This is a novel by Jeanine Cummings about a middle-class woman from Acapulco in Mexico fleeing a drug cartel king pin with her young son, to America.
You have most likely heard of it recently because of the massive controversy it has caused in America – critics say it’s an exploitative story about 2D “Latin” characters that Cummings has no right to tell because she only has one Puerto Rican grandparent and self-identifies as white; moreover why is she getting a 7-figure advance for this when many echt writers from that area are given $500 and a golf clap for whatever they produce?
Lots of people hated the barbed-wire centre-pieces at the book party, they hated Cumming’s barbed-wire “publication day” manicure, they really really hated Cummings saying that she wished that someone “browner” than her had written the book. There’s a lot of rage and hate going on. And I completely get it. Were I not terrified that it came from a place of deep insecurity and crabbed-in envy there are some very visible books I’d go on the verbal rampage about, too.
But not this one. I’ve just finished American Dirt and, look, I’m not going to get into who is allowed to tell what story and I have got absolutely no idea about the nuanced debate around the migrant issue in America.
What I can tell you is that American Dirt is a good book, it’s basically a thriller, an epic race against time. It has all of the things that publishers insist that you have in any book that isn’t a modern literary masterpiece; it must grab you from the first sentence, it must be pacey; it must, above all things, make you desperate to keep reading. Unless you are writing the equivalent of crystal meth, publishers broadly don’t want to know. Who can blame them! The bottom line is right there.
Despite all that, the book reminds me of Kim, and also of Dickens, who sensationalised everything far more and patronised everyone far worse in order to make perfectly legitimate wider social points.
American Dirt also reminds me of the Babylon books. Did you read those? Air Babylon and Hotel Babylon? The author Imogen Edwards-Jones, who is a journalist, extensively interviewed people in an industry and then used their inside knowledge to write a broad and fictional but very accurate factovel.
(I’ve just invented the word “factovel” and I hope it’s going to catch on, it’s, like, a novel that’s based on facts? Use it in a sentence today!)
Cummings spent 7 years researching this book and I suppose it must be highly likely that all of these experiences in the book are someone’s true experience, tweaked to fit a narrative. Concatina’ed together, hell yeah – they make Mexico out to be a dangerous, cartel-ridden hellhole. I see where the critics are coming from. But, please see above; publishers are often not that interested in nuance.
Some utterly furious person in USA Today wrote that American Dirt is probably the one book that people read about immigration this year and it’s a shame. Why? Isn’t it a good thing that we are reading about immigration at all, rather than about bondage fetishists and boy wizards?
And the book and the controversy around it are bound up in one, to avoid the conversation around it would be almost impossible – this book comes automatically with the pinch of salt that, say, Memoirs of a Geisha didn’t come with. I mean, if you want to talk about cultural appropriation let’s start with that book.
I’m sure there’s loads wrong with American Dirt but what it has done is put the conversation about immigration smack down in the middle of Sunday lunch. And as for the other writers who are immensely pissed off with the whole thing – man alive, I sympathise. On the plus side, every single American publisher will be looking for books on immigration now and if you’re a writer with that authentic story to tell, this is surely your moment!
Shucks. I will just have to wait until everyone is looking for books by white middle-aged women with a white wine problem and Morton’s neuroma. Then I’ll be laughing.
Brilliant – this is why I read your blog. Not gonna read the book, just not my thing, but I love the way you talk about stuff like this, with wit and insight. Cheers!
Ah this is very helpful Esther, thank you! Been ummm-ing and ahh-ing about this book for ages – wasn’t aware of the controversy actually, I just couldn’t decide whether it would be the sort of thing I’d enjoy or not. It was the crits on the front of the book that were giving me FOMO (I mean, doesn’t Ann Patchett say it’s the best thing she’s ever read..?!?!) – I thought I might be missing some brand new literary form or something. Glad to know it’s not that. I think, thanks to you, I will now give it a go, but with expectations firmly in check 👍🧐
What a brilliant review. I won’t be reading the book, as good as it sounds, because it seems as if every piece of fiction being hyped up now has to come with a message, be it LGBTQ+ Rights, Immigration, Brexit (so last month, I realise), or somesuch. I just want to be entertained without feeling guilty, or made to think. For that reason I am reading French Exit and love, love, lovin’ it. Also loved Sisters Brothers when I read that, and his first book, (Ablutions, I think – bit of a slo-mo car crash of a story about a bloke who works in a bar).
I would defo read any book you write, though, and a middle aged woman with a wine problem and a medical issue is definitely a topic that I feel all your many followers could queue up at Waterstones to have signed. Get to it!
I could not love you more, Esther. This is all exactly right. I am, admittedly, a middle-aged white lady who lives in Washington DC, but I have an almost allergic reaction to the tattles and the scolds rising up as one to tell us all what we should or shouldn’t like. I have an even stronger reaction to anything that smacks of a fatwa, which is essentially what has been declared against this book. Jeanine Cummins has received threats and had her entire book tour cancelled. Come on, America, get a grip. So I bought two copies this weekend at my neighborhood book store (shop local!). Even if everything the screamers are complaining about is right, if she wrote a good story people will buy it. And if she didn’t, they won’t. And if she somehow persuades some of Donald Trump’s army that immigrants are not the awful people he says they are, so much the better. I hope next year is the Year of the Immigrant Novelist – we could use a lot more of them and their voices. Especially if they write good books with good stories! Our newspaper had an excellent piece about just this here (he doesn’t think too much of the book, but not for political reasons): https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/death-threats-against-the-author-of-american-dirt-threaten-us-all/2020/01/30/ec5070e8-430d-11ea-aa6a-083d01b3ed18_story.html
Thanks Fizz, this is most illuminating and terrific to hear a view from actual America on this
Will read, thanks!
Love ‘golf clap’
I’ll wait for the paperback, or the paperback e-book price!
But this did set me off on why you and Giles don’t co-write a novel like Nicci Gerrard and Sean French or Josie Lloyd and Emlyn Rees. Do you think it would be easier to co-write (‘cos you only write half – in theory) or harder (‘cos you have to argue the toss over every single sentence). You seem to manage the podcast okay so just one small step to ‘Sunday Times Bestseller’?
that would be impossible! we’d both want to write completely different books and also Giles has no time to do anything. but thank you for thinking of us, that’s a lovely thought x
I always think of the wise words of the great poet, Adrian Mole, written during his Growing Pains, so aged approximately 14 3/4
‘I have decided to be an actor. I will write my novels during breaks in rehearsal.’
No novels from him as yet, I notice.
Who Giles? Yes, he wrote one a while ago… but it wasn’t very good 🙁
No, from Adrian Mole! I read Giles’s when it first came out, it was my summer beach read of 2006 and brings back many happy memories. Not all directly related to the novel, admittedly!
As an American, I think a major part of the fracas over American Dirt was how its publishing house pitched it. It wasn’t a fast-paced, adrenaline-pulsing thriller set within a heightened world of drug cartels and La Bestia. It was the Most Important Novel on Migration of Our Time. It was a contemporary Grapes of Wrath. It was The Book that you, politically conscious American, need to read to understand what is happening at the border. It was one of the very, very few books that get a mega-publicity effort, and it was pitched in such a way that people very quickly realized… this isn’t it. It doesn’t live up to any of those promises, and it’s very easy to take down as an inaccurate reflection of Mexico and migrants and the border crisis and cartels and so on (this review does a good job of exploring the ways that the use of language, for one thing, in the book is poorly done and makes it seem that the research wasn’t enough: https://thebluenib.com/a-poor-imitation-american-dirt-and-misrepresentations-of-mexico/). The current cultural climate then makes everything excessive–so the people criticizing the book are sent death threats as well as Cummings and her defenders. The real problem is our publishing system and they’re to blame for creating this whole mess.
If it had been publicized as a thriller, I think things would have gone down very differently.
Hannah thank you for this very illuminating comment, that makes a lot of sense.