Immigration Lawyer: Off Kilter

Lawyer Friend Dept: At 26, Lula, “talented … smart … a scrapper,” is older and savvier than her years, unsurprisingly for one born in, and shaped by, “the most extreme and crazy communist society in Europe, ruled for decades by the psycho dictator Enver Hoxha.” Intelligent and wryly self-aware – she ruefully acknowledges her predilection for “the sort of guy who asked you to keep a gun for him and didn't tell you why “ – Lula is remarkably good company, even if by her own admission she is incapable of telling the truth. “She’d almost never lied at all until she’d applied for her U.S. tourist visa. But ever since she got here, she couldn’t seem to stop.”, according to Globe And Mail. My New American Life is the 16th novel and 25th book from Prose, whose industry would give a workaholic pause. She is by her own admission an almost obsessively meticulous writer and a “maniacal” reviser, so it’s doubtful she hadn’t a clear theme in mind here. Nor is this the first time Prose has used the immigrant experience as a lens for viewing her country: In her 1992 novel Primitive People , she contrasted the sensibilities of a Haitian-born au pair with the off-kilter moral compass of the American family she works for and left the reader to decide who was the more primitive and my New American Life is the story of Lula, a native Albanian residing, but not yet at home, in America – specifically, in “snooty” Baywater, N.J., where she works as a paid companion to a 17-year-old high-schooler named Zeke. “Nanny” does not capture the comradely equilibrium of their relationship. Her employer, Zeke's father, Stanley, is a decent if dispirited former economics professor lured to Wall Street, where he is up against – being crushed by – “the pimply fat face of capitalism,” in the words of his impassioned immigration-lawyer friend, Don. Stanley’s mentally unstable wife decamped a year ago; she is gone, though not out of the picture. Lula occupies herself when Zeke is at school by writing stories – reconstituted Albanian folk tales she passes off as her own – but she is bored. So, when three Albanian nogoodniks mysteriously show up at the door, she’s ripe for the weird friendship they offer. Lula knows she is lucky to have landed the job she has, knows the favour they ask of her will jeopardize both it and her legal status, but she is lonely – even, to her surprise, homesick. Besides, as one of the trio says, “Every Albanian is related by DNA.” How can she refuse her brothers? As reported in the news.
@t enver hoxha, don stanley