If you are looking for a realistic tale about life today in Great Britain, don't pick up this conventional suburban housewife coming-of-age story by the author of A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian. Lewycka offers up her third fast-paced novel in which, again, history and personality enter stage left.
Stocked with regular Britons and wacky characters from Eastern realms, Lewycka sticks with her successful mix from previous stories: Eastern European culture and survival strategies clash with the staid and humdrum West; our history since 1900 shapes our world today; and technical prose about adhesives by day need tempering with bodice-ripping trash romance writing by night. The writing within the writing is as oddly hilarious as it is winkingly self-referential. Our writer addresses her audience with a knowing aside: "I know I'm giving you the standard package, but stay with me, I'll make it fun."
Britons with taxes to pay and order to preserve go about their humdrum business in a semisomnolent state while vital and garish foreigners barge into their lives, disturb and excite. Writer, mom and wife Georgie Sinclair abruptly wakes up to the world around her once she meets octogenarian gamine Mrs. Shapiro. Together they manage a host of men - also a rapacious female estate agent - by feeding them, sleeping with them, fighting with them and getting them to fix the house.
With this central friendship, Lewycka pays literary homage to The Diary of Jane Somers by Doris Lessing, who turned 90 last year and won the Nobel Prize in 2007. Lewycka uses Lessing's premise: A successful yet unsatisfied woman of middle age finds new meaning after a chance encounter with an example of a much older woman, cast aside by modern society, who teaches the demonstrably younger "old woman" what life can become after 50.
Glue replaces tractors as the organizing opportunity for writing within the writing between the plot lines. Georgie pays the bills by penning technical articles for trade magazines about vaguely toxic yet useful binding compounds, metaphor number one for the state of relationships.
There's glue, and goo. Lewycka embraces the stuff of middle-age chick lit: divorce, sultry unexpected lovers ("tall, dark and handsome with a whiff of chlorine") and adventure fantasy to fill the days between sending kiddies off to school with sarnies and welcoming them home for tea.
Novel-writing experts under any rock or writing program will tell you to use an organizing topic outside your main plot line to give the novel expanse. In Tractors, the author invoked the flavor and atmosphere of the eastern bloc in the style of the prose. Glue does not bind so well in this novel because the writing it generates as the metaphor, though true, falls short of delightful. Tractors are funny; organic chemistry, not so much.
But the conventions surrounding Georgie, surrounding the author Lewycka, restrain neither of them. We learn about the end times Internet phenomenon, do-it-yourself home repair, a history of the town of Lydda in the Middle East. Yes, the eastern horizon has expanded to the Levant.
Can a titillating romance novel offer solutions to the Arab-Israeli conflict? Lewycka brilliantly describes the problem. This is the setup for her metaphor. Mr. Ali is from Palestine, the two men helping are dressed in flowing white robes and "Arabic headgear" so we can extrapolate who they are. They are repairing a second-storey window instalment on the outside of a house. The ladder could be any one of several Middle East peace plans. The onlooker is our British heroine, or anyone who has brokered a pact in that region.
"Mr. Ali was dangling in the air, like a rather tubby Tarzan wearing a pink-and-mauve knitted hat. . On the ground . young men . were grappling with an extendable aluminium ladder that had come apart . If they didn't get their act together fast, Mr. Ali was going to plummet some thirty feet on to the stone terrace . I stood on the porch petrified, thinking I should definitely keep out of this ... In the end they managed to get the ladder under Mr. Ali, but it was too short to reach the ground."
The shenanigans with the inept fix-it crew continue. The ladder smashes through the window, the heroine runs to help, clobbers one man, and suggests next time - after everyone is on terra firma - that one of the other men should climb the ladder. Lewycka's view of responsibilities in the Middle East is clear.
The novel wraps up all too tidily - perhaps our successful author has already signed over the movie rights for smash novel number one so she can't help but build in the Hollywood ending, with Palestinians and Jews settling into a decrepit house, and managing to fix it and find room for friends and helpers. Maybe in a suburb in the UK, but no further, or only within the pages of a work of fiction.
Lewycka's real gift is in the writing. She moves from, "Some company was developing a synthetic version of the glue that bivalves such as mussels and oysters use when they cling to the rocks" to "Cloistered in their shimmering watery depths, the loyal bivalves cling passionately together." Lewycka convinces us of the passion of mussels.
We are all made of glue
by Marina Lewycka
Fig Tree, 432 pp
Available at Aksara bookstores
