Finding a sticking point

Marina Lewycka's first book was rejected 36 times until she finally found a publisher. Photo / Supplied

A reader once told Marina Lewycka he worked with adhesives. She figured it was about the most boring thing possible. Until she thought about it.

"Glue is one of those things we take for granted," says the chirpy English-Ukrainian author, on the phone from her house in Sheffield. "It's all around us. Clothing, decorations, homeware, buildings. It's part of our world and I thought it deserved a bit of exploration."

This month Lewycka, who is married to a Kiwi, will speak in Christchurch, Wellington and Auckland about her third novel, We Are All Made of Glue.

It's an ambitious dark comedy in which the sticky agent turns up, literally and figuratively, binding together the characters regardless of their culture.

The novel follows Georgie Sinclair, a divorcee who befriends an old Jewish immigrant named Mrs Shapiro. When she's not pouting over her ex-husband, writing lusty fiction or worrying about teenage son Ben who has developed a fondness for apocalyptic Christian ideologies, Georgie is sticking up for Mrs Shapiro's rights and tending to her dilapidated London villa.

Georgie feels like an old friend by the end of the book but Lewycka confesses she is more like Mrs Shapiro, whom Georgie finds rooting through her ex-husband's dumped belongings.

Mrs Shapiro was inspired by an elegantly dressed elderly woman who lived across the road from Lewycka. When she was sent to a rest home, all her beautiful old hats and shoes and clothing were turfed out. Guess who found them.

"Hunting through skips is what I'm known for in this part of the world," she laughs.

Mrs Shapiro may have a house full of smelly cats and an unhygienic kitchen but she holds many dark secrets about surviving wartime Europe which Georgie is keen to uncover. Palestinian handyman Mr Ali recalls his share of past horrors too.

Lewycka plans to focus on the "serious bits" of the novel on the book tour but she also promises to cover the "bondage bits", which involve the protagonist being tied to the bedpost with Velcro wrist-cuffs. "People want to know whether it really works!"

There is plenty of levity to be found in Lewycka's dialogue. Mrs Shapiro leaps off the page in her exchanges with Georgie: "You must put on a bit of mekkup, darlink. And better clothes. I heff a nice coat I will give you. Why you always wearing this old brown schmata?"

Lewycka used to teach English as a foreign language, and revelled in the linguistic idiosyncrasies of her students. "I just love to listen to people, I'm a terrible eavesdropper. People say the most funny things."

Still, it can't have been easy to balance the light-hearted tone of the book and its weighty themes.

"It's terribly difficult," she says. "You're always taking a risk but I like a book that's entertaining. I hate to be bored or depressed by what I read. But I also want to read something that's not simply a light, domestic story.

"I like to learn something about the world. If problems like the Middle East were approached with a bit more humour, we might be getting nearer a solution."

Lewycka has managed a similar balancing act before. Her debut novel A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, a black comedy about a woman desperate to save her elderly emigre father from the clutches of a gold-digger, became a best-seller and was long-listed for the Man Booker prize.

She followed that up with the acclaimed Two Caravans, about a group of immigrants who come together as strawberry pickers in England.

Glue is even more of a high-wire accomplishment. Aside from the history lessons - the novel touches on the plight of Jewish partisans in wartime Europe as well as the Arab-Israeli conflict - Lewycka finds humour when dealing with the exploitation of the elderly. Mrs Shapiro, who has lost none of her chutzpah with age, is forced into a rest home by conniving social workers and seduced by a sleazy real estate agent with his eye on her property.

Lewycka has always been drawn to such subject matters because of her own history. Sixty-three years ago she was born in a forced-labour camp in Germany after her Ukrainian parents were sent there when the Nazis invaded Russia. Glue is the first time she has deliberately strayed from her family's history.

Only Prokofiev, a Ukrainian, gets a mention, whereas Tractors was written as a sort of memoir of her mother's life and exposed the volatile relationship she had with her now-estranged sister. Caravans also featured a Ukrainian character.

The comic treatment has been criticised as glib but Lewycka took her research seriously. She visited the Holocaust Memorial Library in New York and travelled to a town near Tel Aviv in the Middle East, despite a tourist warning her she would be raped and murdered if she ventured into Palestine. "I made this journey that most Israeli citizens can't make. It's completely illegal for them. And you think in this situation, how can anybody begin to understand each other? Maybe it does take somebody slightly mad and nosy like me to go and poke around in places other people can't poke around in."

Fellow writer Raja Shehadeh (whose book Palestinian Walks won the 2007 Orwell Prize), showed Lewycka around and introduced her to a historian who filled in questions she had for the book.

"And I spent a fascinating afternoon at the Quaker Centre in Ramallah, chatting to whoever came in," she says. "[The locals] just wanted to know what I was doing. They thought I was completely mad. And no one wants to rape and murder mad people."

She is quite a serious person, she says, and if it wasn't for her unlucky attempts at getting published, her comic voice may never have emerged. Lewycka's first book was rejected 36 times. Finally, at the age of 58, she found a publisher.

She suspects that part of the trouble of breaking through was because publishers were looking for the next best-seller, and Tractors was different. She is also relieved in some ways that it took so long. She wrote it without publication in mind, in a racy voice.

"I think if I was trying for publication I would have written it in a more literary way. And that would have been my undoing, I would have been trying too hard. If I was published earlier I wouldn't be a comic writer. I'd be very earnest and a lot less fun."

Her next novel is partly about her own experience in a hippie, leftie commune in the 70s. Lewycka wanted to write about the values of the City - the twist is that one of the hippie children becomes a banker. "It feels as though it's been absolutely non-stop because I've got number four on the way now but I think it's partly because I started so late. If I want to get a really decent body of work out I'm going to have to really go for it."

The monumental success of the first two books led to them being translated into more than 30 languages. But being a best-selling novelist hasn't encouraged Lewycka to splash out too much - she's too busy.

"Well, I've got fabulous new porcelain teeth and a couple of new bathrooms but the teeth cost more than the bathrooms," she says.

"I have always had problem teeth. That is one of the legacies of being a refugee, the terrible nutrition I had as a kid showed in my teeth more than anything. The good thing is, I no longer feel self-conscious about smiling."

MARINA LEWYCKA

Marina Lewycka was born in 1946 in a refugee camp in Kiel, Germany, then moved with her family to England.

Her first book, A Short History of Tractors, won the 2005 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic writing and was long-listed for the 2005 Man Booker Prize.

Two Caravans was published in 2007 and was shortlisted for the 2008 Orwell Prize for political writing. We Are All Made of Glue was published last year.

Lewycka will appear at the first Summer Season of International Writers, in association with the Women's Bookshop, on Tuesday, February 23, from 8pm at the Raye Freedman Arts Centre, Epsom Girls Grammar. See www.womensbookshop.co.nz.