American Dirt’s Jeanine Cummins has a new book—and a message to critics.

“She has a Puerto Rican grandmother” was a fact occasionally cited in 2020 during the controversy over Jeanine Cummins’ third novel, American Dirt. Some critics—spearheaded by the Chicana writer Myriam Gurba, who wrote a florid and much circulated takedown of the book and its author—complained that American Dirt offered an inauthentic portrayal of Mexicans migrating to the U.S. Others, including many publishing professionals, stipulated that Cummins’ own publisher, Flatiron Books, made the mistake of marketing a melodramatic pop novel—a pacy yarn about a genteel bookstore proprietor and her young son fleeing the narco-traffickers who assassinated her journalist husband—as a significant literary work on an important social issue, subjecting American Dirt to a degree of critical scrutiny it was ill-prepared to withstand. In the New York Times, critic Parul Sehgal objected to the novel not on its presumption in depicting people of an identity different from its author’s, but on Cummins’ “lumpy and strange” writing and “thin” characters.

That Cummins’ Puerto Rican grandmother should come into this discussion seems very much a product of the heated cultural moment into which American Dirt was published. Puerto Ricans don’t have that much in common with Mexicans, after all, so when Cummins’ grandmother got brought up, as she inevitably did in discussions of the controversy, the point was obvious: Cummins’ ethnicity could not be written off as exclusively white. Many observers didn’t buy that. What came across as flailing attempts to head off authenticity critiques—accurate, but also misleading, descriptions of Cummins’ Irish husband as an “undocumented immigrant”; an afterword in which Cummins expressed the wish that “someone slightly browner than me” had written American Dirt—only made matters worse. More damning still: photos from a book party in which floral arrangements mimicked the barbed wire in the cover art. Bookstores received threats of picketing and even violence at Cummins’ appearances, and her book tour was canceled.

More than 130 writers signed an online petition asking Oprah Winfrey to withdraw the title as her book club pick. Winfrey refused to reconsider, though she did agree to raise some of the complaints during the club’s discussion of American Dirt. As usual, her instincts for the tastes of middlebrow America proved unerring. The novel went on to sell more than 3 million copies, and it’s easy to find long and enthusiastic online discussions of American Dirt whose participants not only don’t care about the controversy but seem largely unaware of it. “It educated me” and “It should be required reading” are frequent comments.

In short, the novel’s success offers a reminder of how marginal the influence of media Twitter was even at the pinnacle of its ideological flame wars. “The consumers don’t care. They. Don’t. Care ,” one editor told me at the time. “If it does register, they’ll just write it off as PC.” This seems to have been the case. Cummins, though—who saw herself as using fiction to highlight a grievous human rights crisis—seems to have taken the dispute to heart, and not always in the submissive fashion once expected of the Twitter-chastened. Her new novel, Speak to Me of Home, complies with the stay-in-your-lane directives nested in many of the critiques of American Dirt, even as it shoots pointed little darts at their soft spots.

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By Jeanine Cummins. Henry Holt.

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Speak to Me of Home arrives in the midst of a putative vibe shift, under a presidential administration hell-bent on characterizing diversity initiatives as “racist.” It also comes at a time when the dominance of Twitter among media professionals has dissipated. But no one ever really forgets or forgives the barbs launched at them by people hiding behind social media handles—a truth of human nature more keyboard warriors ought to bear in mind. As a novel, Speak to Me of Heaven didn’t make much of an impression on me. It belongs to a genre of commercial women’s fiction that generally leaves me cold. But as a riposte, skillfully mounted while at the same time well shielded from the counterattacks typical of its targets, this book earned my respect.

Here is where Cummins’ Puerto Rican grandmother comes into it again. She is manifestly the basis for the character of Rafaela, the daughter of a Puerto Rican government official from what his peers would describe as one of the island’s “best” families and his elegantly beautiful but low-born wife. Rafaela marries an American who takes her to St. Louis, where she is miserable, and they raise two children, including Ruth, one of the novel’s other main characters. Ruth’s daughter, Daisy, returns to live in Puerto Rico against her mother’s wishes, and the novel opens with an auto accident in which Daisy is gravely injured, obliging the whole family to convene on the island for her recovery.

Multigenerational stories of mothers, daughters, and the immigrant experience have been popular since Amy Tan’s 1989 blockbuster The Joy Luck Club, and Speak to Me of Heaven falls comfortably within the boundaries of that genre. There’s a tepid mystery set up at the beginning of the book, but nothing to compare to the breathless, thrillerlike, what-would-you-do? plotting of American Dirt. Whether Speak to Me of Home will replicate the success of its predecessor seems uncertain, but it does wrestle, if obliquely, with American Dirt’s critics.

Questions of identity perplex the new novel’s characters. Closest in age to Cummins herself is Ruth, who unlike her creator is the daughter, not the granddaughter, of a Puerto Rican immigrant; in fact, Ruth herself lived on the island until age 6. The aristocratic Rafaela is subjected to racist treatment in 1970s St. Louis—she is forced to change in the staff locker room at the country club her husband joins, for example. When Ruth, whose appearance is racially ambiguous, checks “Other” in the ethnicity section of a college application, her mother—who grew up in a Puerto Rico where, as in many racially mixed postcolonial societies, prestige adhered to paler skin—explodes. “You are white!” Rafaela scolds her. “You check white.”

In one particularly sharp-edged incident, Ruth ventures into the Boricua House (a Puerto Rican affinity club) at her college, only to overhear two women there whispering together about what the blanquita, or white woman, could possibly be doing there. The incident summons memories of her Puerto Rican grandfather, who used the same term, “in affection,” but now it’s a “slur.” It’s a word that, Ruth thinks, names

a thing about herself that was both true and not true, and that Ruth was powerless to affect in any case: her whiteness. Ruth hadn’t changed, but the value of that word had, the world had, and Ruth felt the pointed end of it where it lodged in her skin, the color of which was arguably white and arguably not white, depending on who you asked.

Later, Ruth’s own son, Charlie, launching a stage career, changes his name to “Carlos Hayes-Acuña” because “it’s cool to be Puerto Rican.” This, and Daisy’s proclamation “I am Puerto Rican,” despite the fact that both of Ruth’s children grew up in the U.S., baffles their mother. “It’s my heritage,” says Charlie, and Ruth points out that her kids show little interest in their late father’s Irish background.

For all its bland conventionality as a piece of storytelling, Speak to Me of Home sneakily amounts to a well-argued case that Cummins herself is not merely a clueless white woman—is not even really white at all, even if she once described herself as such in a 2015 New York Times op-ed. Like many multiethnic people, Cummins’ identity is complex. She and her family, the new book insists, are no strangers to racism, with its countless slights as well as its enormous injustices. While this doesn’t really clear her of getting certain details about Mexico and Mexican immigrants wrong, it refutes the more wounding claims that she regards immigrants of color as a mass of anonymous brown faces to be pitied and exploited for “trauma porn.” It’s not hard to identify some of American Dirt’s harshest critics in the whispering mean girls at the Boricua House.

Speak to Me of Home addresses these issues indirectly, as is the fiction writer’s prerogative, and probably more effectively than any first-person response to the criticisms of American Dirt ever could have. After her husband’s death, Ruth begins an Instagram account called “The Widow’s Kitchen,” which eventually blossoms into a full-fledged livelihood with millions of followers. Daisy complains that “the Widow’s Kitchen” is “all fake,” even as she recognizes that there is something profoundly soothing in her mother’s aestheticized vision of their domestic life. As for Ruth, she feels that with this fabrication she tried to “create something beautiful and meaningful, and then she would push it into the world without knowing how it would be received, and she would hold her breath until the validation arrived.”

That’s how most writers feel about publishing a novel, and no doubt how Cummins felt when American Dirt went to press. It’s difficult not to sympathize with her horror when the response was anything but validating. To Cummins’ credit, Speak to Me of Home is as dignified and graceful a follow-up as anyone could have executed, one that acquiesces to the identity obsessions of her critics by staying in her own ethnic lane, while at the same time reflecting back to them what Cummins experienced as their lack of charity and imagination. She couldn’t know that, with time and in retrospect, the uproar provoked by American Dirt would look almost quaint. Compared with the atrocities now unfolding daily, an insufficiently literary and authentic (but nevertheless successful!) attempt by a well-intentioned novelist to encourage middlebrow readers to empathize with immigrants does not seem so terrible. It seems, in truth, like the very least of our problems.

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