The first unambiguous laugh comes on the second page of Francine Prose’s delicious satire, My New American Life. We’ve been introduced to the point of view of Lula, a young Albanian woman who, a day after learning that her residence in the United States is “legal,” espies a black SUV from a window in the suburban home of her employer, whom she calls “Mister Stanley.” 

Raindrops beaded the SUV as it trawled past the house where Lula lived and worked, taking care of Mister Stanley’s son Zeke, a high school senior who only needed minimal caretaking. In fact Zeke could do many things that Lula couldn’t, such as drive a car. But since Mister Stanley believed that teenagers shouldn’t be left on their own, and since he went off to Wall Street at dawn and didn’t return until late, he had hired Lula to make sure that Zeke ate and slept and did his homework. Mister Stanley was very safety-conscious, which Lula found very admirable, but also dangerously American. No Albanian father would do that to his son and risk turning him gay. 

The second laugh comes moments later, just a few lines down. “On the way, Zeke gave Lula driving tips: who went first at an intersection, how to speak the silent language that kept drivers from killing each other like they did constantly in Tirana.” The object of satire here is not suburban life in New Jersey but the sentimental attachment that Lula and her Albanian friends maintain for their murderous homeland, which is always described as a nightmare in terms too cartoonish to take quite seriously. Just considering Albania as a homeland takes on an oxymoronic quality. “No one in Albania went near a court unless they were in handcuffs or were suing to get back their land.” Lula herself has absolutely no desire to return, but when her quondam boyfriend is deported, his chums are happy for him, because he’ll have lots of girlfriends and, besides, his mother is a great cook. 

Lula went to the magazine rack and was soon engrossed in an article about a Texas dynasty literally and figuratively screwing each other for generations, when they weren’t crashing cars and jumping off the room. The story cheered Lula. It sounded like a family you might hear about at home, though the money would have been different, as would the trees and cars and roofs.

The writing is what’s funny: what the first sentence grants, the last appears to retract. It was the same but different. Marking a distinction in the types of roof that crazy relatives are jumping off us is absolutely funny prose. Exaggeration telescopes in both directions, from overstatement to understatement. The humor never lets up for more than a page or two as Lula plummets through a slow-motion adventure that’s set in reverse. 

For Lula has no idea what she’s going to do when she is no longer needed by Mister Stanley. She only knows that continuing to live in his house will snuff the life out of her; it already feels like a tomb. Nothing ever happens in Baywater, the close-in Jersey town where he lived with his wife and son until one fine Christmas Eve when his wife ran off. (This uneventfulness is just as stylized as the recklessness of Albania.) Ever since she started working for Mister Stanley, nothing has happened to Lula. She isn’t nostalgic about waitressing at La Changita, the Alphabet City bar where she worked illegally before reading Mister Stanley’s ad at Craigslist, but she does miss her best friend, Dunia, whom she hopes has gone back to Tirana. Dunia has dropped from sight and beyond email range, and in dark hours Lula fears that she may have fallen into worse hands than those of the INS. Until the black SUV drives up to Mister Stanley’s house, Lula’s only connection to the outside world is an amiable librarian a few blocks away, and Mister Stanley’s childhood chum, Don Settebello — the immigration lawyer who has arranged Lula’s wonderful “legal” status. 

This turns out to be what has attracted the guys in the SUV. Two of them are heavies, but the third one, Alvo, reminds her of an old boyfriend. He asks her to do a “teensy favor” for him — to hide a pistol. She doesn’t dare to refuse, but she doesn’t really want to refuse, either, because Alvo is cute, and Lula has been alone for a long time. (At 26, she considers herself to be “old.”) She will spend most of the book dreaming about Alvo, and thinking that it’s odd of him to break into Mister Stanley’s house from time to time, to take a shower, or perhaps to finish one of the stories that, encouraged by her boss and Don, she has taken to writing. The stories are old Balkan folktales that Lula repackages as personal history, appalled that life in America has made such a liar out of her but also tickled by her daring. As it turns out, of course, the mysterious burglar isn’t Alvo at all, but a foreseeable-in-retrospect surprise guest who pops out of hiding at the most inopportune time. 

But nothing really terrible (or frightening) ever happens.  Lula’s safe and secure life at Mister Stanley’s is such a successful American dream that it enables her to outgrow it. Where a more biting satirist such as Gary Shteyngart might interpose some gruesome or humiliating personal detail, Prose highlights Lula’s longing to live in a place where loving-kindness is a real possibility and not an absurd fantasy — her Albanian dream. Although the narrative pace never lags, the novel is not particularly plot-driven; what happens is not as interesting as what Lula thinks about what’s happening. (A longer title might well have been What My Old Albanian Mind Makes of My New American Life; formally, the book is a masterpiece of point-of-view discipline.) Whether or not she ever takes control of her destiny is not something that we care very much about; what we want is for Lula to go on thinking and talking like Lula. And she does not disappoint us. 

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 11th, 2011 at 6:00 pm.