Book cover of My New American Life. Photo / Supplied
My New American Life by Francine Prose
Harper Perennial $24.99
A number of Francine Prose's novels and stories circle around the American Dream of self-invention/re-invention. So it is with this sharp, satirical, semi-satisfying new work.
Lula is from Albania, where she had nothing. Now she's in George Bush's USA, where she wants everything. First step is in the 'burbs of
New Jersey, living "the life of an elderly person", looking after a teenager and his Wall St dad, whose wife has run off to re-define herself in "clean and white" Scandinavia.
Mr Stanley is a sympathetic boss, even more sympathetic when Lula begins embroidering her past. She tells and even writes stories of kidnapping, blood feuds, Nato bombings, suicide pacts. Her real-life biography is much more mundane - or is
until three sinister fellow countrymen arrive in a sinister SUV, with a sinister gun.
From then on, it's enigma, entanglement, an ending that will either have you laying the book on the table with a deep breath of admiration, or chucking it at the wall with a loud noise of irritation.
In some ways, My New American Life is a riff on the Henry James theme of worldly wise, world-weary European meeting idealistic, naive American and things inevitably ending in tears.
