“American Dirt” - if you don’t like it, don’t read it. People get to write the fiction they want in the same way people get to read the fiction they want.
A novel is imagined. It is not a documentary or a memoir or a true account. It is absurd that the writer has to be the person they write about. First, if that were true, how could you. populate a novel? It has many people. ( And if you believe Virginia Woolf and FS Fitzgerald, each character shares one thing in common- and that is a bit of the author. There is no escaping the author’s fingerprints and that includes when a person of color writes about a person of no color.) Second, no argument can be sustained that this is a requirement when we know that with great success Flaubert wrote about Madame Bovary and Tolstoy wrote about Anna Karenina and Wharton wrote about Ethan Fromme and Christie wrote about murderers.
What is does take to write a worthy novel that’s well beyond your direct experience is one of two things: being a masterful writer with a strong imagination OR being a masterful writer who knows the subject area well because you have lived very, very near to it. Like the distance and view between you and it is like that of a window screen. Let’s use Harper Lee as an example of that when she wrote Mockingbird.
When a writer selects a subject it is because it has caught her eye. When you read a novel you are looking through an authorial eye. Quentin Tarantino never had a stunt double in his life. But one day he noticed a stuntman and his actor talking on set and had a, dare I say, novel idea. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was birthed.
A writer of literary intent is not writing a story for you. A writer writes what works for them. There is just no other way to do it. And that makes sense: there are many of “you” and only one writer. Think about Game of Thrones. The writers had one ending to their story. You and I and the neighbor had others. The story must spring from one voice: the author. Miraculously, every now and then the author’s story as told through her eye is so emotionally and psychologically true and beautiful that it is effective for many others. That is why there are a few masterpieces and then everything else of varying degrees of quality and value.
If American Dirt is a competent, but not great novel, it may be because even the five years of research the author did cannot replace the unconscious sensibility that one who sensibility that one who has lived it / almost lived it has. Still, there are many ways to approach this novel. You can read it as an immigration story told from the authorial pov of a white upper middle class American. The protagonist is not in what we think of as the usual immigrant situation, so this can be read as a telling of a rarely examined immigration story. No one can say that this would never happen or that the more common immigrant stories are so important that this one is unworthy.
Or it may be that American Dirt is a novel of little merit. IMHO that is about 88% of what is sold anyway so what’s the uproar about? If the beef is that the publishing industry ignores certain voices, there are better remedies than damning the creative efforts of one writer and extending that damnation into the dangerous territory of decreeing who can tell what story.
There are many, many stories and storytellers. We will never run out. If you don’t like this one, read some something else. Or write one. And hope for a miracle.
