THE YEARS 2007-9 were bad ones for America. The housing bubble burst, the auto industry was in free fall, unemployment rose as high as 10 percent, and Wall Street was at the edge of an abyss. It's just before this tumult that Jende Jonga, an immigrant from Cameroon and one of the central characters in Imbolo Mbue's debut novel, "Behold the Dreamers," arrives in New York with a visitor's visa and the hope that somehow he might transform his temporary status with a green card. Two years later, he sends for his wife, Neni, and their son, Liomi, who join him in Harlem. When we first meet Jende, he's on his way to a job interview, aiming to become a chauffeur for Clark Edwards, an executive at Lehman Brothers. Jende gets the job, and before long he's shuttling not only Clark but Clark's wife, Cindy, and their two children throughout the city. Mbue writes with great confidence and warmth, effortlessly inhabiting the minds of both Jende and his wife. Neni, balancing motherhood and her dreams of becoming a pharmacist, is particularly appealing; she thrums on the page, full of complexity and yearning. Only once, in a pivotal moment toward the end of the book, does she act out of character in a way that feels forced, but elsewhere her sense of her own transformation ("Maybe I'm becoming another person") struck me as a fresh take on the immigrant experience - providing not simply the jolt of being in a new place but also the jolt of taking on a new identity because of that place. Still, if it's place you want, the novel offers that too. Neni observes that "even in New York City, even in a place of many nations and cultures, men and women, young and old, rich and poor, preferred their kind when it came to those they kept closest." Jende's immigration lawyer tells him : "The police is for the protection of white people. . . . But not black men." Jende laments that "people in this country, always worrying about how to eat, they pay someone good money to tell them: Eat this, don't eat that. If you don't know how to eat, what else can you know how to do in this world?" As the story progresses, the plot, which is premised on a class divide, unfolds to reveal many more fissures crackling beneath the surface - immigration proceedings don't go well, marriages falter, friendships fail, children stray. There are a lot of spinning plates, and Mbue balances them skillfully, keeping everything in motion. Even more impressive is the vitality that gleams through the film of gloom as the story becomes less about what happens to the Jongas than about their efforts to make peace with their fate, whatever and wherever it might be. And yet, while the novel's setup is rich with possibility, Mbue doesn't always make the most of it. Within the confines of the car, Jende regularly overhears Clark's business conversations, but the words float through the narrative without consequence. When Lehman goes bankrupt, the event is devoid of context; it doesn't offer us a glimpse into much beyond Jende's panic, his fear that he'll lose his job. When Neni starts working for Cindy Edwards at the family's vacation house in the Hamptons, the conceit is ripe - the Jongas of Harlem pitted against the Edwardses of the Hamptons. But these places remain little more than signifiers. The living room of the Edwardses' porticoed mansion has an "all-white décor and large windows as if to never lose a view of the sky." In contrast, the Jongas' dark, fifth-floor walk-up apartment has a "threadbare living room sofa" and is "full of cockroaches." There's no deep exploration of the true gap between the two. Even so, "Behold the Dreamers" is a capacious, big-hearted novel. Near the end of it, Neni describes Am erica as "a magnificent land of uninhibited dreamers." That might aptly describe the book as well. CRISTINA HENRÍQUEZ is the author, most recently, of "The Book of Unknown Americans."

Mbue's debut novel weaves together the lives of two families living in N.Y.C. during the height of the Wall Street mortgage crisis in late 2008 and early 2009. Reader Onayemi powerfully renders the hopes and dreams of the Jongas-immigrants from Cameroon-and the private pain of the Edwardses-wealthy New Yorkers caught up in the scandal at crumbling financial giant Lehman Brothers. He brings effective nuance to the wide cast of characters of both genders across a broad spectrum of ages, ethnicities, and life circumstances. His reading of Cindy Edwards, who turns to drugs and alcohol as her workaholic husband develops a habit of meeting high-end prostitutes at a Manhattan hotel, is especially haunting. Onayemi's talent for bringing the complexities of the dialogue to life in audio is on full display. A Random House hardcover. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.