Behold the Dreamers (2016) by Imbolo Mbue

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Behold the Dreamers (2016)

by Imbolo Mbue

Lehman Brothers Building, Wall Street, Manhattan

Manhattan: 33/33 

New York: 86/105

   Woop Woop that is all for Manhattan, baby.  I won't miss the rat infested apartments and swarthy immigrant families- of all races, genders and socioeconomic status.  The immigrant experience has been at the fore of the Manhattan sub-chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America- I count 9 out of the 33 books located on the island of Manhattan.  Fitting then, we finish with a 10th book about the immigrant experience- and one of my favorites, Imbolo Mbue's debut novel, Behold the Dreamers, about an economic migrant from West Africa and his family, and his job as the chauffeur for a partner at Lehman Brothers, just before and during their collapse.

  It's not the first time Lehman Brothers has popped up this year.  I recently read The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave Breeding Industry (2017)  by Ned and Constance Sublette and the Lehman Brothers were a whole chapter as the example, par excellence, of the links between 20th century high finance and the slave trade in the American South (Lehman Brothers got their start as slave-trading middle men.)  I was mildly surprised not to see this fact established by any of the characters, and I was left wondering if it was the author himself who didn't know, or if he did know, picked Lehman Brothers for that purpose, and then decided none of his characters would know about that fact, so decided to omit any further discussion.  Anyway, that would be the first thing I would point out in a book about the relationship between an African immigrant chauffeur and a Lehman partner in the early ought's.

  Beyond that incongruity I quite liked Behold the Dreamers both in terms the characters and the mechanics of the book which center around the experience of an African immigrant that time and place. I also liked his treatment of the immigration legal system which I found to be sophisticated and nuanced in a book written by a non-lawyer.  At the same time, the writing wasn't overly technical or erudite, his portrayal of his aspirational immigrant family, living in a quasi-legal state while they actively try to defraud the US Immigration System (which is just treated as a fait accompli.) was also well executed.

  I was just generally impressed by the technical acuity of the prose writing, if not by the characters themselves, who are all morally culpable for various reasons.