She’s Making Friends in a New Place, by Michiko Kakutani

 MY NEW AMERICAN LIFE 

By Francine Prose

306 pages. Harper. $25.99.

Francine Prose’s characters seem to live under the banner of that famous Rilke line: “You must change your life.” In “Bigfoot Dreams” (1986) a woman loses her job and is forced to reassess her life. In “A Changed Man” (2005) a neo-Nazi has an epiphany after taking a tab of Ecstasy and decides to make amends for his former racist beliefs. And in many of the stories in “Women and Children First” (1988) people flirt with a variety of religions and spiritual rejuvenation programs in attempts to remake — or at least renovate — their mind-sets.

Lula, the heroine of “My New American Life,” Ms. Prose’s diverting but clichéd new novel, also wants to change her life. Lula has left Albania for New York City, where she looks at fellow subway riders and thinks: “She wanted to stay in this city with them, she wanted to have what they had. She wanted it all, the green card, the citizenship, the vote. The income taxes! The Constitutional rights. The two cars in the garage. The garage. The driver’s license.”

Yes, Lula wants the American Dream, and she soon finds herself living it — sort of — in a New Jersey suburb, working as a companion (i.e., nanny) to Zeke, the teenage son of an idealistic professor turned Wall Street banker whom she calls Mister Stanley. He tells her his wife left them to go to Norway “because she wanted to start over, somewhere clean and white.”

A lot about this premise is oddly reminiscent of Ms. Prose’s 1992 novel “Primitive People,” in which a Haitian woman gets an au pair job with a family in a bucolic Hudson Valley town. Once again Ms. Prose uses her heroine’s outsider status to make a lot of funny though vaguely familiar observations about the cosseted life of well-to-do Americans: their self-indulgence, their hypocrisy, their trendy politics. Once again she uses a tangy mixture of satire and sentiment to recount her story, seasoning a basically realistic narrative with a light sprinkling of bizarre, tabloid-type events.

In this case we learn that her heroine’s worries about deportation have been temporarily solved: Mister Stanley’s best friend, an immigration lawyer, has gotten Lula a visa, and she has begun to settle into a pleasant enough routine at the home. Zeke has come to like, even trust, her, and she is included in holiday celebrations and Zeke’s visits to prospective colleges. She spends her free time going to the local library and writing short stories — some of which she passes off as autobiographical — on Zeke’s computer.

Writing with affection tinged with condescension, Ms. Prose depicts Lula as a feisty but daydreamy sort of girl, who is given to embroidering her past. She tells the depressed and credulous Mister Stanley that she left Albania because of a blood feud involving her cousin George, a blood feud that involved a bride kidnapping and the suffocation of a couple in a cave. She also suggests that her parents were killed by NATO bombs during the Kosovo war.

What actually happened to Lula’s family is considerably more banal: “The true stories of her childhood,” Ms. Prose writes, “were tales of grubby misery without the kick of romance, just suffering and more suffering, betrayal and petty greed. It was nicer to mine the mythical past. Wasn’t that the Albanian way? Five minutes into a conversation, Albanians were telling you how they’d descended from the ancient Greeks. The Illyrians. Those folk tales had come from somewhere.”

Lula is a little bit homesick and more than a little lonely, and one day she befriends three mysterious Albanians, driving a menacing S.U.V., who turn up at the house while Mister Stanley is away at work and Zeke is at school. They tell her that they know her cousin George back home and the handsome one, who calls himself Alvo, asks Lula to do him a favor: hide a gun for them until they return to pick it up.

“She wished she knew what the gun had done and why they needed to hide it,” Ms. Prose writes. “Why couldn’t they just throw it down a storm drain? But why waste a good gun when they could find an Albanian girl to sit on it like a hen until it hatched baby guns?” If someone finds the gun, Lula thinks, she “could get deported, visa or no visa.” But since she’s already developed a little crush on Alvo, she agrees to keep the weapon.

It’s easy enough for the reader to guess where the relationship between Alvo and Lula is headed, even if Ms. Prose’s vivacious prose initially makes the road there fairly scenic. The trouble is that the novel’s over-the-top climax — which brings Lula and Alvo’s story colliding with the story of Mister Stanley’s family — is silly and contrived, and it’s so implausible that the reader’s trust in the author is severely dented.

Worse, Ms. Prose’s central characters wind up being little more than stereotypes: the well-meaning but spoiled and naïve Americans; the spirited but less-than-completely-honest immigrants. No doubt the novel is meant to address the larger issues of immigration in post-9/11 America, and the clash of ideals and fears, hopes and realities in the George W. Bush era. But it turns out that “My New American Life” is really little more than a tired and faintly cynical riff on the old myth of the American Dream.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/22/books/my-new-american-life-by-francine-prose-review.html?ref=review&pagewanted=print