american dirt by jeanine cummins

evening standard 30 january 2020

American Dirt, the third novel from Jeanine Cummins — who made her name with a memoir about the gang rape and murder of her two cousins — has been described by the crime writer Don Winslow as “a Grapes of Wrath for our time” and  selected for Oprah’s Book Club, which almost guarantees a book bestseller status.

Since then, it has been the subject of an intense backlash, partly because Cummins is a white writer from Maryland — her Puerto Rican  grandmother notwithstanding — and critics have accused her of cultural appropriation in crassly depicting a Mexican family attempting to cross the border into the United States. 

Cummins’s decision to write the novel does not, however, appear thoughtless. She has questioned her right to tell this story and wrote two earlier drafts in which the people attempting the crossing were not the main characters, as she worried about her ability to inhabit them.

The story follows middle-class bookseller Lydia fleeing Mexico with her eight-year-old son Luca after their family is murdered by a cartel. 

It’s true that their experience is surely not the same as most of those attempting to cross the border but that this is partly her point. There is no average person who takes this journey, they are all individuals.

Admittedly, some of Cummins’s characterisation is weak but she renders the danger and discomfort of Lydia and Luca’s journey vividly. The peril of their undertaking is powerfully evoked when Lydia stops to place a plaster on Luca’s blister, risking them losing the rest of their group and a way out of the desert.

This is not the definitive novel about migrancy, if such a thing could exist, but its detailed portrayal of the physical and mental impact of border crossing is not without merit.

This review first appeared in the Evening Standard