'My New American Life' is one Lula of a story

By Olivia Barker, USA TODAY

In My New American Life, Francine Prose cracks open that old chestnut about the immigrant reinvention experience and injects, yes, new life into it.

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  By Stephanie Berger

  Prose's main character, Lula, is writing her memoirs, tentatively titled My New American Life.

By Stephanie Berger

Prose's main character, Lula, is writing her memoirs, tentatively titled My New American Life.

First, Prose picks a fresh community to spotlight (and affectionately spear): post-Communist Albanians circa 2005.

Lula, 26, is a recently orphaned University of Tirana graduate now reduced to nannying for Zeke, the surly teenage son of a single New Jersey banker, Mister Stanley. Her tenuous visa situation is being shepherded through by Stanley's childhood friend Don Settebello, a swashbuckling, smooth-talking immigration lawyer who romanticizes Lula's plight ? and Lula herself, or at least tries to.

But, in an example of where the novel deftly shifts from satirical to sincere, Don rails against the injustices perpetrated against his clients imprisoned at Gitmo.

In her day job, Lula interacts with other immigrants, such as the Latina housekeeper Estrelia (another of Don Settebello's projects), with awkwardly comical results.

And in her spades of spare time, Lula concocts chapters of her bunkers-to-suburbs memoir, tentatively titled My New American Life, and reveals just how slippery identity becomes when you're nearly 5,000 miles from your old Albanian life and not-so-tacitly encouraged to color your experience in shades of cozy sepia, vs. the gray concrete of those bunkers that pockmark your country.

My New American Life
By Francine Prose
Harper, 306 pp., $25.99

(Indeed, this reader craved more Lula-recited tales, however embroidered, of dictatorial Albania and the 70,000 bunkers ? "cement cow pies" ? that remain "plopped along the roadsides.")

Then, three sketchy Albanian men with dubious ties to Lula turn up at Mister Stanley's McMansion in a black Lexus SUV and leave behind a dangerous token. But instead of resorting to cringeworthy clich�s about Albanian thugs, Prose upends them, Sopranos-style, revealing her goons to be multifaceted gangsters with hearts of mostly gold.

The story climaxes with a scene remarkable for its tick-the-boxes shock: sex, sadism, scatology, insanity and a shooting. But the denouement, if a little dull, is subtly, surprisingly hopeful.

Today's new American life ? for both natives and newcomers ? may smack of the bang-the-drum jingoism depicted on the book's cover (a Rockwellian-drawn majorette), but Prose shows there's something marvelous in its messiness.

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