About American Dirt

Something happens to me this year: I am becoming a very picky reader. This means often that I either give up on books that seem to do not go anywhere - in terms of story, quality or any other high literary criteria - (and this very recently happened to me in the case of the critically praised Writers&Lovers that after over 100 pages haven´t stirred any of my many literary feelings) or in the case of those that I am stoic enough to finish, I will not award them more than two palid shining stars. This happened with the very controversial American Dirt that I´ve (finally) finished yesterday evening.

At this point, I will not enter into the contextual controversy around the book. It´s over a year old and much has been said about it. I don´t have too much to add to it anyway to what was already written. This article summs up the most important points about this book.

My curiosity is to try to see what the book has to offer from the literary point of view. At the end of the last year, somewhere in October, I´ve started to read the book. To be honest, at the very beginning of it, I was really caught in and I kept being so for a bit over hundred pages. The thriller lover in me was curious about what really happened to the main woman character Lydia and why her family was murdered by the mafia. The spooky platonic soul connection between the same Lydia, bookstore owner in Acapulco, and the narco-mafioso who ultimately killed her family sounded also worth giving a try. Overall, at the beginning, the writing was also good.

But, as I was advancing into the book and Lydia´s run out of the reach of narco-maniac, together with her geography gifted 8 year old son, towards el norte, to Estados Unitos, my interested dimished little by little. All that road across Mexico, trying to escape the mafia people tracing her, sounded so artificious and like taken out of a badly documented post about ´Things to be aware of when visiting Mexico´. Those kind of listicles that I bet no one is really taking serious any more those days.

I´ve abandoned the book for months with no clear plans to return to it, until a couple of days ago when my mental spring cleaning set as one of the top priorities trying to finish some of the books I had on my TBR for very different reasons. 

Once returned to the book, I haven´t feel that I really missed it, but tried at least to give it a try until the very last page. As the writing in itself is not that bad and there is a story, I didn´t need to convince myself to further read it.

However, this second part - I´ve left the book just in the middle - required on my behalf a steady resilience. Every couple of dialogues, I was becoming more and more annoyed with the grotesque voice given to a 8 years old which no matter how gifted he might have been, was talking with a voice of an adult. One example of his misfit wordings: ´Machismo will get you killed´. A 10 years old old joining later the group on their journey to America is talking on the same voice. Although he is assumed to have spent time with the lawless, still the voice he was assigned is largely inappropriate. I never thought this kitsch can be so annoying but now I know. It´s such a missed opportunity for the writing quality to fail finding the right child voice. Therefore, it fails to bring diversity of points of views and perspectives as, in the end, all the characters are talking on the same tone, repeating over and over again the same discourse the writer wants (you) to hear. 

There are some successes, although small, of the American Dirt, namely the portrayal of human connections, empathy and solidarity, particularly women solidarity, in moment of dramatic distress. 

On the other hand, I couldn´t place any of those encounters in a larger literary geography. I may understand the contemporary references to the anti-migration policies under president Trump and the helplessness against a very corrupt state, but this book is a very light - and largely stereotypical - try to offer a fictional approach to the topic. Gd knows that I really tried to get into the book, many months in a row, actually. Which only made things worse.

Rating: 2 stars