Lauren Bufferd

FictionHistorical FictionDebut Fiction

A mother’s courage

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Longtime editor and essayist Janet Benton turns her considerable skills to fiction with her debut, Lilli de Jong, a beautifully written historical novel set in 1880s Philadelphia about pregnancy, motherhood and the fight for economic independence.

Twenty-two-year-old Lilli discovers she is pregnant after her lover leaves for Pittsburgh in search of better employment. Though he has promised to send for her, Lilli is fearful of being shunned from her close-knit Quaker community and leaves home, taking refuge in a charity residence for unwed mothers in urban Philadelphia. After her daughter is born, she decides to keep the baby, a highly unusual decision in the late-19th century, when finding acceptance and shelter was nearly impossible for an unmarried mother.

Desperate for employment, Lilli is hired as a wet nurse for a wealthy family, at the financial and emotional expense of boarding her own daughter, with catastrophic results. Again and again, circumstances force Lilli to choose between her moral ideals and harsh social realities.

The novel is styled as a first-person diary, and Lilli’s eloquent self-expression is a product of her Quaker education and training as a teacher. Her clear-eyed view of her situation and her fearless questioning of a repressive system make for exhilarating reading, but even her spirit can’t always compete with the hardships of a culture where even wealthy white women had little economic agency.

It is a testament to Benton as a writer that this novel wears its considerable historical detail so lightly, although the narrative does get bogged down with repetitive descriptions of nursing and a few hard-to-believe deus ex machinas. But in its depiction of a mother’s fierce attachment to her child, Lilli de Jong has real resonance in today’s battles over women’s reproductive health and the rights of working mothers.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Janet Benton for Lilli de Jong.

This article was originally published in the June 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Longtime editor and essayist Janet Benton turns her considerable skills to fiction with her debut, Lilli de Jong, a beautifully written historical novel set in 1880s Philadelphia about pregnancy, motherhood and the fight for economic independence.

FictionLiterary FictionGothic Fiction

A gothic coming-of-age

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Grief Cottage, Gail Godwin’s latest novel, opens with a newly orphaned boy grappling with his mother’s fatal accident.

As his late mother never revealed the identity of his father, 11-year-old Marcus is sent to an island off the coast of South Carolina to live with his great-aunt Charlotte, a reclusive artist whose paintings of seascapes and rustic summer cottages are popular with tourists. With an empty month to fill before school begins, Marcus is engaged by the safe hatching of sea turtles as they make their arduous journeys to the ocean. But his attention is also drawn to a desolate, abandoned house—the Grief Cottage, where an adolescent boy and his parents vanished during a hurricane half a century before.

With Charlotte holed up in her studio and drinking heavily, Marcus is left increasingly on his own. He is convinced that the ghost of the dead boy is trying to contact him and visits the cottage daily, until finally the spirit reveals himself. At the same time, Marcus befriends several of the island’s most notable residents, who fill in details of the island’s history and provide context to the story of the ill-fated family.

Like Henry James’ classic The Turn of the Screw, Grief Cottage is less a paranormal thriller than an exploration of the psyche’s creative tactics to survive trauma. The closer Marcus gets to the truth, the more the stories of past and present merge, until the dead are able to provide answers for the living.

Marcus’ precociousness occasionally requires a suspension of disbelief as total as any faith in the supernatural. Despite that, Godwin shows she is still at the top of her craft, using the fragile link between living and spirit to illuminate a young man’s coming of age in this keenly observed, powerful novel.

 

This article was originally published in the June 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Grief Cottage, Gail Godwin’s latest novel, opens with a newly orphaned boy grappling with his mother’s fatal accident. As his late mother never revealed the identity of his father, 11-year-old Marcus is sent to an island off the coast of South Carolina to live with his great-aunt Charlotte, a reclusive artist whose paintings of seascapes and rustic summer cottages are popular with tourists. With an empty month to fill before school begins, Marcus is engaged by the safe hatching of sea turtles as they make their arduous journeys to the ocean. But his attention is also drawn to a desolate, abandoned house—the Grief Cottage, where an adolescent boy and his parents vanished during a hurricane half a century before.

FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

A decade trapped in Spain

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Mary Gordon has been writing compelling books about faith, love and family for four decades. In There Your Heart Lies, her eighth novel, she examines the ways political idealism and religious fanaticism shape the choices of a privileged but naive Catholic woman in the mid-20th century.

At 19, Marian Taylor breaks with her wealthy New York family after the death of her beloved younger brother and sails to Spain to join the forces fighting Franco. Assisting in hospitals, she meets a Spanish doctor, gets pregnant, marries him and just as quickly loses him to sepsis. Forced to live with his parents in rural Spain and surrender her baby to her domineering mother-in-law, Marian becomes completely dependent on a family and a culture as rigid as the one she left behind. Only a friendship with Isabel, the village doctor, offers Marian sanctuary, as well as means to a possible escape back to the United States after a decade of misery.

But Marian has long kept this part of her life secret. Now in her 90s and living comfortably in Rhode Island, it is only when she is diagnosed with cancer that she begins to open up about these experiences with her live-in granddaughter, Amelia. The intensity of Marian’s experience prompts Amelia to make a journey to Spain to reconcile her grandmother’s past with her own uncertain prospects.

Gordon’s novels often feature personal dramas set against a backdrop of political or religious change, and here she touches on the violence of soldiers, clerics and citizens on both sides of the Spanish Civil War, as well as the kind of inflexible religious household in which Marian was raised. But There Your Heart Lies also depicts pleasure in the loving bonds between generations and in acts of generosity and selflessness between friends.

Marian is a classic Gordon heroine—sheltered but passionate and loyal to a fault. In contrast, Amelia’s search for self cannot compete with the drama and urgency of Marian’s time in Spain. This is a historically satisfying novel and, when Marian is center stage, an emotionally satisfying one as well.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Mary Gordon for There Your Heart Lies.

This article was originally published in the May 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Mary Gordon has been writing compelling books about faith, love and family for four decades. In There Your Heart Lies, her eighth novel, she examines the ways political idealism and religious fanaticism shape the choices of a privileged but naive Catholic woman in the mid-20th century.

FictionDebut Fiction

Scattered to the wind

Review by Lauren Bufferd

BookPage Top Pick in Fiction, May 2017

Salt Houses is a dazzling debut about four generations of the Yacoubs, a Palestinian family originally from Jaffa. Told from multiple points of view, the novel offers a unique perspective on Arab displacement, assimilation and the very notion of home. At the same time, it puts a human face on a conflict that many of us need to better understand.

The Yacoubs were relocated from Jaffa to Nablus before the novel even begins. The story opens in 1963, 15 years after this first relocation and just as Salma is reading the future in coffee grounds on her daughter Alia’s wedding day. Though Salma tries to soften the message she detects, it soon becomes clear that the family will experience further displacements. After the Six-Day War (1967), they are forced to leave their home. Salma joins extended family in Jordan, and Alia and her husband, Atef, relocate to Kuwait where they raise a family. After Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, the family scatters once again; this time the grown children of Alia and Atef, now with families of their own, disperse to Paris, Boston and Beirut.

Palestinian-American author Hala Alyan, who is also a practicing psychologist, balances the ordinary joys and burdens of family life with the deeper clashes of culture and homesickness that occur as the Yacoubs spread across the globe. Whether she is depicting the stormy marriage between Alia and Atef or their daughter Widad’s concerns over her stepson’s interest in the more extreme practitioners of Islam, Alyan serves her story well through precise, almost poetic language and empathy toward her characters.

Though the novel is not overtly political, both Alia and Atef are haunted by memories of Alia’s brother, Mustafa, who died in an Israeli jail. But nostalgia is an indulgence they can ill afford. Transience is their way of life, and resilience is their legacy to their children. Salt Houses speaks to the specificity of the Palestinian diaspora, but it also mirrors the experiences of immigrants and exiles all over the world, making it very much a book for every reader.

 

This article was originally published in the May 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Salt Houses is a dazzling debut about four generations of the Yacoubs, a Palestinian family originally from Jaffa. Told from multiple points of view, the novel offers a unique perspective on Arab displacement, assimilation and the very notion of home. At the same time, it puts a human face on a conflict that many of us need to better understand.

Mystery & SuspenseFictionSuspense

Past and present collide in a grief-haunted villa

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Elanor Dymott’s debut, Every Contact Leaves a Trace, was a sophisticated thriller about a man whose wife is murdered when visiting an old advisor at Oxford. In Silver and Salt, Dymott applies her elegant sense of the mysterious to the story of an ill-fated family as two daughters of a famous photographer try to come to terms with his death.

After the 2003 death of renowned British photographer Max Hollingbourne, his daughters convene at a villa in Greece, where they spent many summers as a family. Vinny is the older, more responsible sister, a translator of German drama and poetry and happily married. Three years younger and considerably more volatile, the mordantly unhappy and antisocial Ruthie arrives after the funeral with a list of grievances and demands. Already haunted by memories of an unhappy childhood, a glimpse of the little girl in the neighboring house further destabilizes Ruthie.

The novel interweaves past and present, much of it sad. Max first met his French wife, Sophie, at a photo shoot, and not long after, she gave up her career as an opera singer to be his wife and raise their daughters as he roamed the world, often leaving them alone for months. Even after Sophie began to show signs of mental illness, Max never stopped traveling, but called in his sister Beatrice to help, even asking her to live with the girls when Sophie became too ill to take care of them. When Ruthie tried to share her burgeoning interest in photography with Max, his reaction was often cruel and sometimes violent, leading to an estrangement between father and younger daughter that lasted until his death. Dymott uses a photographer’s ability to alter and manipulate images through the developing process as a metaphor for the tenuous grip Ruthie has on sanity, although there are times when the author’s poetic reach exceeds the novel’s action.

Silver and Salt is an achingly intimate look at grief, and Dymott’s descriptive gifts are amply found in her rich depictions of place from an English flower-filled meadow to the Greek olive groves surrounding the Hollingbourne villa.

Elanor Dymott’s debut, Every Contact Leaves a Trace, was a sophisticated thriller about a man whose wife is murdered when visiting an old advisor at Oxford. In Silver and Salt, Dymott applies her elegant sense of the mysterious to the story of an ill-fated family as two daughters of a famous photographer try to come to terms with his death.

FictionLiterary Fiction

Portrait of a betrayal

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Bernhard Schlink is best known for his internationally successful novel The Reader (1997), and he returns to the themes of passion and loss in The Woman on the Stairs, about a German lawyer who stumbles onto a nude painting of a woman for whom he once risked his career and who then mysteriously disappeared from his life.

When the nameless protagonist is in Sydney working on a case, he comes across a familiar painting in a local museum. Decades earlier, as a young lawyer in Frankfurt, he became entangled in an affair involving an artist, a woman named Irene and her art collector husband, who commissioned the aforementioned painting of the unfaithful Irene. Hired to mediate a series of conflicts involving damage and restoration of the canvas, the lawyer fell in love with Irene, who in turn convinced him to help her steal the painting, promising she would run away with him if they were successful. The day he helped her was the last day he saw her.

The lawyer is able to locate Irene with the help of a local detective. Living in a remote area outside of Sydney, Irene is now leading a quiet life, assisting her elderly neighbors and growing her own food. It also becomes apparent that she is quite ill. Irene’s life of passion forces the lawyer to come to terms with his own losses and to understand that many of his choices were merely reactions to the coldness that he experienced as a child.

Schlink, a professor of law in both Germany and the United States, writes with lawyerly precision, and his protagonist’s midlife search for meaning is thought-provoking and surprisingly tender, though some of the characters never fully come to life. The Woman on the Stairs will appeal to readers as an exploration of the moral ambiguities of blame and guilt and the ethical issues of ownership.

 

This article was originally published in the April 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Bernhard Schlink is best known for his internationally successful novel The Reader (1997), and he returns to the themes of passion and loss in The Woman on the Stairs, about a German lawyer who stumbles onto a nude painting of a woman for whom he once risked his career and who then mysteriously disappeared from his life.

FictionWorld Fiction

Exit West

Review by Lauren Bufferd

The novels of Mohsin Hamid (How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia) range from conventionally structured stories to fiction disguised as self-help manuals. In his fourth novel, Exit West, Hamid explores the worldwide refugee crisis using simple, almost allegorical language spiced with an unexpected dose of speculative fiction. The novel follows a young couple who join a wave of migrants as their city collapses into violence. But in Hamid’s imagined world, there are doorways that lead from one city to another and allow people (mostly dark skinned) to emerge magically in other countries (mostly Western), much to the consternation of the (mostly light skinned) resident population.

Like all of Hamid’s novels, Exit West is a love story, but one that exists within the structure of a moral thriller. Bold and curious Nadia meets the quieter, more restrained Saeed in night class while the unnamed country where they reside teeters on the brink of a civil war. Their attraction is immediate, and their path to intimacy is made more intoxicating by the dangers around them. At first, their relationship is like many other young couples’; they listen to music, sit in cafes and smoke a little weed. But when Saeed’s mother is hit by a stray bullet, the couple decides to move in together. They also begin to heed the rumors about doors that serve as portals from one country to another. Making the ultimate decision to leave their homeland, and paying a middleman a hefty sum, Saeed and Nadia are led to a door that takes them to a refugee camp on a Greek Island. Later doors lead to a private room in an abandoned mansion outside London and then a windswept coast in Marin County, California. Each move tests the couple’s stamina and courage, and although they are dependent on one another for survival, the ties that bind them grow weaker with every transition.

Exit West is political without being didactic and romantic without being maudlin. The storytelling is stripped down to essentials; though the novel is epic in scope and geography, it is only 240 pages. Hamid masterfully handles the shifts from the symbolic to the real, the unnamed to the specific. Exit West is a richly imaginative work with a firm grip on what is happening to someone somewhere right this minute.

 

This article was originally published in the March 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Exit West is a richly imaginative work with a firm grip on what is happening to someone somewhere right this minute.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Into the night

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Margaret Drabble’s first novels, published in the 1960s, were brightly told tales about clever women venturing into academia or extramarital affairs. By the ’80s, her fiction had shifted to wide-angle views of intellectual communities in contemporary London or Cambridge, usually peopled by mid-career women. Drabble’s characters have continued to age along with her, and she brings her attention (and her wit) to the quality of aging as experienced by a group of friends approaching their 80s in her latest novel (her 19th!), The Dark Flood Rises.

Feisty Fran Stubbs is at the center of this mordant and thought-provoking work. Still independent and living alone, she is employed by a nonprofit researching senior-living accommodations. She delivers home-cooked meals to her mostly homebound ex-husband, Claude, and worries about her two adult children, Christopher and Poppet. Also in her orbit are old friends pursuing different solutions to retirement: Scholarly rake Bennet and his younger partner Ivor live a comfortable expat existence in the Canary Islands, and Josephine, a former neighbor from when both women were young mothers, now lives in a planned community for retired academics. 

There is not much plot in The Dark Flood Rises. Friends meet, have drinks, exchange gossip. There are accidents, hospital stays, reminiscences and two funerals, one expected, the other a surprise. Fran stays on the go, crisscrossing England in her mostly reliable car, at her happiest when spending the night in a comfortable room in a mid-level hotel chain. If she ponders anything, it’s how she can best ensure a good death for herself and her loved ones. Behind this web of aging and personal relationships, looming environmental and political disasters threaten to transform the only England she has ever known. 

In one of Josephine’s adult-ed classes, the students discuss the possibility of a Late Style—the form or manner an artist’s work takes late in life. Though one might think resolution and clarity best reflect the aged creative mind, an equal argument can be made for tenacity, intractability and a certain comfort with contradiction, all of which are found in this novel. More witty than morbid, The Dark Flood Rises may not be for everyone, but this wise assessment of aging by one of England’s most respected writers deserves our readerly attention. 

 

This article was originally published in the March 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Margaret Drabble’s first novels, published in the 1960s, were brightly told tales about clever women venturing into academia or extramarital affairs. By the ’80s, her fiction had shifted to wide-angle views of intellectual communities in contemporary London or Cambridge, usually peopled by mid-career women. Drabble’s characters have continued to age along with her, and she brings her attention (and her wit) to the quality of aging as experienced by a group of friends approaching their 80s in her latest novel (her 19th!), The Dark Flood Rises.

Fiction

Shaping the USSR

Review by Lauren Bufferd

The subject of American innocence up against European experience has been examined in American fiction since Henry James imagined Daisy Miller sneaking into the Roman Colosseum. Sana Krasikov digs into the topic from a new and surprising angle in a thoroughly researched and deeply felt historical novel, The Patriots, which follows the consequences of an idealistic young American’s flight to the Soviet Union.

For Florence Fein, the opportunities and promise of the Soviet Union beat out anything that slow-moving Brooklyn has to offer. After moving to Russia in 1934, Florence throws herself wholeheartedly into the creation of the USSR, remaining loyal to her new homeland even after her American passport is confiscated. Her story is punctuated by the first-person voice of her adult son, Julian, in Russia on business 40 years later and eager to quell rumours that his mother informed on friends and co-workers to stay alive.

Krasikov’s award-winning story collection, One More Year, was about compromised choices amid the social and economic flux of political change. The Patriots draws on similar themes, despite its epic scope. Krasikov skillfully moves between voices and decades, never neglecting the moral difficulties of life under a totalitarian regime. There is a compassion here as well as surprising humor, but most of all, a keen awareness of how people strive to be good in dire circumstances. The Patriots is an ambitious, unsentimental and astonishingly masterful first novel with a singular portrayal of living by conviction, no matter the cost.

 

This article was originally published in the February 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The subject of American innocence up against European experience has been examined in American fiction since Henry James imagined Daisy Miller sneaking into the Roman Colosseum. Sana Krasikov digs into the topic from a new and surprising angle in a thoroughly researched and deeply felt historical novel, The Patriots, which follows the consequences of an idealistic young American’s flight to the Soviet Union.

FictionLiterary Fiction

Can you really know the one you love?

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Mercury, Margot Livesey’s eighth and perhaps most psychologically penetrating novel, describes a family destroyed by obsession, passion and secrecy. The fact that the object of desire is a horse does not take away from the novel’s intensity, or the depths to which it fearlessly dives. 

Don Stevenson is an optometrist; his wife, Viv, worked as a hedge fund manager until the opportunity to manage a riding stable with a childhood friend revived her former dreams of being a champion rider. The Stevensons live in suburban Boston, close to Don’s parents. Their two young children are well adjusted and happy. But when Hilary, a newcomer to town, brings the thoroughbred Mercury to board at Windy Hill, everything changes. Viv becomes infatuated with the animal. Don is slow to notice how the changes in Viv’s behavior threaten both their lives and their livelihood. Even after he realizes she is spending some of their savings on Mercury’s care and feeding, passivity keeps him from acting until it is too late.

Mercury is a novel about seeing and not seeing, about the connection between secrecy and separateness. It is about the toll taken when we don’t pay attention and how easily lack of trust can creep into the best of marriages.

It is about literal blindness and abstract recklessness. Livesey has tremendous command over her material and unites a love of horses from her Scottish childhood and interest in the mechanics of vision to her almost uncanny perception of human behaviors. Mercury is a brilliant, unsettling novel that may make you wonder how well you know your partner. 

RELATED CONTENT: Read our interview with Margot Livesey about Mercury.

This article was originally published in the October 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Mercury, Margot Livesey’s eighth and perhaps most psychologically penetrating novel, describes a family destroyed by obsession, passion and secrecy. The fact that the object of desire is a horse does not take away from the novel’s intensity, or the depths to which it fearlessly dives.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Shakespeare behind bars

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Hag-Seed, Margaret Atwood’s retelling of The Tempest, is part of the Hogarth Shakespeare Project, in which contemporary authors reimagine some of the Bard’s most famous plays. The Tempest tells the story of Prospero, a former duke exiled with his daughter, Miranda, to a deserted island, where he studies sorcery and plots revenge. Hag-Seed sticks close to the play’s themes of magic, retribution and illusion, yet Atwood finds a way to root the story in contemporary Canada with satisfying results. 

Felix is about to stage a brand new production of The Tempest, starring himself as Prospero, when he is unceremoniously ousted from his position as artistic director at the Makeshiweg Theatre Festival. Widowed and still mourning the death of his young daughter, Miranda, he moves to an isolated farmhouse in the country, changes his name to Mr. Duke and indulges in dreams of vengeance and painful memories of his lost family. Over a decade later, Felix is running a drama program in a local prison. When rumors reach him that funding for the program is going to be cut and that the politicians who hold the purse strings have ties to his former workplace, the opportunity to retaliate is too promising to pass up. Felix decides that the time is right for the inmates to perform The Tempest. 

Used to more swashbuckling fare, like Macbeth and Henry IV, the prisoners are reluctant to take on a play with fairies, monsters and songs. But Felix finds ways to engage his cast. Soon, the inmates are fighting over playing the spirit Ariel and writing additional tunes for Caliban. Incarceration allows them to identify with the characters who are most confined by circumstances, and as much as Felix exploits their empathy, he is also transformed by it. 

Atwood has tremendous fun with Hag-Seed. Those who know the play will especially enjoy her artful treatment of its more poignant storylines. But even someone unfamiliar with Shakespeare will by entertained by this compelling tale of enchantment and second chances, and the rough magic it so delightfully embodies.

 

This article was originally published in the October 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Hag-Seed, Margaret Atwood’s retelling of The Tempest, is part of the Hogarth Shakespeare Project, in which contemporary authors reimagine some of the Bard’s most famous plays. The Tempest tells the story of Prospero, a former duke exiled with his daughter, Miranda, to a deserted island, where he studies sorcery and plots revenge. Hag-Seed sticks close to the play’s themes of magic, retribution and illusion, yet Atwood finds a way to root the story in contemporary Canada with satisfying results.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Intertwined lives in China and America

Review by Lauren Bufferd

With the whole country talking about identity politics, racism and cultural awareness, Peter Ho Davies’ provocative new novel could not be more timely. Told from the points of view of four different characters over a century and a half, The Fortunes documents the history of the Chinese in America beginning in the mid-1800s. The pattern of 19th-century immigration and current Chinese adoptions is comprised of first men, and then girls, without families. With this in mind, Davies re-envisions the genre of the multigenerational saga. 

The novel’s artful structure allows for four distinct stories, three of which are drawn from historical sources. The son of a prostitute and a white man, or “ghost,” Ah Ling is sold off to a laundry in California. By 1860, he had become a personal assistant to a railroad baron, but then chose to work alongside his countrymen on the transcontinental railroad. The second story is told by Anna May Wong. Born in the United States, Wong was Hollywood’s first Chinese movie star, yet she repeatedly lost key roles to white actresses playing in yellowface. Four decades later, an unnamed friend of Vincent Chin’s remembers the night Chin was beaten to death outside a Detroit bar during the height of the import auto scare of the early 1980s. Finally, in the last section, Mike Smith, a biracial writer, and his Caucasian wife, Nola, travel to China to adopt a baby girl. In each of these stories, Davies’ characters wrestle with their Chinese identity and what it means to become an American. 

The scope and research of The Fortunes is impressive, but what makes the novel memorable is the honesty of each narrative voice, whether it’s the loneliness of Ah Ling, the bitter wit of Anna May Wong, or the unease of Vincent’s friend as he sifts through his memories of that terrible night. But it is the utter intimacy and introspection of the final section, “Pearl,” that digs the deepest. Though it is the section told with the most humor, this is the one that will break your heart. Davies, whose previous novel, The Welsh Girl, was a nominee for the Man Booker Prize, has written a masterful, perceptive and very modern look at identity, migration and the intertwined histories of the United States and China.

 

This article was originally published in the September 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

With the whole country talking about identity politics, racism and cultural awareness, Peter Ho Davies’ provocative new novel could not be more timely. Told from the points of view of four different characters over a century and a half, The Fortunes documents the history of the Chinese in America beginning in the mid-1900s. The pattern of 19th-century immigration and current Chinese adoptions is comprised of first men, and then girls, without families. With this in mind, Davies re-envisions the genre of the multigenerational saga.
FictionDebut Fiction

Life in a new land

Review by Lauren Bufferd

In today’s tense political climate, with immigration in the news almost daily, it is especially welcome to discover Behold the Dreamers, the clear-eyed, thought-provoking debut novel by Imbolo Mbue. No matter your politics, this beautiful novel about an African family starting a new life in a new land offers tremendous insight into people who still come to our shores in search of the American dream. 

In the fall of 2007, Jende Jonga, a Cameroonian immigrant living in Harlem, can hardly believe his luck when he gets a job as a chauffeur for Clark Edwards, an executive at Lehman Brothers. With this opportunity, Jende can better provide for his wife, Neni, and their growing family. When Clark’s fragile wife, Cindy, offers Neni temporary work at their summer house in the Hamptons, the Jongas feel that finally, everything is going their way. The Jongas begin to make plans for their future, applying for permanent residency and saving for their own home in Yonkers and pharmaceutical college for Neni.   

But not even a year later, the housing bubble bursts and Lehman Brothers collapses. The Edwards marriage unravels further. Jende spends more and more of his time driving Clark to after-hours “assignations” in nearby hotels. Before long, the pressure of keeping secrets for Clark and Cindy threatens not only the Jongas’ marriage but their dreams of a future in a country they still can’t legally call home. 

Mbue herself came to the United States from Limbe, Cameroon, the same town that the Jongas hail from. Behold the Dreamers is her first foray into fiction, which shows in the occasionally choppy plot, as well as the depiction of a wealthy Manhattan couple with problems straight from central casting. But Mbue’s perceptive exploration of the plight of African immigrants, especially in the character of Neni, is fresh and vivid. The book’s unexpected ending provides a welcome dose of realism, making this an utterly unique novel about immigration, race and class—and an important one, as well.

RELATED CONTENT: Read a Q&A with Imbolo Mbue.

This article was originally published in the September 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In today’s tense political climate, with immigration in the news almost daily, it is especially welcome to discover Behold the Dreamers, the clear-eyed, thought-provoking debut novel by Imbolo Mbue. No matter your politics, this beautiful novel about an African family starting a new life in a new land offers tremendous insight into people who still come to our shores in search of the American dream.

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