I won’t read American Dirt – but not because the author has the wrong skin colour

Readers of The Spectator who keep up with the latest literary hissy fits could have predicted (perhaps with a groan) exactly what Shriver will write about this week.

Maybe it’s hard to pity Jeanine Cummins. Her third novel, American Dirt, secured a seven-figure advance, an Oprah Book Club pick and a huge publicity campaign (waste of money; last week the Guardian alone gave the book a scale of promotion that its publisher Flatiron Books could never afford, although the paper’s worthies are sure testing that maxim about no publicity being bad). An author’s note, in which Cummins rues not being ‘browner’, suggests a faint premonition of the stir that her thriller would cause. Yet I’m betting the poor woman had no idea that she’d set off the kind of ‘stir’ that sloshes the entire contents of your coffee mug across the counter and on to your crotch.

I’ve not read this novel, and probably won’t. I’m fascinated by the issue of immigration because of its infernal political and ethical complexity. A story about the terrible travails of a Mexican woman and her son while fleeing a violent cartel and heading for the US border sounds thematically one-dimensional and, as a weird, wishy-washy New York Times review describes it, polemical. But I’d never boycott the novel because the author has the wrong skin colour.

Granted, it wasn’t canny for Flatiron Books to advertise Cummins’s lone Puerto Rican grandmother by way of polishing her ‘Latinx’ credentials. (FYI, ‘Latinx’ is an artificially genderless contrivance adopted primarily by right-on white folks. From what I’ve read, ordinary Latinos seldom use it.) Better to concede: ‘Yeah, she’s white, what of it? Because we all have a right to write about whomever, whatever and wherever we like.’