It arrived, according to another review, “on a gust of rapturous and demented praise”.īecause here’s the real issue. Hollywood snapped up the film rights before a single copy was sold. It is rumoured that the publishers paid a seven-figure sum for the book. And the inability to appraise the book on its own merit as literature and, most importantly, as entertainment was certainly made worse by the fanfare that preceded its release. It is harder to defend the book against other allegations of “trauma porn”, when decorative barbed-wire centrepieces adorned its promo events and the author herself posted an image of her “next level awesome!” barbed-wire manicure to match the book’s cover. But American Dirt is a novel, and a thriller at that, so the angst over the accuracy of its portrayal, rather than whether the world feels authentic, seems misplaced and forced. The question that a review answers is simply, is the book any good? If it were a work of nonfiction, all these questions about identity, access and the problematic “white gaze” as Groff called it, become more relevant. This well-meaning nonsense got us, the readers, nowhere.

To her horror, she discovers that the writer herself is not Mexican nor a migrant.

“I could never speak to the accuracy of the book’s representation of Mexican culture or the plights of migrants I have never been Mexican or a migrant,” Lauren Groff wrote. In the New York Times, a white reviewer agonised over whether it was her place to review such a book at all.

American dirt novel