We Are All Made of Glue is Marina Lewycka’s third novel — or, more accurately, her third published novel, since she famously made her way through several other works and a rain-forest’s worth of rejection-slips before finding success with A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (2005) at the age of 59. It is a multi-stranded book narrated by Georgie Sinclair, a Yorkshire-born woman in her forties who now lives in London. Georgie’s husband recently walked out, leaving her alone with, among other things, a mounting level of sexual frustration and a tragic job writing for a trade magazine, Adhesives in the Modern World (this is one of many self-mocking references: Lewycka was also once a non-fiction hack).
Shortly after throwing her husband’s possessions into a skip, she meets Mrs Shapiro, an elderly Jewish émigrée. Mrs Shapiro, who is a compulsive scrimper, retrieves the items and invites Georgie to her tumbledown, cat-strewn house for a thrifty meal of out-of-date fish. The women become friends, and Georgie’s shiftless life begins to liven up when she has to fend off a weird lady from Social Services who is desperate to put Mrs Shapiro into residential care and a pair of unscrupulous estate agents who are trying to harass Mrs Shapiro into selling her house. All the while, a story of wartime abuse and lost love emerges, as Georgie finds out about the old woman’s past.
This is a flawed yet charming novel. Some episodes are just silly, and Georgie is implausibly blind to her own teenage son’s burgeoning loopiness. The satire is not subtle; the dodgy estate agents are called Mr Wolfe and Mr Diabolo. However, that broadness can arguably be seen as a natural side-effect of the book’s main strength: We are All Made of Glue is a big, bustling novel, told with enthusiasm by a narrator who is warm, winningly disaster-prone and, crucially, believable.
