American Paydirt

     There seems to be some business dysfunction in both Hollywood and Manhattan that tells power brokers in both industries that if you throw enough money at an author and their book, buy enough radio spots and full-page ads in trade journals, it'll be a success. And the book business has its tentpole titles just as Hollywood has its tentpole movies. The thinking is that if a handful of projects make enough moolah, well, then the "others" can be excused while they lose money.
     American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins may have the misfortune to become a victim of its own success in both Manhattan and Hollywood.
     All auguries were of success. In a mad bidding war involving nine publishing houses, it eventually ending up with Flatiron Books, a Macmillan imprint that had shelled out an undisclosed seven figure advance against royalties. A movie deal was already in the works involving the people that had made Clint Eastwood's The Mule. The sky was the limit for this debut author in an industry in which debut authors typically don't make advances large enough to support themselves for even a year (which is the whole idea of an advance, or it used to be).
     So what happened?
     Well, in advance of last Tuesday's publication date, the furious backlash against American Dirt, to which product page I refuse to link, was already in full swing mostly from Latinx authors. It brought about a row involving the need for sensitivity readers, about cultural appropriation and, inevitably, white privilege.
     And, as it inevitably works out, those defending American Dirt, an utterly indefensible book in terms of cultural inauthenticity as well as on cultural grounds, just happen to be, by some happy coinicidence, those who have the most invested in it- The author, the publisher, the literary agency, Sterling (sniff) Lord (sniff) Literistic (sniff) that had sold it and the glitterati of the literary world that had reviewed it, including Stephen King and the aging poet laureate of white grievance, John Grisham.
   

     In what'll surely be one of the most embarrassing moments of the AD hype was Salma Hayek pimping the book to the heavens... before the backlash she claimed to know nothing about forced her to delete the tweet and Instagram post doing so. Oops, she also hadn't read it before reviewing it. I guess one can forgive her for jumping at the book knowing nothing about it save that it starred a Mexicana like her who owned a book store like Hayek's character in 1995's Desperado in what was, I'm sure, just yet another in a string of happy coincidences. (At least Hayek had the guts to distance herself from the book, which is more than one can say for certain parties who have a lot of money and credibility riding on this lame pony).
     Fancy that.
     Now, there's an old saw in both the film and book business that states, "There's no such thing as bad publicity." Well, Cummins' book will test that theory as no other ever has.
     Mexican-American author David Bowles wrote perhaps the most scathing critique of the book, yet. In fact, it's gotten so many upvotes on Amazon, it's the first one you see on the product page. Bowles states in part,

     Cummins screws up Spanish egregiously (especially nuances in Mexican Spanish). First, when depicting Spanish-language dialogue as English, she sprinkles it with Spanish words, which is ridiculous ("Hola, abuela" is just "Hello, Grandma," in English, not "Hello, Abuela," as Cummins prefers). Even if we accept this as poetic licence to add cultural texture, she does it poorly, never using Mexican Spanish terms, just sterile, standard ones. If you're going to add spice, make it chile, Jeanine.
     Actual examples of Spanish are wooden and odd, as if generated by Google Translate and then smoothed slightly by a line editor. The Spanish is … not idiomatic at all.
     Cultural references are often missed, and Lydia Quixano Pérez (what a name, huh) is ignorant of things that any Mexican knows. For example, learning a cartel leader is called "La Lechuza" (which Cummins incorrectly glosses as "the Owl") Lydia laughs. Owls aren't scary, she insists.
     Now, a "lechuza" is a screech owl. They have been feared throughout Mexico for literally THOUSANDS OF YEARS, considered harbingers of death, witches in disguise. Lydia's reaction is that of the White readers, not actual Mexicans. And this is just one of literally dozens of examples.

     But it has its defenders, namely its increasingly snotty and arch reviewers who have credibility at stake. Among them are fellow white authoress Ann Patchett, who in defending her review actually said, “I read the book and I loved it. That experience can’t be changed by people who don’t like it. Here’s a level of viciousness that comes from a woman getting big advance and a lot of attention. If it had been a small advance with a small review in the back of the book section, I don’t think we’d be seeing the same level of outrage.”
     Yet, it did involve a huge advance, got reviews from some of the biggest authors in the business and that's part of the problem. Also, her reflexive default to sexualizing the antipathy toward the book is made redundant and ridiculous when one notes that Michelle Obama's book made about half a zillion dollars last year and the spoken word album earned her a Grammy just last night. Outside of Trump's red hat-wearing Nazi base, no one ragged on the First Lady or her success. So much for that argument.
    

     Of course, part of the outrage from Hispanic authors is aimed not just at Cummins and her incredibly tone-deaf book but her publisher Flatiron. Last May, at a pre-launch party, Flatiron featured centerpieces made to look like part of the wall that's made Trump a laughingstock the world over, decorated with twigs made to look like barbed wire. The above picture was lifted directly off Cummins' own Twitter feed, showing both publisher and author alike are equally clueless at this casual cruelty. I'm sure a lot of Mexicans can tell you exactly what it feels like being torn apart by barbed and razor wire while trying to scale the wall that does exist in order to keep from getting killed by drug lords who aren't literary-minded as is Cummins'.
     To give you an idea of the sheer level of Cummins' tone deafness, she actually had barbed wire painted on her fingernails.

     In other words, Flatiron-Macmillan already has a lot of dough invested in this tripe (an initial print run of half a million copies was ordered, so Macmillan suddenly isn't so concerned about the cost of paper and ink) and they're not about to pull out. This isn't Hitler's Diaries. Deception is a lot more palatable if it's an avowed work of fiction, regardless of the social evils it represents. Oprah Winfrey can tell you all about that. Oprah announced as if finding the Holy Grail that American Dirt was just named to her book club list. Looks as if she didn't vet it any better than she had A Million Little Pieces by James Frey.
     But the book's ultimate main value is obviously going to be in inspiring some legitimate questions about what authors can or cannot write. For instance, should Mark Twain had been allowed to write for a character named Nigger Jim in Huckleberry Finn? Should James Fenimore Cooper (whose work was immortally savaged by Twain himself in his famous 1895 essay, Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses) had been allowed to write The Last of the Mohicans, which was about a Mohican named Hawkeye?
     Should I have been permitted to write a novel about a biracial cop in 1854 Boston who was also a former slave, as I had five years ago in Gods of Our Fathers? I'd like to think so, since I did the requisite research and took especial pains not to make my main protagonist Cornelius "Vesey" Van Zant a stereotype. (Plus the subject of slavery is such a remote historical artifact, one cannot be expected to faithfully recreate the entire experience. And, except on a more abstract academic level, who's around to tell us we're wrong?). But I'll circle around to authenticity a bit later.
     And should moral revisionism be applied to literary works written a century or more ago by long-dead authors who simply lived by a different belief system and culture?
     Well, that's automatically a slippery slope and you can argue all day about the moral worth of Twain, Cooper, Laura Ingalls-Wilder and the rest. (Jane Austen's exempt, She never offended anyone and her stature continues to grow.)
     For now, let's confine ourselves to the 21st century and a general belief system many of us share.
     Cultural appropriation is an increasingly thorny debate, one the publishing business strenuously pretends (as in the case of American Dirt), simply doesn't or shouldn't exist. It can be expanded exponentially to include hypotheticals such as, Can a gentile author write a novel with Auschwitz as a backdrop? Indeed, it seems every time an article supportive or critical of Israel is published, about 110% of the time, it's written by a Jewish journalist, as if his or her boss is terrified of being accused of anti-semitism.
     Well, I'm one to believe that anything and everything should be possible in, as Keats once put it in a letter, "the wide, arable land of events." Keats was also known to write that he didn't write poetry "that doesn't cover its ground well."
     And that's the key. The early 19th century Romantic poet hit the nail on the head. While he wasn't writing about cultural appropriation, he was talking about authenticity. Covering your ground well. In other words, doing your research and, even if you're writing about something outside your experience, make it authentic. When Stephen Crane published The Red Badge of Courage in 1895, Civil War veterans who'd read it were at first incredulous that it had been written by a boy of 24 who hadn't been born until six years after the war ended.
     So, writing outside your own experience, even outside your own time and place, is not only possible, it can be permitted, as long as you do your research. As long as you do not do an injustice to your subject matter.
     Cummins did not do the former but she'd certainly done the latter. It does not reflect the Mexican experience at all, say real Mexicans and Mexicanas. Her protagonist is agape at the horrifying violence surrounding her but not in a way that a Mexican mother fleeing a drug cartel would be but as a white summer tourist just looking for a tan and the perfect margarita.
     When you throw a ton of money at such a project, it automatically involves not just the publisher but a publishing industry that features only 3% Latinos, according to Publisher's Weekly last year, an industry in which Latinx authors are struggling to get their work even represented, much less published, much less published to equal fanfare.
     American Dirt and its author also came at exactly the wrong time. We live in an age that's looking more and more like Nazi Germany or at least WWII-era America that locked up Japanese-Americans in detention camps but not Germans or Italians. Donald Trump had inflamed passions, to put it mildly, that have practically turned our southern border into a war zone. We're kidnapping and caging children, tearing migrant families apart, making arbitrary mass arrests, sent troops to the border, and has otherwise turned us into what just five years ago would've been the makings for a dystopian near-future nightmare that Cummins also could have written.
     So, the passions involving immigration were already there and just waiting for the next ember, the next outrage to re-inflame the debate over white privilege. American Dirt has added immeasurably to America's enduring Caucasian-centric culture. Just not in a way that its apologists and investors had expected and hoped.