Fifty Books Project 2023

 

American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins

 

One of the very first bullets comes in through the open window above the toilet where Luca is standing.  He doesn't immediately understand that it's a bullet at all, and it's only luck that it doesn't strike him between the eyes.  Luca hardly registers the mild noise it makes as it flies past and lodges into the tiled wall behind him.  But the wash of bullets that follows is loud, booming, and thudding, clack-clacking with helicopter speed.  There is a raft of screams, too, but that noise is short-lived, soon exterminated by the gunfire.  Before Luca can zip his pants, lower the lid, climb up to look out, before he has time to verify the source of that terrible clamor, the bathroom door swings open and Mami is there.

 

Having been chosen for Oprah’s Book Club and later been accused of engaging in “brownface” because it involves a white woman telling the story of a Mexican woman’s plight, Jeanine Cummins’ novel American Dirt has seen both sides of how media hype can build up a cultural work and tear one down.  Behind the positive and negative hype is an exciting story that, despite some clunky attempts at depicting the inner emotions and thoughts of a variety of characters, ends up being quite moving.

 

Lydia Perez lives in Acapulco with her husband Sebastian, a journalist, and her son Luca.  She runs a small bookstore and leads a happily exhausting middle-class life.  She befriends an older gentleman of taste and refinement who shops in her bookstore and this new friendship provides her with the stimulating conversation that is sometimes lacking in the hurly burly of her marriage.  We learn all this in flashback:  the novel opens with Lydia draping her body over Luca’s while hiding in the shower from hired assassins that are killing sixteen members of her family at her niece’s quinceanera.  Unable to find Lydia and Luca, the somewhat lazy assassins leave, determined to kill them both where ever they find her.   

 

She and Luca emerge from hiding suddenly without family and fugitives from injustice.  They cannot turn to the police for fear that the cartel leader who has ordered the assassinations – in retaliation for an exposé Sebastian has written about the cartel – has informants in the police department.  They must leave Acapulco with little more than the clothes on their backs, and after some thought in the early hours and days of hiding it becomes clear that they must ride La Bestia – the freight trains that travel north towards the United States – and find a coyote who will smuggle them across the border.  The bulk of the novel is the story of that trip.  Through this clever – and seemingly realistic – plot device, Cummins builds a narrative that centers on both the danger and corruption middle class Mexicans face from the cartels and narcotraficantes and the plight of Central American migrants fleeing their own dangers and corruption.

 

The blurb on the front of the book compares it to Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath; the similarity is structural: as Lydia and Luca move north, they meet and travel with a growing group of fellow migrants, each with their own stories of horror and fear.  The beautiful twins, Rebeca and Soledad, are fleeing the sexual violence of their hometown in Honduras – itself controlled by narcotraficantes; Lorenzo is a former cartel soldier now claiming to want a more decent life; Marisol, who has lived for years in the United States, is trying to return to her family after a recent deportation and Beto, a child only slightly older than Luca who has lived on his own in the garbage dumps around Tijuana, is now trying to get north.  Although Lorenzo is not to be trusted, the group in general forms a kind of family, sacrificing and supporting each other through extremely difficult, brutal incidents.  The novel portrays the trip north as a kind of collective exercise in which the migrants form a mini-community of mutual aid.

 

Along the way they encounter many Mexicans who want to help them, let them hide in their tool shed, leave them water, offer them protection and sometimes transportation through a landscape filled with murder, accidental death, gang rape and robbery.

 

The novel is thoroughly believable.  I am not generally dissuaded by questions of an author’s authentic connection to her material – fiction is supposed to be an act of imagination – but I did find myself wondering about Cummins’ research, which must have been substantial.  She imagines horrific scenes in desolate landscapes among desperate people in language that is often gripping and close to beautiful.  Her decision to move in and out of character’s minds is, I think, a mistake.  She takes on too many of these characters and often the transitions are jarring and break the spell of her more general narrator.  And the voices themselves are only barely differentiated – Luca thinks in vocabulary and style very much like Lydia, who thinks very much like several other characters.  Cummins does not limit this device to her main characters.  We move into the head of a nurse back in Honduras learning of her impressions of her patient and his family even though we don’t really encounter this nurse again and we never see the patient.  We move into the consciousness of a character that has been barely introduced to experience his near-drowning.  These strike the reader like a violation of the fourth wall of the novel, we had been locked in on the world of La Bestia, and then suddenly reminded that we are in a novel.

 

I would say that these issues are slightly more than quibbles, but they do not change the ultimate fact of Cummins’ achievement: whatever her background or ethnic insight, she has imagined and allowed us to imagine a world I will never see, but that is intrinsically part of the world I live in every day.  It does more than to humanize the figures we see in the news (and in the supermarket, restaurants, and on delivery trucks).  It makes real for the reader the world they fight their way through for the simple right to live with us.