My New American Life (Prose)

Book Reviews
[A] book that brims with smart surprises.... 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.... Throughout this witty novel, she demonstrates an affecting hunger for an American life, even if she often finds that life plenty weird.
Ron Carlson - New York Times Book Review


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.
Publishers Weekly


Desperate to stay in America—she's in New York on a tourist visa that's close to giving out—26-year-old Albanian Lula accepts a job in suburban New Jersey as caretaker to woebegone teenager Zach, whose crazy mother upped and left on Christmas Eve. He and his father have since lived in mutually befuddled silence, though Mister Stanley, as Lula calls Zach's dad, is doing his best. The kindly Mister Stanley even arranges for a lawyer friend to assure Lula's legal status. Then, the day after she's got her papers, a black SUV pulls up in front of the house, and the three young men who pile out lay claim to Lula's attention because they're Albanian, too. Lula goes along with their request to hide a gun, then goes along for a ride and falls for the ringleader, Alvo. Soon she's doing what's she's done all along to survive, fabricating at will to explain her relationship to Alvo while trying to steer Zach away from the abyss. Her hopefulness and initiative contrast sharply with the lassitude and utter cluelessness of her host family. Verdict: Does Lula get the new American life she wants so badly? In this sparkling new work by Prose (Blue Angel), she's on her way. An illuminating and ultimately upbeat look at America's immigrant situation that all fiction readers will enjoy. —Barbara Hoffert
Library Journal


(Starred review.) 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. Best-selling Prose continues to ascend in popularity and acclaim, having just been honored with the prestigious Washington University International Humanities Medal. —Donna Seaman
Booklist