Sense and Sensitivity

Publishers increasingly lean on outside experts to vet books for cultural insensitivity. Is it working?

- TAJJA ISEN

American dirt was supposed to be a major book of the year. Jeanine Cummins’s novel, which follows a Mexican bookseller and her son as they dodge cartel violence and attempt to cross the border into the United States, had all the makings of a blockbuster. Cummins’s publisher, Flatiron Books, had reportedly paid out a seven-figure advance and was sparing no expense on marketing; the book was blurbed by heavyweights Stephen King and John Grisham; and, sealing the deal, it was chosen for Oprah’s Book Club. More than a mere bestseller, though, American Dirt was positioned as the next Great American Novel. (Crime author Don Winslow called it “a Grapes of Wrath for our times.”) The book was meant to illuminate the politics of the present, when migrants of all ages are being detained en masse along the US border. Then, a few weeks before its January release date, the backlash began.

In one viral review, author Myriam Gurba tore into the book’s stereotypical characters and simplistic moral dichotomy, which positions America as a beacon of hope and goodness and Mexico as all criminality and death. Another review, in the New York Times, called American Dirt “ determined ly apolitical” —  surprising, given its themes — and noted the author’s odd fascination with “gradients of brown skin.” It emerged that, though Cummins has a Puerto Rican grandmother, she had identified as white up until at least 2015, when she’d penned an op-ed claiming that race was something she “really [didn’t] want to write about” (emphasis hers). It was only last year, during early promotion for American Dirt, that she began publicly identifying as Latinx.