When Jeanine Cummins’s novel American Dirt, about a mother and son’s perilous odyssey from cartel-ravaged Mexico to the United States, was named an Oprah’s Book Club selection, Cummins must have felt bulletproof. Not only had she gotten a seven-figure advance and a film deal, but her book had also received rapturous blurbs from Stephen King, John Grisham, Sandra Cisneros, and Julia Alvarez. Now her book's jacket would sport, like a gleaming sheriff’s badge, the golden “O.”
If you’ve been online in the past three weeks, you may have an idea of what happened next. Ms. magazine killed an incandescently angry review by Myriam Gurba, who then published it on Tropics of Meta under the title “Pendeja, You Ain’t Steinbeck: My Bronca with Fake-Ass Social Justice Literature.” The broadside, accusing Cummins of stereotyping, cultural appropriation (“appropriating genius works by people of color” and “slapping a coat of mayonesa on them”), and trafficking in “trauma porn,” doomed the hapless author, who, following days of la tostadura on social media, has canceled her book tour, citing concerns for her safety.
Cummins (or her publisher, Flatiron Books) anticipated scrutiny. American Dirt includes an author’s note in which she attempts to justify her interest in undocumented immigration. Her Puerto Rican grandmother “didn’t always feel welcome” in the U.S. Cummins married an undocumented immigrant in 2005 (though she neglects to mention that he is Irish). At bottom, she wanted to humanize “a sort of helpless, impoverished, faceless brown mass.”
Poor choice of words.
Like one of the oppressed migrants she writes about, Cummins now has nowhere to turn. American Dirt is such an abysmal book that even reliable champions of the right to write anything, about any character in any setting, seem loath to defend it. Cummins’s sins against literature are at least as plentiful as her sins against Latino identity. The veteran writers who gave their seal of approval to this by turns lurid and cloyingly sentimental pap should be ashamed of themselves, as should Oprah Winfrey, who has financial ties to the book’s publisher.
A massacre at a quinceañera, like something out of a Walker, Texas Ranger rerun? Check. A deceptively refined cartel boss whose buried passion is composing poetry? Check. A mother reassuring her young son, who is bewilderingly precocious whenever the plot demands it, that doctors will “fix” a man who just got sliced in half by a freight train? Check. Lots of beginner Spanish sprinkled throughout, to make this jaw-dropping disaster mas autentico? ¡Sí, señor!
American Dirt can be almost touchingly amateurish. Cummins’s syntax, metaphor, and imagery are tortured, perhaps with a car battery. “There’s a frazzling thrum of confusion that arcs out of Luca’s brain when . . . .” Huh? There are wonders of empathy, such as: “Surely this is the worst moment of their lives. Wait, no. All their family was murdered.” Mother and son rest “wrapped up together in their blanket like a colorful burrito,” much as a white person might imagine being snuggled up inside a hot dog bun.
Yet the book is too earnest to come across as truly mercenary. And the fact remains that many books fated to be megabestsellers are at least this awful. Real writers tremble with rage before the success of books such as The Da Vinci Code, Twilight, Fifty Shades of Grey, and (whet your battle-axes, nerds) the Game of Thrones series. Cummins’s fatal error was to profit from a book whose most rabid foes could plausibly disguise their resentment of her success as a principled stand.
Yet that stand is itself problematic. Literature is not an adjunct to activism, nor does it owe it anything. Literature is under no obligation to raise consciousness, further a humanitarian cause, or even achieve realism. “I wished someone slightly browner than me would write [the immigrant story],” Cummins writes in her author’s note. Is the humanitarian crisis at our southern border only compelling enough for one book?
If Cummins meant that she wished someone slightly browner had been the beneficiary of a huge advance and a massive, carefully coordinated public relations campaign, then that is a generous wish. But nobody who labors for seven years on a book, even a bad one, should publicly self-flagellate when she hits pay dirt. Much of success is showing up. To the suggestion, made by some of Cummins’s critics, that dozens of manuscripts telling “this” story (as though shared subject matter could make any two books interchangeable) are languishing in desk drawers, one wonders why a publishing house with its eye on the bottom line would have chosen Cummins over an author with a claim to authenticity.
If you answered “racism,” take a look at any list of forthcoming American novels. The surnames are as diverse as America herself. The unpalatable truth is that Cummins showed up, with a book blunt, humane, and silly enough to have mass appeal.
There is a tendency now to view stories, like water or mineral rights, as a finite resource to be jealously guarded. Not so—and that is on balance a good thing, because the people who have experiences worth writing about often lack the opportunity or desire to write about them. A literal-minded sense of which stories belong to whom leads to an endless proliferation of rules. Is a wealthy Mexican privy to the sufferings of a Guatemalan peasant? Can anyone who has never made a border crossing, Latino or otherwise, hope to capture its painful vicissitudes? He may certainly try. To exercise imagination is a risk. It might not succeed, but it is the wellspring of literature.
The first book with a Mexican protagonist published in the U.S. was The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta: The Celebrated California Bandit in 1854. Like American Dirt, the novel was an honest attempt to explore injustice. Like American Dirt, it was full of racially insensitive caricatures and is damn near unreadable. Its author, John Rollin Ridge (who published as “Yellow Bird,” his Cherokee name) was not Mexican.
When it appeared last year as a Penguin Classic, no one complained. Hardly anyone even noticed. After all, dead men cash no checks.