Francine Prose’s Immigrant Novel, by Ron Carlson

MY NEW AMERICAN LIFE

By Francine Prose

306 pp. HarperCollins Publishers. $25.99.

The great grinning tradition of American satire has always been healthy because this confounding country provides an abundance of jaw-dropping moments every day, moments that don’t need rewriting or amplification to reveal their comic craziness. All you need is the ability to see them and then present them plainly, as if you were born yesterday, with nothing but big eyes and a sense of right and wrong. O.K., maybe born the day before yesterday and in Albania, but still with that sense of right and wrong. Francine Prose has just such a sharp protagonist in her wry novel, “My New American Life,” a book that brims with smart surprises.

The person with the new American life is Lula, a 26-year-old waitress from Tirana, Albania, who has been living in a shared apartment in New York and is deeply worried about being deported. Then again, as she notes, everyone in George Bush and Dick Cheney’s America seems to be worried: “It was just a matter of time before someone on Fox News got the bright idea of sending back the Pilgrims.” Lula is alert and full of longing and beautifully out of place. Like many newcomers, she’s more aware of American vibes and American history than the family that eventually takes her in. Lula’s droll observations, as she navigates between her new life and her Albanian friends, give Prose’s novel the verve we’ve seen in her previous fiction.

The comparison between Lula’s two countries provides a study in the new civics. “Paranoia,” she determines, “was English for Balkan common sense.” And in the Balkans, there is no phrase for a “win-win situation.” In America, she notes, although a congressman apologizes for an affair and the president tells the press that the United States doesn’t torture, “it was interesting how everyone lied and only the adulterers got caught.” When her new boss calls her “our little Albanian pessimist,” he’s quickly corrected: she’s simply a “realist.”

The novel traces the period that Lula stays with that new boss, whom she calls Mr. Stanley, and his son, Zeke. Glad to let go of her life in the city, she answers an ad on Craigslist and becomes a sort of nanny for Zeke, a senior in high school who lives with his father in suburban New Jersey. Mr. Stanley left teaching to work in the financial district, and he’s trying to do right by his son after his wife’s dramatic departure. Lula’s job is to keep Zeke company and keep food in the big empty house.

In a charming turn, Lula spends some of her time writing stories, retelling Albanian folk tales that she adjusts and passes off as true and that Mr. Stanley and the immigration lawyer he finds for her both applaud. She considers writing a memoir about her youth — for a minute — but opts instead for romanticized fiction. After all, Lula in Baywater thinks of herself as a princess in a tower. For a while.

She’s a perfect observer of American life in the opening decade of the 21st century. Of course, a young woman who “spent the formative years of her childhood under the paranoid leadership of a psychotic dictator, a person who has seen economic collapse and rioting and chaotic violence and everywhere gangsters in control” provides a perfect lens for seeing this country.

Watching the evening news on television, Lula feels sorry for the president, “so like a dim little boy who’d told a lie that had set off a war.” When he tries to warn Americans about bird flu, he has trouble with the word “avian” — “His forehead stitched each time he said it and his eyelids fluttered, as if he’d been instructed to think of birds as a memory prompt.” The vice president gets a note or two as well, but Lula’s best when she’s surprised by the broader panorama of American life. One night in a restaurant she sees the patrons playing musical chairs, a game she considers remarkably cruel. After all, in Albania there were never enough chairs to go around.

Setting so much of modern America in high relief, mordant and comic, light and dark, Lula reminds us more of Fran Lebowitz than Alexis de Tocqueville. Her friend Dunia is wry and knowing, much more cynical, a foil to Lula’s relatively placid domesticity. Once a waitress with Lula in New York, Dunia has now achieved the American dream: she is married to a plastic surgeon and has credit cards. “It’s not like Communism,” she remarks. “The shopping is better. The sex is worse.”

Lula’s own romantic interest is Alvo, a shady, charismatic young Albanian who shows up one day in the suburbs with two other men, asking a strange favor that swims under the rest of the story. Alvo, who may be a criminal or a construction worker — or both — is the absolute opposite of Mr. Stanley. On their one big date, on Christmas Eve, Lula dances with him and rationalizes their relationship in a way Woody Allen would recognize: “How handsome he was and how glad she was to be here with him. Why should she care about a gun, some moody weirdness, a certain lack of clarity about what he did for a living? And O.K., some low-level stalking.”

Lula’s dreams and pragmatism form a heady, bittersweet comic mix. But “My New American Life” isn’t essentially a book about romantic love, about some prince coming to the tower, even though gender politics ring on every page. (“Flirtation and charm worked everywhere, second only to money.”) The essence of the novel isn’t Lula’s American rite of passage; it’s the makeshift family she forms with her employer and his son. Mr. Stanley, it turns out, is a tender guy who misses his vanished wife and forgives her negligence. And Zeke is that rarity: a good boy. He’s kind to Lula and interested in her stories.

When the three of them go on a college tour, Zeke spends a night participating in the “big sibling” program. Almost. After the night takes an astonishing and sadistic turn, Lula longs to comfort the justifiably shaken boy. At the college, “she’d been mistaken for his sister and his mother, and tonight she felt like both, wishing she could protect him from so much she couldn’t control.” Maybe, she reflects, “that was what family meant: wanting, and not being able, to help the people you love.”

Lula is good company, somebody most readers would welcome into their families. Throughout this witty novel, she demonstrates an affecting hunger for an American life, even if she often finds that life plenty weird. Watching a television cooking show just before Thanksgiving, Lula hears a phrase she can’t get over: “a successful turkey.” Wanting to be the perfect hostess, she wonders: “How successful could it be, dead and eaten?”

Ron Carlson’s most recent book is a novel, “The Signal.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/01/books/review/book-review-my-new-american-life-by-francine-prose.html?ref=books&pagewanted=print