A sour taste of marketing hype
With so many endorsements by so many powerhouses, it seems only Stephen King’s core point is truly accurate
I SELDOM read novels hyped up by marketing blurbs of reputable writers, but American Dirt by Jeanine Cummings was an exception. After all, Don Winslow anointed it as “A Grapes of Wrath for our times”, Julia Alvarez: “A dazzling accomplishment”, and Tracy Chevalier: “Essential reading”.
Let alone Mexican-American literary doyenne Sandra Cisneros endorsing it as: “Not simply the great American novel, it’s the great novel of Las Américas”. Add to that Stephen King’s point that it is: “One hell of a novel about a good woman on the run with her beautiful boy”, and I was sold.
I read American Dirt in three days flat. Something did not sit well. I found it more of an escape noire cum frontier action thriller in line with Stephen King’s comment, than what the other other blurbs hyped it to be. A hype that started well before publication, with a bidding war involving eight publishing houses and Jeanine Cummings signing a seven-figure dollar deal. With an Oprah Winfrey Book Club endorsement prior to publication and prospective movie rights to match, amplifying its demand.
Then I read the “author’s note”. Two comments irked:
“I was appalled at the way Latino migrants, even five years ago – and it has got exponentially worse since then – were characterised within the public discourse. At worst, we perceive them as an invading mob of resource-draining criminals and, at best, a sort of helpless, impoverished, faceless, brown mass, clamouring for help at our doorstep.”
“So I hope to present one of those unique personal stories – a work of fiction – as a way to honour the hundreds of thousands of stories we may never get to hear. And, in so doing, I hope to create a pause where the reader may begin to individuate. When we see migrants on the news, we may remember: these people are people.”
So who is this “we” and “reader” Jeanine speaks for? White middle-class America? Her self-proclaimed mission to individuate the Latinx migrant experience of the assumed voiceless “brown mass” through the lens of her white gaze troubled me. I have read many Latinx writers on the same subject and they are not voiceless. As Jeanine should know from years of research for her novel, the Latinx community has diverse literary voices. Although their books are not the subject of bidding wars between major publishers and Oprah Winfrey Book Club endorsements, they are vocal on Latinx lived experience. Julia Alvarez and Sandra Cisneros, whose blurbs were used to hype up American Dirt, profitable cases in point in the publishing world.
Jeanine Cummings, who self-identifies as white and wrote a book on the Latinx migrant experience, is not the issue. Anyone can write about anything, as long as they respect the subject matter and its material context with due regard for authenticity.
I doubt whether her middle-class protagonist – who owns a bookshop in Acapulco, on a 2 600km escape run to the US with her son, from a drug cartel – is an authentic representation of the general Latinx migrant profile and overland trek experience. This, partly atop an infamous freight train called La Bestia (The Beast) and a few days on foot with a “coyote” through a desert. Neither is “el norte” or the US, as ideal a refuge as the final chapter suggests, given the ever-lurking threat of deportation. But if that type of fictional misrepresentation sells because it appeals to middle-class readers and, as Oprah Winfrey opines, “pierce consciousness” about the plight of migrants, then so be it.
Maybe the publishers should apologise for their miscast marketing. So too the paid blurbers, who praised the book as a “A Grapes of Wrath for our times”, and “Not simply the great American novel, it’s the great novel of Las Américas”. This type of literary hype and its overblown marketing says more about who still dominates the publishing industry in the US, whose voices they consider marketable and who they really target as readers, than the book itself.
Read for what Steven King says it is: “One hell of a novel about a good woman on the run with her beautiful boy.” The novel does offer white-knuckle suspense, spiced with a pacy plot-driven narrative and characterisation in service of plot. As for its depiction of a Latinx migrant experience and Mexico as a country, here it is more of a plot device than the subject of the story. Mere stage props for a performance that could have been set elsewhere.
Maybe Jeanine Cummings and the Headline Publishing Group should not have included the “author’s note” in the book, let alone let marketing hype speak louder than the book itself. Authentic fiction need not be true to fact and does not need its author’s self-justification, political explanations, or marketing hype.
It must speak for itself with organic coherence, and let its substance and reader experience be the measure of its worth.
American Dirt spins a taut escape genre yarn, albeit for those who prefer being so entertained, irrespective of subject matter. In this, Stephen King’s blurb was accurate and honest.