had also been thinking about the nature of love and what made it everlasting between two people. When you fall in love, what comes after? When you disagree with each other, cause harm, what is it worth then? Reading this book was like discussing these things at length with a close friend and feeling, at the end of the conversation, a great deal more at peace. I think maybe I had been on the precipice of certain realizations myself, or perhaps I had already made them, and this book articulated them in a way I wasn’t yet capable of doing. Also, certain aspects of Tracy’s personality – her approach to politics, how she was a little old fashioned, her musings on feminism, her love for literature, her ambition, the depth of her introspections – were very similar to mine. Untrue as it was, it made me feel as though I had a personal stake in her story. If things ended up being alright for her, they would be alright for me. But my own biases prior to reading it aside, this was a different kind of story, told compellingly and without romanticization (is that a word?) of its major issues. I’m disappointed it wasn’t better received. Some readers are calling it pretentious. Why? Because the author used some words they didn’t know, alluded to authors they hadn’t heard of and books they hadn’t read? The main character was an English professor, for God’s sake. What did they expect? I personally didn’t feel that not knowing every single word or being familiar with every work of literature or author made reference to compromised my understanding of the story. In fact, I loved it so much I will be rereading it as soon as I find the time. This was a true gem of a book.

In Tolstoy Lied: A Love Story, English professor Tracy Farber struggles to balance the challenges and uncertainties of both her professional and personal life, ultimately losing control of both before ever creating order in either. Facing a possible promotion at work—tenure within the university’s English department—she must negotiate departmental politics and juggle the demands of her own teaching and research projects while also advising a brilliant but unstable graduate student named Elizabeth and coexisting with a bitter and controlling colleague, Joanne. As a single, professional woman, Tracy realizes, to some extent, that she has sacrificed her personal life to further her career. Although her personal time includes social outings and conversations with friends, by the opening of the novel, her most serious romantic relationship has ended because it lacked an essential spark; accordingly, she creates for herself an ‘intellectual hermitage’ devoted to her work. Tracy takes umbrage, then, at Tolstoy’s opening line in Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Building from this premise, she plans a sweeping research project to argue that Tolstoy lied—hence the title—and that furthermore, the entire literary canon has built a stigma to conglomerate, resist, and/or devalue happy endings. Nonetheless, Tracy is a far cry from her own happy ending, regardless of the fact that she does meet and begin dating an intelligent, kind, and considerate man whom she eventually admits she loves. Their whirlwind courtship, engagement, and break-up comprise the trials of Tracy’s personal life, all of which leave her distracted, confused, and desperately seeking the relationship advice she herself used to dispense so glibly to her friends. Her ex-fiancé wants to be the primary provider with a house full of children; this idea of family, coupled with his very fundamentalist Christian heritage, clashes with Tracy’s more liberal and feminist views of life, hindering their reconciliation. As her work situation becomes more hostile—Elizabeth’s breakdown, Tracy’s refusal to play office politics, and Joanne’s relentless persecution of her—Tracy nearly experiences a disappointing collapse of her career and personal life. Through these experiences, however, she learns some important lessons about herself, not to mention an enlarged perspective on relationships, life, and love. Author Rachel Kadish truly focuses on relationships in this novel, whether romantic, platonic, or interpersonal/professional. Although much of the action centers on Tracy's life in academia, knowledge of literature or even of Tolstoy is not necessary to understand and appreciate this book.

The title may be the best part of this book, as well as the edges of the narrative where didactic elaboration on the title creates a frame. There can be something refreshing about books that do not quite succeed -particularly at believable characters, despite making enjoyable dialogue, believable dialogue even in the context of dialogue I can as easily imagine on a TV show like Parks and Rec- and yet are published, expressly readable, and confident in themselves. It's done. On to the next.

There was this really cheap moment in the book when two old academics are standing together and one of them quotes You Can't Always Get What You Want, and I felt like I was watching a movie like About a Boy or Love Actually, and I felt a tired grace a writer might grant herself in a moment to be done with a book that does not take itself seriously and needs to be finished. On to the next. The thing is, I like About a Boy just fine, in fact I think it's a standout of its genre. Is this a standout of its genre, or is the standout quality of it an accident of its time, 2006? A little of both, probably.

In this book's New York there's no sense that 9/11 happened. In this book's 2006, there's no sense that the internet is gaining steam in its social usage. In this book's academia, college campus drama seems incidental, not something you can generalize or connect to broader culture and politics. There's no contact with any of these challenges to happiness today, because the book was written yesterday. What makes it refreshing is also what makes it feel unrealistic, though some of what feels unrealistic in characterization is just the fact that this book is populated by 30-something ~white New Yorkers in 2006.

Is it fair to give 3 stars to a book that succeeds at being what it set out to be, just because it's embarrassing to read it, and has the airy puff snack taste of the unnecessary, not quite indulgent, not quite pleasurable, use of my time? Perhaps it is unfair to give 3 stars to such a book, but it is also exactly what the book is: a 3-star book. It does not carry the indulgent gratification of a 2-star read, nor the satisfaction of a 4-star effort.

Tolstoy did not lie, in fact he was probably too honest, but his opening line in Anna Karenina is annoying and incorrect, sure. I am interested in more happy literature, but that means actually literature that portrays more effort than what literature tends to portray. There is a great deal of struggle in happiness: the struggle of being disciplined, of being charitable, of biting one's tongue, of daily maintenance work, of hygiene and cleanliness and society and conflict resolution and prevention.

The main character in this book does not exhibit this effort. She goes with the flow, and has the moral luck to flow as a dutiful worker in her field. I suppose that is happiness, too. Fine. It is also happiness how she defends her convictions and is loyal to lifelong friendships and her role as a mentor. These are good details as well. Though the well-crafted scenes outnumber awkward episodes in this book, I felt myself embarrassed more often than I'd care to experience as a reader. When characters are doing things -whether throwing plates of food or cutting toe-nails- that is when the book rises with life, but when characters are presented as types, especially older character types, or when motivations are explained, that is when the book flattens out.

Oh the beautiful smart language, the satire of workplace/academic politics, the hilarious gay professional ally...

Downsides: trite love descriptions, disappointing closure to romantic climax, possibly incorrect depiction of bipolar disorder? So much self doubt, and lots of obfuscation in characters' thoughts and dialogue so that there were a few passages I read more than 4 times and still didn't know what I was expected to take away from it...

Overall, great smart (yet light enough) read

I'm glad I read Rachel Kadish's wonderful The Weight of Ink before I read her earlier novels or I might never have picked it up. From a Sealed Room (1998), her debut novel, was pretty awful. This one from 2006 is better than that, but it is way too long, and the protagonist, in her 30s and supposedly a respected professor of English literature, thinks and behaves like an immature adolescent.

I have been known to quote–and dismiss–on more than one occasion the famous quote from Tolstoy–“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”--which assumes that people and families are only interesting–that is, worth writing about–if they’re unhappy. Denying that claim is the explicit premise of this novel, set forth on its first page. . . . Or at least that’s how it appears. But then it turns out that the novel is not about families at all, and when they’re occasionally mentioned they’re not happy families. Nor are the individuals who are the subjects of the novel happy. The appealing protagonist/narrator is an English professor at a university in New York City. It’s puzzling why writers think that general readers will be interested in the internal politics of English departments, but it’s a common theme. And in this case it works, in large part because of the engaging, thoughtful voice of that narrator. Her professional and romantic struggles, in her narration, were, for me as page-turningly compelling as a thriller. I really liked that we saw her work life as a determining factor in her pursuit of happiness, something that is all too rare in fiction. And I hope it’s not a spoiler to reveal that the novel does, after all, have a hard-earned happy ending.

After The Weight of Ink, I went looking for more of her books - I really enjoyed this book. Very different from The Weight and enjoyable. The conundrum the heroine is in is so common for strong women these days. I will go read more of Rachel's Kadish's books.