The Maris Review, vol 23
"What we demand of authors who cross racial or cultural lines is that they do so with the adequate amount of skill and respect." Yep, Jeanine Cummins has a new novel.
What I read this week
*** Both of these novels are by friends of mine. So I won’t pretend to be objective. Why don’t I just tell you what struck me most about them and then add some favorite lines from a couple of reviews?
Entitlement by Rumaan Alam
Rumaan writes about privileged characters who very rarely struggle with the implications of their privilege at all, which makes them terrible and terribly fascinating.
His latest heroine is Brooke, a young-ish upper middle class Black woman who becomes obsessed with her boss, an old white billionaire, and the way he spends money. In many ways, Brooke is a cipher, an ambition monster with very few outside interests, whose sense of, well, entitlement, is her primary feature.
I’ll refer you to the final paragraph of Tope Folarin’s review in The Atlantic to spell out why Brooke’s story is so much more than that:
In the end, Brooke’s struggle reveals a deeper truth: That in a society in which the circumstances of birth still dictate much of one’s fate, the pursuit of fulfillment is fruitless without an honest understanding of the forces that shape and constrain it. Entitlement captures this dilemma, showing that although ambition and intelligence may open doors, the ultimate prize—true autonomy and agency—remains elusive for almost everyone. Brooke’s journey is a poignant reminder that, for most people, entitlement is not an identity but a trap.
A Reason To See You Again by Jami Attenberg
Kirkus once called Jami the “poet laureate of difficult families,” which I think is such a perfect way to put it that any time I’m talking about her work I like to mention it. Not only does Jami nail the dynamics of Jewish family life, but I also know when I read a Jami Attenberg novel I will probably encounter some fast-talking broads with a lot of appetites and opinions and flaws and I will feel at home in their presence.
A Reason To See You Again explores that line between love and hate that always seems to be shifting in family relations, the way we run away from each other and then seem to find each other again. And this time around there’s a lovely depiction of an aunt-niece relationship, one that made me feel seen, childless dog lady that I am.
I leave you with some words from Leah Greenblatt in her New York Times review of Jami’s book:
She does all this with wry, streamlined wit and almost ruthless efficiency, distilling the essence of her characters and sometimes sealing their fate in the same paragraph. Even minor players are so sharply sketched that they feel immediately familiar, and the cultural markers ring true, too, from the crosscurrents of second- and third-wave feminism to the gold-rush opportunism of the early tech boom.
Here we go again
On Thursday The Bookseller announced the UK publication of American Dirt author Jeanine Cummins’s next novel, Speak to Me of Home, in May of 2025. Sure enough when I searched online I found that the US version will be published by Henry Holt, an imprint of Macmillan, at the same time.
The original publisher of Cummins’s previous novel, Flatiron Books, also an imprint of Macmillan, is not involved at all. I feel the need to specify this because I know how hard Flatiron has tried to do better since the publication of American Dirt, and I understand how the existence of this new book threatens to undermine the good work they’ve done.
I also feel for the employees who feel unheard internally at Macmillan, who had deep reservations about this project and were hoping to have more of a say about how it rolled out. That is, when they finally heard about it (but that’s another story).
Let me take you back to the end of 2019 when I was doing author Q&As for the Wall Street Journal, and I was looking for the big book of the coming January. I had heard so much buzz about American Dirt that I requested a copy immediately. Then I read the first 50 pages or so and put it away. The writing was cringy and clunky and that was enough for me. (I interviewed Liz Moore about her excellent Long Bright River, for those of you who loved The God of the Woods and aren’t afraid to go a little darker.)
Not long after, I read Myriam Gurba’s now legendary takedown of American Dirt, a sharply piece of writing in itself, some of which I excerpt below. (If you liked Myriam’s essay in full, I highly recommend her 2023 essay collection, Creep: Accusations and Confessions.)
Cummins bombards with clichés from the get-go. Chapter One starts with assassins opening fire on a quinceañera, a fifteenth birthday party, a scene one can easily imagine President Donald Trump breathlessly conjuring at a Midwestern rally, and while Cummins’ executioners are certainly animated, their humanity remains shallow. By categorizing these characters as “the modern bogeymen of urban Mexico,” she flattens them. By invoking monsters with English names and European lineages, Cummins reveals the color of her intended audience: white.
More criticism followed — much more, but Cummins still appeared on Oprah and just about every bestseller list you could imagine.
Much has been made about the supposed cancelation of Jeanine Cummins, with PEN America arguing that American Dirt has become the primary example of how criticism on social media can discourage authors to take risks.
American Dirt came up repeatedly as an example of the shifting consensus around racial representation that publishers are increasingly considering in their decision-making before and after publication. Interviewees stressed that the book was a bellwether illustrating how a social media outcry can shift the conversation about a book, pressuring publishers to respond. Despite the book’s commercial success, the episode left many within the literary world with the impression that books perceived to trespass across racial or cultural lines could be risky and undesirable.
This is bullshit. I know of so few readers who actually think this way. What we demand of authors who cross racial or cultural lines is that they do so with the adequate amount of skill and respect. It’s risky to be bad at depicting people outside of your cultural and ethnic background because when you are, that (rightly!) opens you up for criticism.
But as Esmeralda Bermudez wrote in the LA Times, the real fight over American Dirt isn’t really about Cummins: “It’s about an industry that favors her stories over ones written by actual immigrants and Latinos.”
American Dirt has sold 3.5 million copies worldwide. The publishing industry is still 72.5% white.
I haven’t seen a copy of the new book. Maybe some of the bad writing has been tweaked in edits, maybe Cummins has given this one more thought, as has her publishing team. And maybe now that she’s writing explicitly about her Puerto Rican heritage, her characters will seem less like caricatures.
Hmmm.
I’ll leave you with Aya de Leon, writing in Guernica in 2020.:
Jeanine Cummins, author of the novel American Dirt, has a Puerto Rican grandmother. And though she identified herself as white in a 2015 New York Times interview, she seems lately to have taken that Puerto Rican saying to heart, identifying as Latinx in recent media appearances—just in time for the release of her novel, which has come under fire for the way she depicts its Mexican characters.
Happy Sally Rooney Day
New releases, 9/24
A Reason To See You Again by Jami Attenberg
see above!
Intermezzo by Sally Rooney
I Love Hearing Your Dreams: Poems by Matthew Zapruder
AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can't, and How to Tell the Difference by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor
Playground by Richard Powers
Final Cut by Charles Burns
As a librarian, I'm not supposed to comment on patrons' checkouts. But the number of times I've had to order a ton of copies of American Dirt for a local (old white lady) book club seriously hurts my soul.
They sure do want people to know the 1st printing of Cummins’ book is 750k copies…but they seem not to want the general public to know it’s coming.