Past imperfect | 5 August 2009

We Are All Made of Glue, by Marina Lewycka
The Rehearsal, by Eleanor Catton
Yalo, by Elias Khory, translated by Humphrey Davies

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compulsive scrimper, retrieves the items and invites Georgie to her tumbledown, cat-strewn house for a thrifty meal of out-of-date fish.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.