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  • Simply Writer
  • Gina Frangello (bio)
My New American Life. Francine Prose. Harper. http://www.harpercollins.com. 306 pages; cloth, $25.99; ebook, $9.99.

Francine Prose is a writer who defies categorization. In a publishing climate more intent on branding novels by female writers as "women's fiction" than any era since prior to second-wave feminism, Prose is among those select who manage—against all current odds—to remain simply writers rather than being marketed by and exclusively to their gender. She, along with comrades like Mary Gaitskill, Jennifer Egan, Margaret Atwood...their numbers can seem depressingly few, but I digress...remain able to engage gender while somehow rising above the fray of this marketing game, continuing to appeal to male and female readers alike. It is further cause for celebration when such a writer can put out a novel about a twentysomething female protagonist, yet be read/critiqued in ways that wholly eschew such "women's fiction" pigeonholing. With the release of her sixteenth book, My New American Life, Francine Prose has managed precisely this feat.

Since early in her career, Prose has been labeled a "satirist" by critics, but here too I would venture that the categorization doesn't quite fit. (Subjectively, I rarely like overtly satirical work, and yet I consistently enjoy Prose.) I'm not convinced that what she does is satire so much as simply exhibiting common sense in exposing cultural foibles, which is at least in part the task of any serious writer. She has taken on, in previous books, such complex and loaded topics as social class and academia, and in My New American Life, she addresses a myriad of contemporary ills and absurdities: the Iraq War and Abu Ghraib, the hypocrisy of immigration policies, the privileged despair of suburban life, and the (dubious) value and nature of honesty. If she is a satirist, then she is a satirist in the same vein as Jonathan Franzen—a writer with whom she actually bears much in common—which is to say that her work cannot be so easily reduced.

What Francine Prose is, indisputably, is a pro. From the opening paragraphs, I felt a sense of relief and release at being in her competent, self-assured hands—a master stylist, her language and storytelling bear few missteps. At the center of American Life is its aforementioned twenty-six-year-old heroine, Lula. Despite Prose's large themes, Lula herself is no philosopher or rocket scientist. A refugee from a banally tragic life in Albania, she is intoxicated by the concept of American freedom, but her actual life in the States revolves around equally petty details to the existence she fled in Albania. Waiting tables at a Mexican restaurant or serving as the unnecessary nanny to a nearly grown teenage boy, she is perpetually broke, sexually frustrated to the point of making desperately unwise choices about men, and tormented by worry about her best friend, whom she fears has fallen to harm after being deported. She is also lusting after an Albanian thug called Alvo who has left a mysterious gun in her care—the point around which most of American Life's "action" centers. Prone to neither self-examination nor deep thought, Lula nonetheless possesses a sharp (she would say Albanian) cynicism that makes her an astute social critic and navigating lens for this novel's varied terrain.

If Prose has a weakness as a writer, it is a tendency to become so intent on uncovering every societal foolishness that she fails to take us deeply enough into the individual—rather than cultural—psyche of her protagonists. Though Lula is likeable, flawed, engaging, and deftly conveyed, I can't claim to have ever felt deeply attached to her or to have lost the sense of her role as a "character in a novel." I would venture that this is a common characteristic in Prose's work—though it could be argued that this approach also spares her the frequent pitfalls of sentimentality or narcissism that can befall more psychologically probing writers. Here again I think of Franzen, whose Freedom (2010) tackles highly similar cultural terrain (minus the Albanianisms) as My New American Life...

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