My New American Life: A Novel [Hardcover]

Francine Prose (Author)

Book Description

Release date: April 26, 2011

Lula, a twenty-six-year-old Albanian woman living surreptitiously in New York City on an expiring tourist visa, hopes to make a better life for herself in America. When she lands a job as caretaker to Zeke, a rebellious high school senior in suburban New Jersey, it seems that the security, comfort, and happiness of the American dream may finally be within reach. Her new boss, Mister Stanley, an idealistic college professor turned Wall Street executive, assumes that Lula is a destitute refugee of the Balkan wars. He enlists his childhood friend Don Settebello, a hotshot lawyer who prides himself on defending political underdogs, to straighten out Lula's legal situation. In true American fashion, everyone gets what he wants and feels good about it.

But things take a more sinister turn when Lula's Albanian "brothers" show up in a brand-new black Lexus SUV. Hoodie, Leather Jacket, and the Cute One remind her that all Albanians are family, but what they ask of her is no small favor. Lula's new American life suddenly becomes more complicated as she struggles to find her footing as a stranger in a strange new land. Is it possible that her new American life is not so different from her old Albanian one?

Set in the aftermath of 9/11, My New American Life offers a vivid, darkly humorous, bitingly real portrait of a particular moment in history, when a nation's dreams and ideals gave way to a culture of cynicism, lies, and fear. Beneath its high comic surface, the novel is a more serious consideration of immigration, of what it was like to live through the Bush-Cheney years, and of what it means to be an American.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The story of a good-hearted immigrant doubles as a snapshot of America during Bush II's second term in Prose's uneven latest. Lula is a 26-year-old Albanian working an undemanding au pair gig in New Jersey. Her employer, Stanley, is a forlorn Wall Street exec recently abandoned by his mentally disturbed wife. He asks only that Lula see to the simple needs of his son, Zeke, a disaffected high school senior. Soon, Stanley and one of his friends, a high-profile immigration lawyer, are taken with the tale-telling, mildly exotic Lula (who speaks English flawlessly) and get to work on securing her citizenship. Lula's gig is cushy if dull, a condition relieved when three Albanian criminals, led by the charming Alvo, arrive at Stanley's house with a quiet demand that Lula harbor a (Chekhovian) gun for them. Prose seeks to show America through the fresh eyes of an outsider with a deeply ingrained, comic pessimism born of life under dictatorship, yet also capable of exuberant optimism, and the results, like Lula, are agreeable enough but not terribly profound. (May)
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From Booklist

*Starred Review* Whenever Lula feels pressure from Don, her heroic immigration lawyer; or Mister Stanley, her melancholy employer; or Zeke, his moody teenage son; she offers a wry observation about how brutal life is in her native Albania to ensure their sympathy. She also needs to remind herself to be grateful for living legally in the U.S., in spite of how lonely and bored she is working as a nanny in New Jersey. Lula doesn�t do much, since Zeke is old enough to be applying to college, but his father doesn�t want him home alone after his imbalanced mother�s abrupt disappearance. Between trips to Guant�namo, Don encourages Lula to write a memoir titled My New American Life, a clever setup that allows Prose great freedom in crafting Lula�s comically ironic and heartbreakingly guileless voice. In deftly choreographed scenes of caustic hilarity, from awkward meals to fumbled romance, Prose articulates both Lula�s hopefulness and homesickness as she contends with Mister Stanley and Zeke�s despair, Don�s righteous indignation, and the frightening demands of three Albanian guys who show up in a black Lexus SUV. Prose is dazzling in her sixteenth book of spiky fiction, a fast-flowing, bittersweet, brilliantly satirical immigrant story that subtly embodies the cultural complexity and political horrors of the Balkans and Bush-Cheney America. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Best-selling Prose continues to ascend in popularity and acclaim, having just been honored with the prestigious Washington University International Humanities Medal. --Donna Seaman

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Harper; First Edition edition (April 26, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061713767
• ISBN-13: 978-0061713767
• Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 1.1 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #562,562 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Francine Prose is the author of sixteen books of fiction. Her novel A Changed Man won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and Blue Angel was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her most recent works of nonfiction include the highly acclaimed Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife, and the New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer. A former president of PEN American Center, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Francine Prose lives in New York City.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Prose offers fresh insights into contemporary American life that allow us to see ourselves with fresh, unblinking eyes May 18, 2011

By Bookreporter

Format:Hardcover

Temporarily submerged by our economic woes, the debate over immigration policy simmers just below the surface of American political and social life. In her lighthearted, consistently engaging new novel, Francine Prose tells the story of Lula, a savvy 26-year-old Albanian newcomer trying to gain a foothold in a country that at times seems as strange as her bizarre native land.

It's October 2005, a low point of the Bush presidency, with others as yet unimagined, ahead. Half-Muslim, half-Christian Lula has just secured her work permit, a glimpse of her green card glittering on the horizon. She's situated uneasily in a sterile New Jersey McMansion 10 miles from Manhattan. Its owner, Stanley Larch ("Mister Stanley" to Lula), is a former economics professor turned disgruntled Wall Street banker. He's hired her to keep an eye on Zeke, his sullen, vampire-obsessed teenage son whose taste in attire runs to black and body piercings. Their wife and mother, Ginger, abandoned the family for the Norwegian fjords ("she wanted to start over, somewhere clean and white") the previous Christmas Eve, suffering from something her husband vaguely describes as "mental health issues." Hearing what sounds like sobbing from Mister Stanley's room one night, she wonders, "Who wouldn't cry? No wife, no fun, no girlfriends, a job he hated, a son who seemed to despise him."

Out of boredom, Lula turns to writing stories based on Albanian folk legends she reshapes into magical realist-inflected tales about her family's life that Mister Stanley naively believes demonstrate real literary talent. But Lula's quotidian existence is disrupted when three young Albanian men she nicknames the "Cute One," "Hoodie" and "Leather Jacket," appear at the Larch residence in a black Lexus SUV. She's attracted to Alvo ("the Cute One") who has been in the country since 1990 and claims vaguely to be working "renovating supermarkets." Her feelings oscillate between desire for him and the sense she's dealing with a character whose danger hasn't yet fully revealed itself. Though Alvo and his companions inject a note of menace into the story, it never rises to a level where we fear any serious harm will befall Prose's likable characters. The one scene of near violence, involving Lula, Alvo and the hapless Ginger Larch, is played mostly for comic effect.

Mister Stanley's good friend and Lula's attorney is Don Settebello, an immigration lawyer who blends a highly successful practice with an idealistic streak that has him representing Guantanamo detainees, bitterly complaining all the while of their mistreatment. He's the voice of what Prose suggests is the fading American conscience, suppressed by lingering fears of terrorist attacks, real or imagined.

Contrasted with Lula's life is the one her Albanian comrade Dunia has fashioned on American soil. Lula discovers her that friend hasn't been kidnapped and sold into Asian sex slavery, as she had feared. Instead, she has landed herself a husband (a New Jersey plastic surgeon named Steve) and has settled with alacrity into the role of the jaded suburban housewife ("It's like living under Communism. The shopping is better. The sex is worse."). Their trip to the Short Hills Mall to outfit Lula for a Christmas Eve date with Alvo is a sharp send-up of American consumerism. Prose's satiric gifts are put to equally fine use in her portrayal of the obligatory upper middle-class parent/child college tour and in the scenes of Lula's encounter with the more Dickensian aspects of our criminal justice system.

Some of the purest pleasures of Prose's novel are Lula's sharp insights into our contemporary life. "But America was like Communism and post-Communism combined," she remarks. "You weren't supposed to be materialistic until you got successful, after which it was practically your duty to flaunt it in everyone's face." Commenting on the contrast between a Congressman confessing an adulterous affair and the president denying reports of torture in Iraq, she notes, "It was interesting how everyone lied and only the adulterers got caught." With her sly wit, Prose holds a mirror up to both our shortcomings and our occasionally endearing oddities, giving us an opportunity to see ourselves with fresh, unblinking eyes.

Prose's novel is anything but the classic immigrant saga. But what unites Lula's story with those is her ample tool kit of survival skills, her determination to succeed in her adopted homeland, and her optimism that tomorrow and the day after that will be better than today. Those personality traits make her an appealing protagonist and her story one of unalloyed enjoyment.

--- Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A funny satire with memorable characters May 11, 2011

By Diane VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

My New American Life is whip-smart funny. Satire is not always easy to pull off on the written page , and Prose does it amazingly well. Her writing, especially of Lula's thoughts, had me cracking up, like this one:
"Lula knew that some Americans cheered every time INS agents raided factories and shoved dark little chicken-packagers into the backs of trucks. She'd seen the guys on Fox News calling for every immigrant except German supermodels and Japanese baseball players to be deported, no questions asked."

Lula wants desperately to grab a hold of the American dream, but her job as a nanny to an 17-year-old young man leaves her bored and stuck in the suburbs with no friends and nothing to do. Prose makes you feel her stifling suffocation. When the wanna-be Sopranos Albanians show up and ask her to "hold on to" a gun for them, Lula does as she's asked, even though she knows this could lead to trouble for her and her employer and her deportation. Yet, strangely, she cannot say no to them; and besides, it's a little excitement.

I usually identify with at least one of the characters in a novel that I read, but I could not identify with anyone in this book, yet that did not stop me from enjoying it. I live in New York City, a city that runs because of its immigrant population, and this book gave me a new perspective on the people who leave their families behind to start a new life elsewhere.

Lula misses her homeland; she cries
"for her once-beautiful homeland now in the hands of toxic dumpers and sex traffickers and money launderers. She cried for missing her country, for not missing it, for having nothing to miss. She cried for the loneliness and uncertainty of her life among strangers who could still change her mind and make her go home."

All of the characters are interesting: sad sacks Mister Stanley and his friend Don (both divorced and lost), young Zeke (I just wanted to hug him and tell him it will be all right), the Albanians (a riot!) and Lula's friend Dunia, who hits the immigrant lottery by finding a rich man to marry.

There are so many fantastic scenes- at the restaurant where Lula gets a celebratory citizenship dinner with Zeke, his dad, Don and his caustic daughter, Lula's date with Alvo, the college trip- all are sharp and memorable.

Prose successfully combines the comic and the tragic, and throws in some politics, like Don's work with detainees at Guantanemo. Her portrait of American life soon after 9/11 (through Lula's eyes) is vivid and thought-provoking.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars A little overrated October 4, 2011

By Pleased Customer

Format:Hardcover

Although I had high hopes for this book, given the reviews, it wasn't quite as good as it was made out to be. The author writes well and it's an easy read, however, connecting with a protagonist who seems flat is relatively Impossible. More than anything, it is the protagonist that ruins the seemingly interesting storyline. Yes, there is a happy ending, a bit of silver lining to all that she goes through, but even that isn't enough to save the reader from boredom. Overall, It's simply overrated.