Back in Black

Over the past seven years, Marina Lewycka has targeted a singular funny bone. Born to Ukrainian parents in a German refugee camp and raised in the U.K., Lewycka, now 65, was on the brink of retiring from her university job when she produced a novel — and gained an agent — via a staff-development course. That debut was 2005’s A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, a semiautobiographical story about two sisters, involving their aging Ukrainian father, the Anna Nicole Smith — inspired gold-digging object of his affection and some dark family history. Tractors became a commercial and critical hit, and two more well-received novels followed, Two Caravans and We Are All Made of Glue.

While tackling serious issues (war-torn homelands, the plight of migrant workers, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict), Lewycka tempers them with a unique take on satire that combines the blackest of East European humor with British theatrical farce.

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“I owe a lot to Eastern European humor,” says Lewycka via Skype from New Zealand, where she’s basking in her role as a first-time grandmother. “It’s the humor we had in my family when I was growing up. But the British sense of humor is a triumph of civilization; it’s just so terribly good. I think of Fawlty Towers or Monty Python or even Absolutely Fabulous — they cover the range of funny, from knockabout farce to satire to that sense of hopelessness, of people who find themselves in impossible situations and somehow have to fight their way out. That’s a very British thing.”

In her latest novel, Various Pets Alive & Dead, it’s 2008, and Serge Free is a quantitative analyst who’s “supposed to be able to take the riskiness out of risk with the wizardry of mathematics.” His hippie parents think he’s at Cambridge doing a Ph.D.; he’s actually harnessing his knack with numbers, chaos theory and Fibonacci to generate gazillions for an investment bank.

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While Serge rides the white-water rapids of fickle finance, his sister Clara teaches primary school in a deprived area, fighting a losing battle when it comes to greening, recycling and tree planting. Both are survivors of a Yorkshire commune that thrived in the ’70s and ’80s; in telling flashbacks, Lewycka exposes the revolutionary blind spots via the detrimental effects of shared clothing and the way the kids parrot dinner-table conversation at school: “The family’s a patriarchal construct to facilitate the subordination of women” is reconstituted as “The family’s a pastry ark construction to fascinate the sobbing nation of women.”

Serge and Clara’s mother Doro contemplates the idealistic life she led while staying active by fighting against bogus property developments: “It was adventure and, given the chance, she’d probably do it all again. But with fewer lentils.” The contrast between the generations’ ideals is stark — and funny: “If everyone was like you, Mum, the system would collapse,” Serge says to Doro. “But that’s what we want,” she replies, astonished. “Isn’t it?”

Amid the seismic economic shifts and banking debacles, Lewycka’s characters remain resilient — even Serge, when the reality of his “unlimited upside” assignment reveals its black-hole abyss. Lewycka’s resilience is apparent too. As contemporaries retire, she’s moving into top gear, cheerfully appreciating the timing: “If I’d been published earlier,” she says, “I wouldn’t be nearly as much fun. I was really earnest when I was young; I’ve lightened up a lot as I’ve got older.”

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