My New American Life

"...[M]aybe [he] had sensed some maternal feeling burbling up inside her, or the decency that Lula prided herself on maintaining despite her many character flaws and the world's efforts to harden her heart." (p. 15)

The main takeaway point here, I think, is that people are too complicated to slot them into categories (good/bad) based on any external evidence (immigrant/citizen, poor/rich), or even on their own actions. The characters in this book - Lula, Dunia, Zeke, Mister Stanley, Don Settebello, Savitra - encourage thought but defy judgment. ( )

Mildly amusing novel about a young Albanian immigrant's experiences in darkest New Jersey, but not as funny nor as pointed as it could have been. Lula, the likeable central character, left Albania to settle (illegally) in New York. She has moved from waitressing in a mojito joint to a more stable but terminally dull position as a live-in nanny to a teenage boy. The boy's (liberal if boring) father and the father's best friend, a very liberal lawyer, are working to get Lula legally established. That's where matters stand when love enters the picture in the form of an Albanian hoodlum in a black SUV. Complications complicate, and Lula eventually emerges, heading back across the George Washington Bridge.

There are some touching characters in the book, particularly Lula herself and Zeke, the teenaged boy. But most of the rest of the people in the book are either cardboard figures, crazy people, or sad sacks. Similarly, there are a good many truly funny apercus about American culture in the age of Homeland Security, but there is little sustained humor. I thought about abandoning the book midway, but I decided I didn't want to leave Lula in New Jersey. ( )

Lula is an economic migrant. She entered the USA on a tourist visa ostensibly to visit “relatives” from her native Albania. But in fact her plan, all along, has been to get work, whatever work she can find without a green card, and then figure out some way of perpetuating her new American life. She succeeds, in her way, despite numerous obstacles and an encroaching balkanization of life in New York and surrounding environs. Near the end of her tether and her visa, Lula is taken in as a sort of au pair / governess / nanny to the teenage son of an emotionally wounded ex-academic, Stanley, who now works in the City. Stanley’s wife slipped into mental illness and out of he and his son’s life one Christmas eve and with her she took much of their reason for living. They exist now in a kind of after-life, the entombed suburbs of New Jersey. Lula, one way or another, is the new blood that may bring them back to life.

Francine Prose is a deliberate writer. I can only think that she must have chosen an Albanian refugee/immigrant narrator dismayed at the fear-induced paranoia of Bush-Cheney America for a reason. Does she want her reader to hear echoes of the 1997 Barry Levinson comedy Wag The Dog? Maybe it’s just me. Certainly the stories bear no resemblance other than Lula’s habit of writing “true” stories – a memoir that her high-powered immigration lawyer informs her will very much help her case – which liberally borrow from Balkan folktales and literature. And perhaps because these events take place in the heartland of The Sopranos (a television programme that is referenced a number of times in the novel), it makes sense to introduce a trio of gangsters (Albanians in this case, not Italians) in a shiny black Lexus who inveigle their way into Lula’s dull life in New Jersey and eventually connect or re-connect her with the wider family of Albanians coursing through the veins of America.

If you are getting the impression that this novel doesn’t quite know what it wants to be—political satire, immigrant biography, bildungsroman, chicklit, state-of-America report—then you are on the right track. It is always fine writing from Prose, but here it doesn’t add up to a unified whole. ( )

http://iwriteinbooks.wordpress.com/2012/06/05/my-new-american-life-francine-pros...

When recent Albanian immigrant, Lula, signs up for a live-in nanny position, it’s not exactly the stereotypical extra-Manhattan Jersey au pair gig. She is the “care taker” of 17 year old, college senior Zeke, and, for all intents and purposes, his father, also known as Mister Stanley.

Despite the rather unconventional uses of her skills and time, Lula falls in platonic love with the two guys. All is fine and dandy in suburbia until a shiny black SUVs rolls up the manicured curb one day while Lula is home alone. The doors open to reveal Albanian drama and mystery she thought she had left at home.

Part “heart-warming immigrant tale”, part “witty, biting look at American life”, My New American Life is all parts “great story”. I didn’t really know anything of Prose when I signed up for this tour and though her writing is simple and sweet, her story style is definitely something I’m going to need more of and soon. Lula’s voice was identifiable without and the side characters were, though less than perfect on all accounts, easy to sympathise with and adorably flawed.

I may have related to this on a strangely personal level because though I am a few generations removed from immigrant status, myself, my family is not that far off the boat from Russia. So, I don;t know, ok, maybe it’s a stretch but I definitely felt a little bit of Eastern Ex-Commie Bloc sisterhood with Lola.

This would make a sweet, fun summer read for those who enjoy a unique, quick book with little bit of sadness and a lot of silliness. ( )

6.12