My New American Life

Lula, a 26-year old Albanian immigrant, is working as an au pair for a moody teenager in suburban New Jersey. Ellen Archer eloquently portrays Lula's sharp intelligence and wit. A very believable Albanian accent graces Archer's utterances as Lula and as the Albanian acquaintances with criminal intent who unexpectedly turn up. Lula views post 9/11 America in recovery with perceptive clarity and sardonic asides as she contrasts her new home with the strife-ridden Balkans. Her experience as a stranger in a strange land is lightened by the hilarious missteps and foibles of her new American friends. Archer doesn't miss a step in delivering the nuanced tones of Lula's bittersweet past and her satirical analysis of both Bush-Cheney politics and the Balkan war. As Lula is pressured to deviate from the straight and narrow by the Albanian criminals, she optimistically strives to secure her U.S. citizenship--and the elusive American Dream. A.W. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

January 3, 2011
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.

January 1, 2011

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. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 11/15/10.]--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 1, 2010

Trust the admired Prose, former president of the PEN American Center, to take on a thorny topic--in the age of immigrants, what it means to be an American. Lula, a 26-year-old Albanian whose tourist visa is about to expire, lucks into a job tending an out-of-control high school senior in suburban New Jersey. All's well--until some Albanian "brothers" show up, wanting to bask in the glow of her new American life. Can't wait to read this one; with a 50,000-copy first printing (not more?).

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 15, 2011

Versatile novelist/essayist/biographer Prose (Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife, 2009, etc.) views post-9/11 America through the sardonic eyes of an Albanian immigrant.

An ad on Craigslist led Lula to a cushy live-in job in suburban New Jersey keeping an eye on high-school senior Zeke while his father makes a bundle on Wall Street. And Mister Stanley, as Lula calls him, even got his friend, hotshot immigration lawyer Don Settebello, to arrange a work visa. So it's a bit awkward in October 2005 when three fellow Albanians show up in a Lexus SUV and ask her to hide a gun for them. Why does Lula do it? Truth is, she's a bit bored by her "new American life," as Don keeps calling it. Making sure Zeke eats, sleeps and does his homework doesn't take much time; conning Mister Stanley and Don with stories about blood feuds and bride-kidnapping in Albania (most of them plagiarized from folklore or based on family incidents from 100 years ago) is almost too easy. Besides, Alvo, chief of the Lexus-driving crew, is awfully cute, and Lula is lonely. She knows so much more than these liberal, well-meaning Americans; when Don agonizes over what he's seen at Guantànamo and how little he can do for his clients there, she shrugs, "very Balkan...that's what happens...human nature." Lula's observations of the affluent U.S. are funny, but Prose's targets are rather obvious: Mister Stanley's estranged wife is a loony New Ager making a tour of Native American spiritual sites; indifferent student Zeke gets into college only because the place that accepts him is desperate for applicants after a shooting incident ("it's always the science students," remarks a professor), etc. The story is agreeable without being terribly eventful or making much of an impact, emotional or otherwise.

Intelligence, wit and an engaging heroine can't quite disguise the fact that there's not much actually happening here.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

Starred review from February 1, 2011
Whenever Lula feels pressure from Don, her heroic immigration lawyer; or Mister Stanley, her melancholy employer; or Zeke, his moody teenage son; she offers a wry observation about how brutal life is in her native Albania to ensure their sympathy. She also needs to remind herself to be grateful for living legally in the U.S., in spite of how lonely and bored she is working as a nanny in New Jersey. Lula doesnt do much, since Zeke is old enough to be applying to college, but his father doesnt want him home alone after his imbalanced mothers abrupt disappearance. Between trips to Guantnamo, Don encourages Lula to write a memoir titled My New American Life, a clever setup that allows Prose great freedom in crafting Lulas comically ironic and heartbreakingly guileless voice. In deftly choreographed scenes of caustic hilarity, from awkward meals to fumbled romance, Prose articulates both Lulas hopefulness and homesickness as she contends with Mister Stanley and Zekes despair, Dons righteous indignation, and the frightening demands of three Albanian guys who show up in a black Lexus SUV. 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. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Best-selling Prose continues to ascend in popularity and acclaim, having just been honored with the prestigious Washington University International Humanities Medal.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)