Exiles looking for love -- or money

What a difference a revolution makes, even a peaceful one. The title of Marina Lewycka’s spirited novel, “A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian,” suggests how many fresh associations have begun gathering around that country’s very name. Thanks to last year’s Orange Revolution, in the eyes of the world, Ukraine moved overnight from a corrupt backwater to democracy’s poster child. The last thing one expected in a work of fiction about Ukrainian exiles was a charming comedy of eros. Until now.

Set in contemporary suburban England, Lewycka’s book introduces us to the recently widowed Nikolai Mayevskyj, who at 84 falls for the buxom 36-year-old Valentina. Visiting family on a tourist visa from Ukraine, Valentina wants to stay and Nikolai promises to help. Fueled by a concupiscence that’s more fancy than fact, Nikolai’s behavior and the events that follow prove that eros, like politics, is also an agent of change.

The trouble starts when he calls his daughter, Nadezhda, to announce he’s getting married. Nadezhda, whose bemused, good-tempered voice guides us through this maze spawned by passion, watches in horror as her new stepmother proceeds to fleece her father, an engineer and inventor, whose selective unworldliness makes him an easy mark. Her older sister, Vera, is even more outraged at their father’s indulgence, not least because of its threat to her own inheritance.

Valentina persuades the lonely Nikolai that she wants to worship beside him in the Church of the Good Life. But when the old man drops three grand on his new bride’s breast enhancements, we see how rapidly both succumb to the multiplication of desires so often a side effect of this particular creed. Nikolai, who should know better, has failed to mind the gap between the dream and the deal.

Together, his daughters, who themselves have fallen out over the division of their mother’s modest estate, unite to help their father navigate the rough waters of his marriage, which sails inexorably toward the divorce courts before it is even consummated. Or so Nikolai insists. Valentina, now more Medusa than Venus, claims she’s carrying his child. Her credibility, however, has been shattered by her violent outbursts, unbridled greed and frequent betrayals. She is as she appears: a gold digger with attitude. As Valentina mounts her assault on the British judicial system, which remains predictably unflappable, a surprise visitor from Ukraine adds another twist to the tale.

Mail-order brides and marriages of convenience were a common phenomenon in the Ukrainian emigre community during the ‘90s. Nikolai can’t help being vulnerable not only to Valentina’s charms, but also to her plight. Ukraine and its people have lived through a century that saw more than 15 million (more than a third of the population) killed by wars and genocidal famines. With not a family in the land free from ghosts, those who left after World War II invariably feel like survivors. Their guilt at having escaped translates into a natural and often healthy desire to help those who remained.

Lewycka quietly recognizes but doesn’t dwell on this history. The narrator’s voice carries us along for a ride that, despite the bumps and curves in the road, never feels anything less than jaunty.

While the plot drives the story in zany circles, an intriguing lesson drawn from the tragedies of the past emerges in the snippets we’re offered from Nikolai’s crowning project, a brief history of the tractor. Riding the energetic renewal he experiences on meeting Valentina, Nikolai discovers causalities worth pondering. He links the overuse of tractors by Midwestern American farmers in the 1920s to the economic chaos that led to the collapse of the stock market, and then “the instability and impoverishment which spread through the world were also factors behind the rise of fascism in Germany and communism in Russia, the clash of which two ideologies almost brought the human race down.” Such unexpected synchronicities reinforce the sense of mutual responsibility we must feel for each other. Unfortunately, the destructiveness of our constitutional impulse to super-size seems largely lost on us.

Happily, Eros’ powers haven’t weakened and ultimately it changes the characters’ lives for the better. Nikolai has enjoyed a last lusty romp, while his daughters have understood the misguided pettiness of feuding over their mother’s estate. Love’s labors haven’t been lost: All’s well that ends.

Askold Melnyczuk, the author of “Ambassador of the Dead,” directs the creative writing program at the University of Massachusetts Boston.