American Dirt

I'll be frank: I didn't want to read this book. I've been spending the last year-plus reading a lot of books written by authors of color, queer authors and, generally, voices that are not often amplified, so I really wasn't interested in reading a white woman's take on the immigrant experience. But alas, the book club I help manage at work chose this as part of an observance of Hispanic Heritage Month (grumble) and after toying with the idea of just not participating, I decided I would read it and see what all the fuss was about.

Well, a few chapters in I forgot all about the racial controversy surrounding the book because I was too overwhelmed with how poorly this novel was written: the muddiness of the narrative, the clunky use of Spanish words, the melodramatic plot elements and the bland central character. I suppose I shouldn't have been that surprised because, if this had been a well-written book, the controversy probably wouldn't have hit the fever pitch it did. But it's not. It's really quite bad.

A few things that irked me while reading American Dirt:

- The use of Spanish. I've read books written in English about Spanish-speaking characters, written by Spanish-speaking authors. It's not uncommon to weave the Spanish language into the narrative, but with quality writing, there is a purpose to it. Words are generally chosen because their Spanish versions have no real English translation or the Spanish version means something different than the English translation would. But Cummins sprinkles Spanish throughout the pages of her book like dashes of hot sauce, meant to lend some kind of hollow authenticity to her half-baked attempt at bringing migrant pain to the masses. There's is no reason for balon (ball), futbol (soccer...or football) or pollo (chicken) to appear in Spanish and italics. It's clumsy, distracting and unnecessary.

- The muddy and unfocused narrative. American Dirt is told via a third-person narrative that clings tightly to whichever character Cummins decides to focus on at that particularly moment. Most of the time it's her central protagonist Lydia, but sometimes it's her young son Luca, or a fellow migrant they meet on their journeys, or a nurse at a hospital in Honduras hundreds of miles away, or the coyote that's taking them across the border. The switches between narratives can be very sudden and jarring and, while most of the characters have far more compelling and interesting stories than Lydia (though still littered with stereotypes), Lydia is the character Cummins has chosen to focus on, yet she seems about as bored as I was with her as she flits between the lives and perspectives of others throughout the book. It'd be one thing if the third-person narrative had a broad narrative-eyed viewpoint from the get go, but it's intensely intimate from the get-go, making the jumps away from Lydia rough, rather than a fluid story that glides between its subjects.

- The choice of heroine. As I said above, Lydia is not a great main character. She's bland and broadly drawn and, despite having been born, raised and lived in Mexico her entire life, she reads like a middle-aged, middle-class, white American mother from top to bottom—an obvious cypher for the Oprah Book Club readers this book was clearly aimed at from the start. Cummins claimed that she wanted to put a human face on migrants coming to America, but her choice of focal point character looks like very little of the migrant population. A well-educated Mexican business owner who sets out on her journey to the states with wallet full of pesos and a bank card giving her access to several thousand more is not the face of the average migrant. Cummins clearly knows this because she populates Lydia and her son's journey with faces that more accurately represent migrant population, in particular, those coming from Central America, not Mexico. While reading I was constantly asking the question, "Why is this book about Lydia and not these indigenous Honduran sisters, Soledad and Rebeca. Why not Marisol, the woman who had lived in the U.S. for years and was deported and desperately trying to get back to her two teenage daughters living in San Diego?" The answer seems obvious: Cummins wanted someone the middle-class, middle-aged white American women she was writing this book for to have someone they could latch on to, someone like them. I find this to be not only a poor storytelling choice, but a cynical judgment of her audience, that they could only feel empathy for migrants if it happened to someone like them.

- The melodrama. The author claims to want to put a human face on migrants, yet her characters are awash in soap opera-style storytelling. The self-serious tone of the migrant journey is cheapened by the ridiculous addition of Lydia's personal relationship with the cartel boss she and her son are running from. It feels like something out of a telenovela and every time it comes up it grates with the rest of the world Cummins is creating, culminating in a final send off to that particular plot line that is wholly unnecessary and just so badly done.

- The tragedy porn. Obviously, bloodshed, death and rape are dangers in the migrant journey, but the way they are used in American Dirt often feels cheap. It begins with the opening massacre and continues with assaults on teenage girls and a some murders of, at best, tertiary characters along the way. Aside from the deaths of Lydia's mother and husband (this is not a spoiler, it's in the first pages of the book), most of these horrible instances have little to no personal impact on our main character and thus, they have little emotional impact on us, the readers. It's borrowed pain to illustrate the stakes of the journey without having Lydia or her son touched directly by it. There is some talk of the emotional scars they will carry with them, but it's just that, talk. Lydia and Luca's wounds, both physical and psychological, pale in comparison to that of those they have traveled alongside, both before their journey north and after it. They are touched by privilege throughout the story, bystanders to worst traumas of Cummins's interpretation of the migrant experience, never able to bring us close to it. In the end, Cummins is not interested in visiting any real pain on her protagonist (outside of the inciting incident of the novel), only the less fortunate that surround her.


Before I sign off, I do want to note one thing that I appreciated about this book (hence the second star). Cummins mentions in her acknowledgements that the loss of her father lead to the grief that is woven throughout this book and, when she allows herself to tap into those emotions, there are rare moments of authenticity in American Dirt. This is especially true when she writes about the impact the death of Lydia's father had on her and how it changed her (though, somewhat oddly, it's told more through the lens of her dead husband than through Lydia herself). It can also be found, at times, when Lydia's son Luca grapples with the reality that he has just lost his own father. While there is a lot of loss throughout the book, not all of it has this same sense of authenticity, some of it is very quickly brushed away. But anyone that's lost someone important to them will identify the points where Cummins is putting her own experiences with grief on the page. In those brief passages, there's a transcendence of the airport novel schlock that makes up the rest of the novel. But these moments are frustratingly brief and sparse, impactful though they are.

Every day a fresh horror, and when it's over, this feeling of surreal detachment. A disbelief, almost, in what they just endured.

A griping tale that shows the plight of citizens fleeing their homes for reasons most of us cannot fathom. However sensationalized this story may be (or not, Cummins indicated several years of research went in to this book), the truth is probably a lot darker than the majority of us realize.

This story was a rollercoaster and each chapter had enough climax or tension that I would say "one more" and made faster progress through the book than I expected.

...he starts to understand that this is the one thing all migrants have in common, this is the solidarity that exists among them, though they all come from different places and different circumstances...each of them carries some story of suffering on top of that train and into el norte beyond.

I had some problems with how some characters were structured, descriptions of others that became tiresome and even the pacing of their progress. But this isn't the book that you critique a child or someone in the ensemble cast. This is a book that opens you up to the real horrors that go out "out there" and any flaws I note are immaterial.

But their lives have been so expansive, their traumas so adult. They are adult women, and now they're meant to clip themselves into a three-ring binder each day.

What this story did was allow me to understand the difficulties migrants face, how they have to weigh losing it all or dying and moving on for promise of a better future. And what does that future look like on the other side? How can you start from nothing? How do the horrors of your past not make you detached and a husk of yourself?

Quote worthy lines from the authors note section at the end:

We seldom think of them as our fellow human beings.

So I hoped to present one of those unique personal stories - a work of fiction - as a way to honor the hundreds of thousands of stories we may never get to hear.