The project of these novels is inspired: to chronicle a period during which just about every American questioned the dream, and many watched it crumble, through the eyes of people who never considered its promise a birthright. Immigrants, by definition, are poised to wonder about things that natives might never think to question in good times—things like national character, cultural values, and civic priorities. When bad times arrive, they are already in the habit of asking the relevant questions. They genuinely want to know, as Neni asks, “What kind of country is this?” Together, these novels suggest a clear answer: the U.S. may be inhospitable to these immigrants’ dreams in the near term, but one day it’s altogether likely to belong to their children.

* * *

The financial crisis proves disastrous for the Jongas and the Wangs alike. For the Jongas, it’s the ultimate barrier to entry; the Wangs experience it as a humiliating fall from grace. In both cases—and in many real-life cases too, of course—the crashing market is a symbol of disintegrating national myths. Hard work does not always end in success. Not only does homeownership come at a steep price—it may not be possible to begin with. And America’s pluralism is prized more in theory than in practice.

But for the immigrant protagonists of both novels, the myths are only part of the equation. They are also acutely aware—in a way that bankers, as depicted in both novels, are distinctly not—that the world they see crumbling around them is not the whole world. Wall Street is not the sole center of gravity. As their American lives fall apart, both families look back toward the homelands they were once so eager to escape, now armed with a measure of the hard-won clarity they’ve gained in the U.S.

In Behold the Dreamers, Jende and Neni Jonga’s approach to the new world in which they find themselves—they’re a little skeptical, and very curious—offers a fresh perspective on the excesses of the pre-crash one percent. They encounter not just a chaotic city, but a bewildering set of terms and social codes for what they discover is the primary activity: the making and spending of money. Though Jende spends his days chauffeuring a banker and reads the Wall Street Journal religiously, he is enough of an outsider that he assumes Enron was a person. Still, his thoughts come across as more sensible than ignorant: “The bailout thing was in the news every day, but he still didn’t understand if it was a good thing or a bad thing.” In the Hamptons, startled by the size of her employer’s second home, Neni wonders, “didn’t they understand that no matter how much money a person had, they could sleep on only one bed at a time?”

If Mbue sometimes strays into homiletic territory with her protagonists, she also deftly parodies the natives. Vince, the banker’s son who wants to disabuse Jende of “all the lies [he’s] been fed about America,” is a caricature of a self-conscious radical chafing at his privilege, naïve and unworldly in his vague cynicism. But such sweeping dismissal of the country is its own kind of privilege. Newcomers, more quickly than the natives, learn to see the good and the bad in one frame. When the Jongas head back to Cameroon, chastened by their experience, post-crash America remains, in their minds, the land of choices and all kinds of chances. They imagine their young children someday returning.