Behold the Dreamers

Jende Jonga, an immigrant from Limbe in Cameroon, has spent years washing dishes and driving livery cabs in New York when, in the fall of 2007, he lands the job of his life: chauffeur to Clark Edwards, an executive at Lehman Brothers, for thirty five thousand dollars a year. His wife, Neni, who came over with their young son, Liomi, on a student visa, works as a home health aide and studies chemistry at community college, meaning to become a pharmacist. Jende's case for asylum is pending, and everything depends on it.

Driving the Edwardses around Manhattan, Jende learns more than he should. Clark sleeps a few hours a night; his elder son, Vince, wants to abandon Columbia Law School for India; his wife, Cindy, is insecure, given to substance abuse and marked by a poor childhood. During a summer with the family in Southampton, Neni finds Cindy unconscious. Then Lehman collapses. Cindy asks Jende to keep a log of her husband's movements, a scandal breaks, and Clark lets Jende go. Neni, desperate, confronts Cindy with a photograph of her passed out and walks away with ten thousand dollars, which appalls her husband. Jende's asylum claim is denied, an appeal is beyond them, and he chooses to go home. Cindy dies after another bout of substance abuse; Jende sees Clark one last time; and the novel ends with the Jongas driving from the airport at Douala toward Limbe.

Mbue writes with warmth and a light touch, and both families get fair hearing. The book reads easily, a long, steady domestic novel rather than a thriller, and its pleasures are its people, especially the fierce, funny Neni. Kirkus found it "remarkably kind to all its characters" and noted how "the magnitude of the catastrophe makes itself clear only slowly." Cristina Henríquez in the New York Times praised writing suffused "with great confidence and warmth." It suits readers who want the 2008 crash seen from the driver's seat.