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There's that awkward moment in a new romance when the other person says or does something that instantly derails the whole enterprise. You've been sailing along contentedly for weeks, giddy with fulfillment, and then suddenly, a minor provocation, and that queasy feeling sets in: What am I doing with this guy?
The offense needn't be significant. For instance, if you're a person who cares about language, as does the English professor hero of "Tolstoy Lied," Rachel Kadish's cheekily titled new novel, the following gaffe in the middle of a philosophical discussion would sound the death knell.
Tracy: " `Do you think I'm fatuous?' "
George: " `Tracy, I think you're very slender.' "
On the other hand, if this is the guy's idea of a joke, he's a keeper.
Before George, Tracy Farber, 33, counted herself among the happily single. With a series of unsatisfying relationships safely in her past--and finding little to envy when surveying the lives of her married or dating friends--she was comfortable with the realization that the most reliably stimulating companionship could be found in books. She was focused on her academic career at a top-flight Manhattan university, where she was up for tenure, and considered herself retired from the dating game. She wasn't closed off to the possibility that Mr. Right might waltz into her life, but she wasn't going to go on JDate.com looking for him.
As everyone knows, looking the other way is the surest way to corral love. Tracy and George first meet at a dull office reception, where George, an education-policy consultant, executes perhaps the classiest pickup move ever. When Tracy drops her soggy plate of hors d'oeuvres, splattering her blouse and making a mess on the carpet, George, who had only just introduced himself, gamely throws his own plate into the air in a show of solidarity. Is there a husband out there who would do something so gallant for his wife?
It's not long before levelheaded, romantically circumspect Tracy is sounding like any other girl in gaga land:
"During the three and a half weeks I have known George, I have been on drugs. Experiencing Technicolor flashbacks to here and now. Prone to fears and euphorias, not responsible for my actions."
That is, until George springs a surprise engagement on her, offers to convert to Judaism and unveils some decidedly old-fashioned ideas about family and gender roles. All of which would set off sirens for a career-oriented urbanite reared on the mantra that "a woman's independence [is a] hothouse flower."
Kadish's first novel, "From a Sealed Room," was an ambitious if somewhat disjointed affair set in Jerusalem in the aftermath of the first gulf war, which tried to gain a purchase on the big questions (Is peace possible?) through the personal stories of three women. At its center was a relationship between a naive American college girl and a morose young Israeli artist whose intensity, initially flattering, becomes something frightening and shades into violence. This new book tackles lighter concerns--love, happy endings, the tiger's lair that is a university humanities department--but the change in George's demeanor from a laid-back charmer in touch with his feelings to an insecure, needy sort with ghosts in his past (a fundamentalist Christian upbringing and a crisis of faith) feels vaguely creepy in the same sort of way.
Kadish steers her characters away from that precipice, however, since the goal of "Tolstoy Lied" is to demonstrate that happiness between two thoughtful, interesting people who have traveled along very different life paths is attainable--and it need not be a snooze to read about. As it happens, Tracy has a similar literary project in the works. It's an idea she has been saving for her posttenure book because it's a potential career killer: "happy endings as possible acts of resistance in American literature." Tolstoy's famous opening sally in "Anna Karenina" ("Happy families are all alike . . ."), Tracy argues, is symptomatic of a blanket literary and cultural prejudice against happiness as a subject worthy of serious inquiry.
Kadish seems aware that her girl-meets-guy scenario has obvious chick-lit resonances, and she takes pains to give Tracy an intellectual dimension and to make her believable as a literary scholar. Unlike other career-girl heroes, who seem mainly to be shown shopping for shoes, it's refreshing to see Tracy actually doing her job: advising a graduate-student thesis, teaching class, attending meetings on grade inflation and curriculum review, and navigating the land-mine-strewn terrain of departmental politics.
Kadish's portrayal of this insular, ego-driven world is pretty spot on, down to the bow-tied ancient specimen presiding over the department like a kindly paterfamilias, with nary a publication to his name in recent memory. There's also a gossipy and all-powerful administrator, a visiting professor from Oxford University, a gay colleague who's contemplating jumping ship and a domineering 16th Century specialist with a chip on her shoulder who seems to have it in for Tracy.
Not everyone might be captivated by the machinery of a university English department and its peculiar dramas--there is a reason, probably, why no one is clamoring to make a TV show about academics--but Kadish, who did some time in a literature graduate program, knows what makes the place tick and deftly summons its daily rhythms and social conventions. We begin to suspect early on that Tracy's tenure review isn't going to go as smoothly as predicted: Her colleagues all talk as if it's already in the bag, and Tracy seems awfully sanguine. But Kadish keeps things interesting, setting the stage for an elaborate power play involving a brilliant, unstable graduate student who communes with dead writers. The twisted psychology at work seems, scarily, entirely plausible.
With some books you're constantly fighting the urge to flip ahead to the hot-and-heavy sections. Here the resumption of the love story is actually a bit of a downer. Kadish gets the early courtship euphoria just right and makes George seem eminently desirable (you can't help but wonder why such a normal, good-looking, charming guy is still single). But his allure is permanently damaged by the engagement debacle and some late-emerging personal issues.
True, we all have issues, and Kadish wants us to believe that happiness (with all its attendant complexities) is within reach for Tracy and George. Yet having brought her characters this far, she seems to run out of material for the post-reconciliation period. Tracy, a big believer in happiness as variegated and interesting enough to write about, resorts to cursory formulations and slapdash summary to describe her new life with George:
"Don't think it's easy. We stumble, clash, retreat. Laughter resurfaces slowly. Anger surges and has to be pried loose."
"[H]appiness can be built up, brick by brick, out of argument."
"There's not much point in trying. No description in a book or movie or song has ever come close to what it is to be in the presence of the man I love."
Which is just as well, because Kadish never really sells us on one crucial point: that Tracy and George are meant to be together.
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