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Freddy and Fredericka by Mark Helprin
Freddy and Fredericka are an English royal couple. He's the big-eared, bumbling, boring, unfaithful Prince of Wales and she's his stunningly beautiful yet vacuous wife. Freddy fails at his first required quest to become king that involves the royal falcon. King Edward supposedly abdicated his throne for the same reason. Freddy is persuaded that he must pass another test, conquering a foreign land, and this time it's the United States. Freddy and Fredericka parachute, incognito, into New Jersey, and claim to be dentists from Alabama. Their madcap adventures across the U.S. leave them poor and doing menial work, stealing vehicles, trying to fix teeth (after losing theirs), committed to an insane asylum for a while, and ends up with Freddy becoming a speechwriter for Dewey Knott, the Republican presidential candidate. They discover themselves, and each other, in a land and lifestyle that is totally foreign to them. Mark Helprin's novel has received mostly positive reviews with the New York Times saying, "It's a book that skates merrily and improbably along on the author's bravura storytelling talents and love of verbal high jinks, a novel as funny and antic and purely escapist as his recent stories have been preachy, pretentious and glum."
