{"id":99129,"date":"2025-05-13T21:56:09","date_gmt":"2025-05-13T21:56:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/99129\/"},"modified":"2025-05-13T21:56:09","modified_gmt":"2025-05-13T21:56:09","slug":"american-dirts-jeanine-cummins-has-a-new-book-and-a-message-to-critics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/99129\/","title":{"rendered":"American Dirt\u2019s Jeanine Cummins has a new book\u2014and a message to critics."},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cShe has a Puerto Rican grandmother\u201d was a fact occasionally cited in 2020 during the controversy over Jeanine Cummins\u2019 third novel, American Dirt. Some critics\u2014spearheaded by the Chicana writer Myriam Gurba, who wrote a florid and much circulated takedown<\/a> of the book and its author\u2014complained that American Dirt offered an inauthentic portrayal of Mexicans migrating to the U.S. Others, including many publishing professionals<\/a>, stipulated that Cummins\u2019 own publisher, Flatiron Books, made the mistake of marketing a melodramatic pop novel\u2014a pacy yarn about a genteel bookstore proprietor and her young son fleeing the narco-traffickers who assassinated her journalist husband\u2014as 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<\/a> to the novel not on its presumption in depicting people of an identity different from its author\u2019s, but on Cummins\u2019 \u201clumpy and strange\u201d writing and \u201cthin\u201d characters.<\/p>\n

That Cummins\u2019 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\u2019t have that much in common with Mexicans, after all, so when Cummins\u2019 grandmother got brought up, as she inevitably did in discussions of the controversy, the point was obvious: Cummins\u2019 ethnicity could not be written off as exclusively white. Many observers didn\u2019t buy that. What came across as flailing attempts to head off authenticity critiques\u2014accurate, but also misleading, descriptions of Cummins\u2019 Irish husband as an \u201cundocumented immigrant\u201d; an afterword in which Cummins expressed the wish that \u201csomeone slightly browner than me\u201d had written American Dirt\u2014only 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\u2019 appearances, and her book tour was canceled.<\/p>\n

More than 130 writers signed an online petition asking Oprah Winfrey to withdraw the title as her book club pick. Winfrey refused to reconsider<\/a>, though she did agree to raise some of the complaints during the club\u2019s 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\u00a0million copies, and it\u2019s easy to find long and enthusiastic online discussions of <\/a>American Dirt<\/a> whose participants not only don\u2019t care about the controversy but seem largely unaware of it. \u201cIt educated me\u201d and \u201cIt should be required reading\u201d are frequent comments.<\/p>\n

In short, the novel\u2019s success offers a reminder of how marginal the influence of media Twitter was even at the pinnacle of its ideological flame wars. \u201cThe consumers don\u2019t care. They. Don\u2019t. Care ,\u201d one editor told me at the time. \u201cIf it does register, they\u2019ll just write it off as PC.\u201d This seems to have been the case. Cummins, though\u2014who saw herself as using fiction to highlight a grievous human rights crisis\u2014seems 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.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. \n <\/p>\n

    It\u2019s One of the Weirdest Mistakes in Movie History. I Spent Months Investigating How It All Went Wrong.
    \n <\/a>\n <\/li>\n

  2. \n <\/p>\n

    Judy Blume\u2019s Most Controversial Book Is Now a Netflix Series. There\u2019s a Radical Change.
    \n <\/a>\n <\/li>\n

  3. \n <\/p>\n

    Can the Kennedy Center Survive Trump?
    \n <\/a>\n <\/li>\n

  4. \n <\/p>\n

    Netflix\u2019s Breakout Comedy Star Finally Has His Own Movie. It Left My Audience in Stitches.
    \n <\/a>\n <\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    <\/p>\n

    \"The<\/p>\n

    <\/a><\/p>\n

    \n By Jeanine Cummins. Henry Holt.\n <\/p>\n

    \n Slate receives a commission when you purchase items using the links on this page.
    \n Thank you for your support.\n <\/p>\n

    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 \u201cracist.\u201d 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\u2014a truth of human nature more keyboard warriors ought to bear in mind. As a novel, Speak to Me of Heaven didn\u2019t make much of an impression on me. It belongs to a genre of commercial women\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

    Here is where Cummins\u2019 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\u2019s \u201cbest\u201d families and his elegantly beautiful but low-born wife. Rafaela marries an American who takes her to St.\u00a0Louis, where she is miserable, and they raise two children, including Ruth, one of the novel\u2019s other main characters. Ruth\u2019s daughter, Daisy, returns to live in Puerto Rico against her mother\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

    Multigenerational stories of mothers, daughters, and the immigrant experience have been popular since Amy Tan\u2019s 1989 blockbuster The Joy Luck Club, and Speak to Me of Heaven falls comfortably within the boundaries of that genre. There\u2019s 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\u2019s critics.<\/p>\n

    Questions of identity perplex the new novel\u2019s 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.\u00a0Louis\u2014she 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 \u201cOther\u201d in the ethnicity section of a college application, her mother\u2014who grew up in a Puerto Rico where, as in many racially mixed postcolonial societies, prestige adhered to paler skin\u2014explodes. \u201cYou are white!\u201d Rafaela scolds her. \u201cYou check white.\u201d<\/p>\n

    <\/p>\n

    \"\"<\/p>\n

    \n Rachelle Hampton
    \n Why Everyone\u2019s Angry About American Dirt
    \n Read More<\/b>\n <\/p>\n

    <\/a><\/p>\n

    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, \u201cin affection,\u201d but now it\u2019s a \u201cslur.\u201d It\u2019s a word that, Ruth thinks, names<\/p>\n

    \n

    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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

    Later, Ruth\u2019s own son, Charlie, launching a stage career, changes his name to \u201cCarlos Hayes-Acu\u00f1a\u201d because \u201cit\u2019s cool to be Puerto Rican.\u201d This, and Daisy\u2019s proclamation \u201cI am Puerto Rican,\u201d despite the fact that both of Ruth\u2019s children grew up in the U.S., baffles their mother. \u201cIt\u2019s my heritage,\u201d says Charlie, and Ruth points out that her kids show little interest in their late father\u2019s Irish background.<\/p>\n

    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\u2014is not even really white at all, even if she once described herself as such in a 2015 New York Times op-ed<\/a>. Like many multiethnic people, Cummins\u2019 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\u2019t 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 \u201ctrauma porn.\u201d It\u2019s not hard to identify some of American Dirt\u2019s harshest critics in the whispering mean girls at the Boricua House.<\/p>\n

    Speak to Me of Home addresses these issues indirectly, as is the fiction writer\u2019s prerogative, and probably more effectively than any first-person response to the criticisms of American Dirt ever could have. After her husband\u2019s death, Ruth begins an Instagram account called \u201cThe Widow\u2019s Kitchen,\u201d which eventually blossoms into a full-fledged livelihood with millions of followers. Daisy complains that \u201cthe Widow\u2019s Kitchen\u201d is \u201call fake,\u201d even as she recognizes that there is something profoundly soothing in her mother\u2019s aestheticized vision of their domestic life. As for Ruth, she feels that with this fabrication she tried to \u201ccreate 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

    That\u2019s how most writers feel about publishing a novel, and no doubt how Cummins felt when American Dirt went to press. It\u2019s difficult not to sympathize with her horror when the response was anything but validating. To Cummins\u2019 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

    Get the best of movies, TV, books, music, and more.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cShe has a Puerto Rican grandmother\u201d was a fact occasionally cited in 2020 during the controversy over Jeanine…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":99130,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3938],"tags":[3444,77,20362,28939,17966,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-99129","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-race","11":"tag-slate-book-review","12":"tag-slate-plus","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99129"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99129\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/99130"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}