American Dirt and the Social Novel

I finally got around to reading American Dirt. Authors can only dream in their most optimistic moments of getting the accolades this book has received. Stephen King. John Grisham. Oprah. They all blurbed the front cover with glowing compliments. With such words of blessing from that creative triumvirate, I had to read it. But I also have to admit, what intrigued was that a critic labeled it “the next Grapes of Wrath.”

The book was hailed as a new take on the immigrant story, a story that could use a fresh perspective. That is what The Grapes of Wrath did for agricultural workers in the 1930s. The comparison of that novel to American Dirt raised my expectations Cummings’s book would become a classic social novel.

I love well-written social novels, and The Grapes of Wrath stands tall amid its fellows. A social novel is not a “socialist novel” but a story that focuses on one or two issues of corruption, poverty, child labor, racial, class, or gender discrimination, or other forms of abuse in its narrative. The problems are illustrated in the novel through the actions and reactions of the characters. Social novels have been known to motivate change in accepted attitudes and even laws. If a novel can entertain, inform, and move a nation’s conscience, to me, that is the high point of any writer’s creative efforts.

One of the great social novels of the last century was Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. Though Sinclair intended to highlight the poverty of new immigrants to Chicago, the book’s detailed description of the slaughterhouse conditions in meatpacking plants so appalled readers they stopped buying meat. The government was forced to reform food processing standards. Today, when we purchase packaged meat, we benefit from some of those reforms. Not all social novels have had that effect, both immediate and long-lasting. But these books increase readers’ awareness of an issue and shine a light on some hidden darkness that needs a deeper consideration from our political and cultural powers.

American Dirt begins with a promising opening—a polished premise that is professionally laid out in a scintillating action scene. Its King-style prose moves so quickly you don’t have time to put it down.

In brief, a happily married Mexican couple with a ten-year-old son, Luca, live in Acapulco, an international tourist city. They are both college-educated, well informed, well read, with above-average intelligence. Both parents have meaningful careers setting the young family firmly in the city’s middle class. Lydia, the wife, owns a bookstore. She is educated, well-read, smart, and a loving mother and wife, a character with strong heroine potential. Her husband, Sebastian, is a newspaper writer, and his specialty is writing about the cartels. In his latest expose, he is about to unmask one of the most ruthless of the cartel leader (Javier), who has hidden behind an alias that allows him a life of anonymity. He can walk the streets, and not even his rivals know what he looks like. His cartel has just completed a bloody purge of the city’s competing gangs and brought a pause in the beheadings and assassinations haunting the city.

The first scene is a pulse-pounding blur of carnage. Lydia’s husband’s expose has been published, setting off a series of personal tragedies for Javier that infuriates him. He sends his sicarios to Lydia’s family party to liquidate them all. Sixteen are murdered in the backyard while Lydia and Luca survive through her quick thinking and determination by hiding in the shower. She hears them looking for her and her son. Lydia must escape the city and her country. After the police arrive, she packs a few things. While she has the presence of mind to remember her money, she fails to take her passports, ID for her son, or any documents that would prove their identity except for her voter ID card. It was odd that these essential items don’t even come to mind. But for a moment, I can believe that in the adrenaline rush of seeing her family slaughtered, she forgot. Toothbrushes you can buy anywhere; passports and birth certificates come dear.

But as I read the narrative, I couldn’t let that mistake go because it leads to another problem. An educated, cultured woman, the wife of a reporter whose colleagues are dying in record numbers for many years now across Mexico would know she would need ID to fly or cross a border. This remiss on the author’s part stretches credulity for me. But I continued reading.

I’m not going to mention the issues that many Latino writers have raised about Lydia’s character, the fact she comes across as more American than Mexican. Others have plowed that field. I never expected this narrative to be genuinely Hispanic. This is a tempered story the way Taco Bell Mexican food served in the U.S. fits the taste of the American public, not the native Mexican palate. This book was written to the broadest possible audience, the middle-class American reader. It is the most lucrative book market in the world, and if the publisher didn’t think it would appeal to that audience, Cummings would never have received her seven-figure advance. In the publishing world, it’s always a dollar and cents equation. I’m just speaking frankly.

But as I read on, I began to question the premise. What kind of story is this? An immigration story or a refugee story? There are significant differences between the two.

The narrative progresses into a cat and mouse game between the cartel sicario sent to return her to Acapulco, into the hands of Javier’s perverted justice. He is flushed with revenge for the personal cost to his family that resulted from Sebastian’s article. His thirst for her blood will not be slaked until she is dead by his own hands.

Along the way, Lydia and Luca meet up with two teenage sisters escaping violence in Honduras. They begin traveling together. Somewhere along the road, she realizes she is a migrant and identifies with those impoverished men and women who are traveling to el Norte to find work.

This is where the story falls apart for me. She, Luca, and the two Honduran teenagers are not immigrants in the same way the others are. They are not fleeing to another country for better jobs. She and the girls are refugees fleeing violence. The fact they don’t use the word, never consider the possibility, or that no one along the path of their escape brings it to their attention defies reality.

Consider these facts: Surely, when the social worker in the migrant center is performing her intake interview and discovers why Lydia is running, it would have been the worker’s duty, and possibly delight, to inform her of her rights under asylum laws. But the word “refugee” is never mentioned. Again, as they join forces with a street-wise ten-year-old boy, and he brings up the fact they could be refugees and get free passage across the border, Lydia acts as if she never heard the word and is bewildered by its very meaning.

By muddling the issue of refugees versus immigrants, the story to me loses its power. Refugees are forced by fear of their safety to flee for their lives. Those who can prove their fear of returning to their own country have legal rights at every international border. (Even Russia recognized the right of Edward Snowden to refugee status). Immigrants are compelled by the economic and social issues that push them to leave home, or they are pulled by the opportunity for a better life to cross a national border. By mixing these two groups, she sucks the power out of her story to speak to specific issues. Neither the reasons for the killing of Mexico’s reporters and editors or the socio-economic forces pushing Mexican and Central Americans to flee north for a better life are examined in any substantial manner. This is a significant defect and distraction of the story.

To sort his out: All refugees are migrants in the broadest sense of the word, but immigrants are not refugees. Refugees have legal rights that are internationally recognized by asylum laws that immigrants don’t have. There are two ways to enter most countries: As immigrants (legal or illegal) or as refugees.

The fact Cummings didn’t even mention that word “refugee” confused me. The violence in American Dirt to a newspaper reporter and his family and sexual and physical violence to a Honduran teenager is illustrated in this novel, but not explored. Rather what we have is a long chase scene north, which itself is thrilling and makes for an entertaining read. But it doesn’t make it a social novel. In my estimation, this book does not rise to the standard of the social novel. At least to what I see in so many others of the genre.

The year before the publication of the book, a carnage of murders and assassinations of editors and reporters ripped a hole in the heart of the nation’s free press. In 2019 alone, 12 reporters were murdered. Almost every year for the last decade, Mexico ranked near the top of the most dangerous country for newspaper reporters after Syria and Iraq, and both of those are warzones. The cartels are at war with the democratic institutions of our southern neighbor. They are methodically attempting to destroy the free press in Mexico by purging those who dare to speak the truth. The Mexican government has so far proven ineffective in stopping the murders. When a nation’s free press is destroyed, how can a free society survive?

That angle would have made a heck of a social novel.

At the least, if Lydia on her headlong rush el Norte had lingered on the meaning of her husband’s death. If she had considered the implications to the people of Mexico that those who are speaking the truth about the cartels are being gunned down in their own homes, in front of their children, in view of the entire world, maybe she could have pricked someone’s conscience.

Not to belabor the point, but just last week, Jorge Miguel Armenta, the owner and editor of the newspaper, “El Tiempo,” and one of his police guards were gunned down coming out of a restaurant in Sonora. If the man required a police escort while eating lunch, he must have been under the threat of death.

It surprised me that no reviewer I have read has even mentioned the apparent lack of clarity on the part of the author. The NY Times didn’t mention it in their review. Neither did the LA Times. However, in the blurb listing the book on the LA Times Best Seller list this last Sunday, it’s called a “refugee” story. Remarkable.

Maybe the same American press that went wild with apocalyptic expostulations over the Khashoggi murder (as they should have) could have the same righteous indignation for their brethren to the South. The Saudi Press is already silenced, and it affects us in the U.S. very little. If the Mexican press has its tongue cut out, the economic situation will only worsen. Further exacerbating the burgeoning humanitarian crisis many peaceful Mexican citizens find themselves in, caught in the crossfire of horrific gang violence, likely amplifying an already inflamed crisis at the border.

Cummings must know the difference between the two. So it most likely wasn’t an oversight, but a conscious choice to get away from the typical migrant scenario, an impoverished villager seeking work in the north. But her husband wasn’t a gardener or a bricklayer. He was a reporter, and the protagonist is well read and intelligent. Yet that Lydia is utterly ignorant of what it means to carry a passport and documents for her son, and does not know what the word “refugee” means smacks of contrived. The two teens she travels with, under normal circumstances, would also have been immediately eligible for asylum.

Currently, the asylum system at our southern border is broken and not serving its intended purpose. But that wasn’t the story the author wanted to tell.

What she did write is a carefully plotted suspense novel in the vein of what King and Grisham write. One long chase scene from cover to cover. It leaves the reader breathless. From that perspective, it was satisfying and well done. I don’t fault her for that.

If you are interested in an excellent refugee story, pick up What is the What By Dave Eggers. It’s based on the life of Valentino Achek Deng, one of the Lost Boys who escaped the Sudan civil war when he was only seven years old. A truly heartwarming story of staggering proportions.

Here a very short list of social novels I’ve enjoyed reading in no particular order.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe

The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair

The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

The Octopus by Frank Norris

Bleak House, Charles Dickens

Crime and Punishment, Fydor Dostoevsky

Les Miserables, Victor Hugo

In Dubious Battle, John Steinbeck

Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain

Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser

Native Son, Richard Wright

 

I would love to hear from you. What social novels have you enjoyed? What do you think of American Dirt.

 

Some further reading.

John DeSimone is the author of The Road to Delano, a historical novel set in Delano, California, during the grape strike. If you haven’t read The Road to Delano yet, you can find it here.

If you haven’t reviewed it yet, you can post it here and here

If you like to read more of John’s work, you can find it here.