The novelist Peter Carey, whose new book, 'Parrot and Olivier in America,' came out last week, likes to call himself a Marshian, which is another way of saying he's from Australia. Carey, one of only two writers to win the Booker Prize twice (the other is J.M. Coetzee, a South African), grew up about 30 miles from Melbourne in the improbably named town of Bacchus Marsh, where his parents owned a car dealership Carey, now 66, lived Down Under until 1990, when he moved to New York. He still speaks in a broad Australian accent and is not shy about mentioning that his homeland recently issued a 55-cent postage stamp in his honor, or two postage stamps, really. Until now, all of Carey's novels have in one way or another been about Australia. Probably the most famous are 'Jack Maggs' (1998), which reimagines Dickens' 'Great Expectations' from the point of view of Magwitch, Pip's benefactor, newly returned from the penal colony down under; and 'True History of the Kelly Gang' (2001), which recounts the story of Ned Kelly, the Australian outlaw and folk hero, in Kelly's own words. Carey's new book is his first to be set in America. 'Parrot and Olivier' takes place in 1830 and is an 'improvisation,' as Carey calls it, on the history of Alexis de Tocqueville, who appears here as the asthmatic, myopic, nosebleed-prone Olivier-Jean-Baptiste de Clarel de Barfleur de Garmont. Olivier is possibly even more of a snob than Tocqueville was and certainly less gifted, but he too is a Bourbon aristocrat who after the accession of Louis-Philippe finds it convenient to get out of France for a while and accepts a commission to write about the American prison system. He is accompanied not, as Tocqueville was, by an aristocratic compatriot, but by an English printer and engraver, almost twice his age, named John Larrit (also known as Parrot, because of his carrot-colored hair), who has been hired by Olivier's family to be his servant and secretly to keep an eye on him. He got the idea for the book, Carey said, from reading Tocqueville's 'Democracy in America' a few years ago. 'I had an impression that he was this French aristocrat who really got America,' he said. 'I think that's a commonly held view. But I found that he was terribly ambivalent. Every single vile thing that's said about America in my book is taken from his. He had a kind of general snobbishness and a great fear about the kind of culture that's possible in a country that cares only about money. 'And you find yourself reading all this in two ways. You think, 'You ridiculous snob.' And you think: 'Actually, pal, you've got a point. It's even worse than you thought.'' 