Hope in the Rubble of the American Dream

“The financial crisis laid bare a lot about the ways in which the American dream is not that accessible to everybody,” the writer Imbolo Mbue, originally from Cameroon, recently NPR’s Rachel Martin. “I was very disillusioned about America.” After losing her job in marketing during the Great Recession, she turned to fiction to explore that disillusionment. , her debut novel, opens in 2007 and follows Jende and Neni Jonga, a pair of Cameroonian immigrants whose sights are fixed on “the milk, honey, and liberty flowing in the paradise-for-strivers called America.” Both husband and wife go to work for the family of a Lehman Brothers executive. Red flags wave from the first page, signaling disappointment ahead—and visa troubles are on the horizon as well. But whether or not America will have them, they don’t lose faith in its platonic form: “a magnificent land of uninhibited dreamers.”