Jeanine Cummins, _American Dirt_

THIS FALL, I gave a talk to a local group about the controversy surrounding this novel and about cultural appropriation. As someone who aspires to being thorough and fair, I included in my preparation for the talk the actual reading of the novel I would be talking about. 

Given the widespread condemnation American Dirt has met with, it would be fun to report that it turned out to be a fine novel. Unfortunately, it didn't. Run-of-the-mill book club fodder at best. 

Heroine Lydia seems designed to appeal to US book club readers. Thirty-something, middle class (she owns a small bookstore in Acapulco), wife of a crusading journalist, devoted mother of a special-needs son. Book clubbers like a hooky opening, so in the first chapter almost all of Lydia's family is murdered at a niece's quinceañera. She and her son survive by hiding in a bathroom. They flee northward.

The murder has been ordered by a local drug cartel kingpin. enraged by the crusading journalist's exposé of his corruption. Soapy enough for you? No? Okay, let's throw in that the kingpin was a favorite customer at Lydia's bookstore without her ever suspecting what he did for a living, that he shows her his poetry and seems to have a crush on her, devoted husband and father though he is. Still not soapy enough? Okay, his daughter, away at university in Spain, is so ashamed of her family after reading the crusading journalist's exposé that she kills herself. Hence the kingpin's bloody rage. That's got to be soapy enough for anyone.

So. Northward they flee. On la Bestia, Lydia and her son become friends and traveling companions with a pair of teenaged Guatemalan sisters. They deal with corrupt officials, potential informers, possibly untrustworthy coyotes. By the end, we have a pile-up of thriller plot clichés.

The writing is not good, though occasionally entertainingly bizarre. For instance: "the prickly, unbalanced gate of the diarrhetically infirm." I'm pretty sure she meant "gait," not "gate," but even the corrected version sounds strange. Or: "Lydia funnels gratitude into the slow blink of her lashes." The funnel ensures the gratitude goes right into the lashes, I suppose, with none spilling over wasted into the eyebrows.

The resentment of any number of Latinx writers against Cummins and against Oprah's Book Club, whose anointing of the novel was guaranteed to make it the best-selling novel about immigrants and refugees this year and perhaps ever, is all too easy to understand.