Parrot & Olivier In America by Peter Carey

 

Two men come from abroad to the United States in the early 1800s.  Olivier is the son of French aristocrats with all the snobbery that entails.  Parrot is a servant who has been sent to Australia as a boy and then returned to England by the man who sent him there.  Ostensibly, Olivier is coming to America to study the penal system and make a report to the French government.  In reality, he is fleeing another revolution in France.  Parrot has been sent to assist him but is also a spy for the count who sent Olivier overseas as well as Olivier's mother who lives in fear that he might fall in love in America and marry someone unsuitable.

The two have many adventures.  Parrot runs into the love of his life on the ship over, a woman artist who blows hot and cold on his love.  He visits her periodically throughout the book and assists her in her schemes to get rich.  Both the men are astonished at the American verve and determination to improve themselves.  They attend town meetings, visit up and down the Eastern coast and observe different jails and penitentiaries.  Olivier does indeed fall in love with an American heiress and soon is imagining a life in America.

Peter Carey has won the Booker Prize twice and this book was longlisted as well for that prize.  It is a takeoff on the visit and writings of Alexis de Touqueville whose early reporting on the new country was a sensation at the time.  The two men start as master and servant but over their visit come to regard each other as friends and help each other in their various schemes.  Readers will delight in the descriptions of the early United States and how it seems to one from abroad as well as in the various adventures the two men encounter.  This book is recommended for readers of literary fiction.