Books I Didn’t Finish: American Dirt

American Dirt came out in January and attracted a lot of attention. Some of that attention was no doubt the kind that author Jeanine Cummings was hoping for, taking the form of rave reviews, weeks spent on top of bestseller lists and a lucrative advance and movie deal. Other reactions weren’t so kind, focusing instead on inaccuracies and cultural stereotypes, and the validity of Cummings as an author of Irish and Puerto Rican descent telling the story of a Mexican mother and her son fleeing across the border to escape cartel violence.

I was vaguely aware at the time that there was a lot of hubbub around American Dirt, but being in the grip of migraines and not reading a huge amount, not what the content of that hubbub was. When it appeared on the Kindle daily deals a few weeks ago I remembered that it had been highly praised and smashed that Buy Now button without any further thought. So abrupt was my YOLO-purchase that I didn’t even bother to look at the author’s name.

This is how I ended up going into American Dirt assuming that the author must herself be Mexican or the child of Mexican immigrants, thinking that surely such literary powerhouses as Oprah and our friend Stephen King wouldn’t shower high praise on a writer using the experiences of an oppressed minority as fodder for a pulpy thriller.

In hindsight, I really have no idea what possessed me to think this.

Anyway, I made it less than a chapter into the book before going “Hang on, this wasn’t written by a Mexican author, was it?” and going back to check.

I’m not sure exactly what tipped me off. Maybe it was the way that protagonist Lydia’s Acapulco neighbourhood is so thinly sketched in between her extended family being gunned down by cartel hitmen, or the fact that the book keeps focusing on things that white Americans would find unusual but which would be completely unremarkable to Mexicans. Or maybe it was this:

‘Mijo, ven,’ she says, so quietly that Luca doesn’t hear her.

[...]

‘Mira, there’s a boy here. This him?’ Luca’s cousin Adrián. He’s wearing cleats and his Hernández jersey. Adrián can juggle a balón de fútbol on his knees forty-seven times without dropping it.

[...]

‘Forget the chicken, pendejo. Check the house.’ Luca’s mami rocks in her squatting position, pushing Luca even harder into the tiled wall.

Yes, the book does that thing where random words are in Spanish, and yes, it does this even though the characters are supposed to already be speaking Spanish. I never can tell what exactly is meant to be happening here.

I’m obviously not in a position to criticise the book’s cultural accuracy or lack thereof—although for what it’s worth, I picked up on a lot of the inaccuracies at first glance simply because they felt unrealistic or implausible—but even as someone who’s never been to Mexico and doesn’t know a lot about the country I could sense a pervasive odour of inauthenticity, a feeling that the author hadn’t experienced any of these things and was simply repeating second-hand accounts at best.

But even if you don’t care about any of that, even if the idea of an American author writing a story about a Mexican woman’s extended family getting murdered by a drug cartel and being lauded as the next Great American Novelist for it doesn’t turn you off, then don’t worry because American Dirt has narrative flaws a-plenty, and here in the content venue narrative flaws are what we’re all about.

When you’re writing a story about a woman’s extended family getting murdered by a drug cartel, tone becomes paramount. You want to avoid introducing plot elements that seem to make light of the situation, as doing so could gravely undermine your story and might offend people whose extended families are gunned down by drug cartels, which, remember, is a thing that actually happens in real life. You’d want, to pick a completely random example, to avoid inserting a quasi-romance between your heroine and the cartel boss who organizes the murder of her extended family by his drug cartel.

On a completely unrelated topic, American Dirt starts off with the murder of Lydia’s extended family at the hands of a drug cartel and then regularly flashes back to show the reader what led to this situation, and it’s...uh...well, it’s…

It turns out that Javier, the leader of feared Acapulco cartel Los Jardinaros, met Lydia some time prior to the start of the story as a customer to her bookshop, and they started an intimate friendship via mutual geeking out over Jeanine Cummings’ favourite novels. In the course of this, Javier fell in love with Lydia.

When I got to this part, I thought the book was about to take hard left turn into one of those weird romance novels about women being kidnapped by sheikhs or other powerful, dangerous men; that doesn’t end up happening—Javier’s affection goes unrequited—but even still, making it so that Lydia has this starry-eyed book-friendship with the man who later has her extended family murdered by his drug cartel is an incredibly odd detail. It immediately puts the story out of the realm of being a gritty, fictionalized account of real things that actually happen to people and into altogether more fanciful territory. I’m not saying you couldn’t walk that particular tightrope successfully, but American Dirt certainly doesn’t.

Other tonal inconsistencies come into play in the form of Lydia’s eight year old son Luca. To be completely honest, I’m not really sure what the book is trying to do with Luca; at times it seems like Cummings was going down the whole “autistic genius” route with him before changing her mind at the last minute. Regardless, it turns out he has Super Geography Skills, basically acting as a human compass in addition to having an astonishing memory for geographical facts. I was just about willing to tolerate this until his ability to regurgitate Wikipedia pages plays a hand in freeing him and Lydia from the clutches of cartel goons, at which point the book went all the way from the territory of gritty realism and into Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close: Mexican Cartel Massacre Edition. My tolerance for precocious “special” children has already been worn thin by repeated exposures to unwise doses of Stephen King, I don’t need them showing up in novels about Mexican cartels and immigration.

But to be honest, even this wasn’t enough to put me off the book entirely. For all its flaws, American Dirt is extremely gripping and propulsive for roughly the first third and a half; I might have been regularly rolling my eyes and sometimes staring incredulously at the words on my Kindle, but in the early going when Lydia is barely staying one step ahead of the assassins on her trail, I was hooked despite myself.

Then the book settles into a long, dull section of the characters hitching across Mexico on trains, interspersed with horrific things happening to people. My patience lasted until some of those horrific things crossed the line from tragedy into tragedy porn—and particularly maudlin tragedy porn at that—before I gave up.

American Dirt has unsurprisingly been lauded as an ideal novel of the Trump Era. Having gotten through more than half of it, I agree. Just maybe not in the way Oprah and Stephen King and its many other fans would like.