This is a surprisingly good book. The protagonist is a professor, single, and looking for love. The setting is Manhattan, the literature department of a university. Many issues that are not usually addressed are introduced through the interesting, diverse characters. Setting and physical descriptions are subtly and adroitly blended into the action to convey a realistic feel. The author is a literary professional writing on a grant so all the technical bases are covered. (I did finally finish the book.)

I truly enjoy the character development in Rachel Kadish's books - true also of this story of a young woman in a university English department.

Somewhat interesting. I was much more interested in the love story and the inner conflicts of the main characters than the infighting in the faculty of the English department (however, the contrast may have been necessary). In addition, the male character was not fleshed out nearly as well as the female character.

This book was ok. Held my interest long enough to be a diversion from the problems of the day but nothing of substance. Only read this book if you are bored.

This was an ambitious attempt to integrate two complex storylines. One is a love story of two 30 something people trying to foster their relationship while keeping their respective problematic pasts and differences in values and outlooks on life from messing things up. The other is about one of them, a woman professor, trying to navigate her way through the internecine politics and toxic interpersonal dynamics between the faculty of a university English department.

While I found that Kadish largely succeeded at this, there were times when her portrayals suffered from too much detail. It is rare for me to think that a book of less than 330+ pages seems too long. There were moments, however, when Tolstoy Lied felt that way because of the lengthy, in depth descriptions. But for the most part her depictions in a straightforward readable prose were insightful, highly believable, and at times quite poignant. The internal dialogues that the lead woman character who is also the narrator had with herself about love, her friendships, her family, her work and career, etc demonstrated a lot of psychological sophistication and insight on the author’s part. I could readily see how this book foreshadowed the kind of skillful writing and character development Kadish demonstrated in The Weight of Ink.

The other aspect of TL which I found annoying at times was the author’s references to literature. Not being familiar with famous American novelists meant that I did not grasp some of what she was alluding to. As I am admittedly not a fan of poetry I also found these elements of the book to be less than appealing. While some Goodreads reviewers accused Kadish of being pretentious for including these elements in the book, I would not go that far. I think it was more a matter of her wanting to incorporate this aspect of her education and life into her writing. Given my more pedestrian tastes and limited knowledge these things just did not appeal to me.

Fortunately, these deficits were relatively minor. Overall, I enjoyed reading the book enough to give it a 4 star rating. I am pleased to have discovered Kadish and look forward to reading more of her work in the future. She is a talented and imaginative storyteller.

The premise of this book is that happiness can be just as compelling as unhappiness (from Tolstoy's "happy families are all alike" critique in the beginning of Anna Karenina), and while it's an interesting conceit, I just didn't think this book lived up to it's promise. I think the main problem was I found the hero to be rather creepy and pushy, and I wasn't convinced that this strong protagonist would fall for him. That said, the writing was great with some excellent descriptions. This is a notch higher than chick lit, but I found it a bit too chick lit-y to be really great.

3.5 stars

Interesting premise and some funny and wise lines. The plot itself was OK, but I found parts of the novel irritating. First, the novel has no chapters, only parts. True, there are breaks in the prose--but why no chapters? And early in the book the stream of consciousness style seemed contrived to allow the author to make witty comments on various topics--especially about the nature of dating and love. But in the end it was an interesting read and showed insight into the world of academia. If you're not connected with academia, however, I'd skip this one.

Extremely well written. A real pleasure to read not only for her mastery of the written word but the story/premise were both well thought out.

Felt like chick lit pretending to be serious. Too many characters, and since Tracy's understanding of most of her co-workers changed throughout the book it was hard to get a grasp of their personalities. George, the male lead character, seemed domineering and disrespectful of Tracy's career from the first date, so it was hard to read about Tracy continually brushing these things aside.  I thought for a bit that the happy ending would be a return to singlehood, which would've made me happier and been more realistic than the resurrection of a relationship that seemed unfixable.

I’ve finished reading Tolstoy Lied: A Love Story just a few minutes ago and the book had me thinking about happiness and its true meaning. It made me realize that you can never gain happiness without beating the odds, which are loneliness, anger and heartaches. You can never truly say you’re happy without feeling lonely, angry or heartbroken.

People misunderstand happiness. They think it’s the absence of trouble. That’s not happiness, that’s luck. Happiness is the ability to live well alongside trouble. No two people have the same trouble, or the same way of metabolizing it. No two happy people are happy in the same way. Even Tolstoy was afraid to admit this, and I don’t blame him. Every day brilliant people, people smarter than I, wallow in safe tragedy and pessimism, shying from what really takes guts: recognizing how much courage and labor happiness demands. —Tolstoy Lied: A Love Story, Rachel Kadish

Just from that last sentence, everything is cleared up. Happiness demands a lot of courage and labor. Happiness doesn’t only mean you are happy. It also means you’ve been to too much trouble and too much pain that this time, finally, you must get it.

3.5/5

I decided to read Tolstoy Lied, Kadish’s second published novel, because I found Kadish’s third and most recent novel, The Weight of Ink, to be totally compelling. The second novel is not nearly as good as her third novel, but the skills that will make The Weight of Ink so very good are already on display in this very different sort of a novel. The lie that Tolstoy allegedly told is the very famous first paragraph of his Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Kadish reveals in an online backstory that she had wondered if people really believed that all happy families were really that alike. When she was in her twenties, she wrote a short story, which she resurrected years later and turned it into this book, which is both a novel of ideas and a romantic comedy. https://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/ba...

tThe protagonist of Tolstoy Lied is Tracy Farber, a young English Department professor who is in her tenure year at a major New York City university, which is not named but which just might be modeled on NYU. She is clearly a strong candidate. All her work is well above average for the university, her students highly regard her, she is advising a very strong graduate student’s dissertation work, and her tenure packet is super strong. At the same time she toys with the idea that happiness in literature is not attended to by academia, that perhaps a wide-ranging book based on Tolstoy’s lie as it has appeared in literature over the years is worth investigating, after she gets tenure, of course; she knows to keep that idea to herself as it goes against what is valued in the academy. For all her brilliance (and her goal of keeping her Tolstoy idea a secret), Tracy has an almost innocent insistence on ignoring all pragmatic advice. She remains independent and does what seems most important. And in a book like this one, that will lead her to make a series of mistakes, and the history of those drive the plotline.

tAt the same time, Tracy Farber has decided (at the age of 33) to remain single for the rest of her life. Her relationships in the past have not turned out well, and she feels she is happy as she is with a full professional and intellectual life and many close friends from all the stages of her life. But then she meets George, and bit-by-bit everything changes. He is from an entirely different background: he’s an escapee from a fundamentalist Christian family and she is a largely agnostic Jew. He works for a nonprofit helping poor kids in public schools while she is a professor at a major university. But they do share interests in doing what is right. She is forced to recognize that she is falling in love, and the rest of the novel follows the several different stages of their love story. And those drive the romantic comedy plotline.

While Kadish’s writing chops are clearly present in this novel, her skills are not quite strong enough to blend those two genres, especially since the audiences for those two genres do not overlap all that much. Many lovers of a good romance story will grow impatient with all the literary allusions and academic politics. And these lovers spend so much time thinking about ideas and ethics, so that even the love story itself is heavily intellectualized. Lots of thinking and rethinking each step may even seem to some readers like showing off with a bunch of stuff no one cares about. Readers who love David Lodge novels (and others) that eviscerate academia may not consider the romantic plotline worthy. In any case, the one half of the book does seem to tug at the other. Despite these flaws, I found myself enjoying the book. I recognized many of the humorous academic battles and battlers. Even the love story wasn’t awful, although it was quite slow. Cautious recommendation; I’m sure each of you will be able to tell if this book is for you. Oh, and by the way, I just noted that Kadish’s first novel, From a Sealed Room is currently on the shelf at my local public library. I’ll be heading over there later today.

I enjoyed this book, both the personal journey and the insight into academia. Who knew that academia was more nasty, underhanded and spirit sucking than law? I have personally worked with a Joanne and can verify that the author's characterization is spot on.