Marina Lewycka
Georgie Sinclair is a bit fed up with her life. Her novel-writing aspirations have come unstuck thanks to a career writing articles about adhesives for trade magazines, her husband has moved out after a domestic over DIY and she has recently moved to London, where she knows almost no one aside from her son, Ben, who is currently terrified by the prospect of imminent Armageddon and urging her to take Jesus in.
After a chance encounter in the local supermarket, lonely Georgie goes round to have dinner with Naomi Shapiro, an elderly lady who lives in a huge, dilapidated mansion. When a minor accident puts Naomi in hospital shortly afterward, Georgie turns out to be the closest thing she has to a friend or relative.
Georgie begins looking after Naomi's many cats as well as the tumbledown house, little expecting the series of complicated capers about to unfold around her. It turns out that many people want to get their hands on the house - the land alone could be worth millions - and are prepared to resort to all manner of dirty tricks to get it.
Lewycka's much-lauded strong point is her ability to take a slightly wonky look at something and make it funny. In We Are All made of Glue, however, the comedy relies too much on obvious puns - dastardly estate agents named Diabello and Damian - and other wordplay.
Strawberry Fields, Lewycka's second novel, was criticized by some reviewers for a mismatch in tone and message. We are All Made of Glue runs a similar risk, combining Israel-Palestine 101 with a rollicking storyline of misunderstandings, underhanded dealings and high dudgeon. It's not that serious issues can't be treated with humour, but here the comedy combines with an overly detached note, as if the narrative is always on the brink of revealing the extent of its self-ironizing. The extensive accent-based humour and jokey linguistic misinterpretation strand many of the immigrant characters in buffoonery, rendering the scattergun satire rather uncomfortable. Lewycka is a serious and intelligent writer as well as a successful humorist, but even she can't quite pull off a pantomime based on the Holocaust and the nakba.
Lewycka's narrators ring true, if occasionally rather heavy on the disingenuousness. We don't necessarily recognize ourselves in their situations, but their self-doubt, tentative relationships and tendency to hold two incompatible opinions or ideals while trying to work out why we are all here make them seem familiar.
But when the characters are overly innocent in the service of plot, their autonomy sacrificed for another laugh, it's hard to feel that they've really let you in. This is one reason Lewycka's first-person style - university lecturer Nadezhda in A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, a whole cast of migrant workers in Strawberry Fields - is so successful: Getting into Georgie's head offsets the farce and gives her room to breathe, to be normal for a few moments without the pressure to be funny. She's like an Adrian Mole for grownups, with the characters pondering the important things in life, the really existential questions, but able at the end of the day to pick themselves up and trudge on through another round of embarrassments and frustrations, all the while remembering never to take themselves too seriously.
Georgie herself is a compelling, likeable character, looking for her fairy-tale ending but ultimately settling for gluing back together the broken pieces of her marriage and family. But she isn't quite enough to carry We Are All Made of Glue by herself. A sharper focus on any one of a number of themes might have lifted the book into the league of Tractors and Strawberry Fields.
But this ambitious cocktail of a novel ends up more like a mystery punch, almost a parody of Lewycka's earlier work. The misunderstood eastern European immigrants, the beleaguered but feisty elderly people and the slightly wonky love affairs all make their usual appearances, but this time with extra cheesiness, some third-rate chicklit sex and an uncharacteristic lack of nuance to season the farce.
J.C. Sutcliffe is a writer and translator who lives in Canada and England.