It was supposed to be the book launch of every author’s dream: Jeanine Cummins had scored a rare publishing industry trifecta. She sold “American Dirt” for seven figures. A Hollywood studio bought the film rights. Oprah Winfrey anointed it her Book Club pick.
Yesterday, Ms. Cummins’ publisher canceled her tour and issued a public apology amid a firestorm of accusations of cultural appropriation and stereotyping.
It’s a pattern familiar to writers of young adult, science fiction, and other genre fiction. But “American Dirt,” industry observers say, is the most high-profile work of literary fiction bound up in a thorny question: Who gets to tell someone’s story?
Ms. Cummins herself acknowledged the debate in her afterword of her thriller about a Mexican mother and son escaping a drug lord by fleeing to the U.S. border. “As a non-immigrant and non-Mexican, I had no business writing a book set almost entirely in Mexico, set entirely among immigrants,” she wrote. “I wished someone slightly browner than me would write it.”
The furor over “American Dirt” centers around a previously noncontroversial idea: authors using fiction to imagine lives other than their own. To some, the controversy represents identity politics run amok. To others, the dispute highlights a lack of diversity within the most prestigious echelons of the publishing industry. At the heart of the matter is a deeper question: How can fiction best engender empathy?
“Why it’s happening now is because it is related to the politics of identity and the feeling that certain groups in society haven’t had a sufficient voice and representation,” says Ian Buruma, former editor of The New York Review of Books. “But when it starts relating to fiction or drama or film, it seems to me a very doubtful discourse because, first of all, if every writer could only write about characters like themselves that would become a very narrow exercise. And the whole point of writing, especially of fiction, is that you can get into the heads of people who are not like yourself.”
