Warwick > Status Update

Yeah, that’s only about self-satisfaction: excavating to find some poorly formulated sentence they can dig a whole on and use it as an excuse for a rise. Honesty (in this case, the author’s honest perspective) isn’t welcoming when they don’t follow the protocol. I haven’t read the book. Maybe it’s garbage. But by the exemples and the tone (the fancy wording doesn’t hide the whining, mate. Cut that length in half and maybe something relevant might be pointed out.) used in the letter, I think its more of the same: pointing fingers.

"There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. A book is well written or badly written, that is all".

That was Oscar Wilde, progressive icon. Meanwhile, I rather suspect that the writers and defenders of good improving literature (chiefly sentimental three-volume novels of a Christian sort), protectors of public decency and morals, would today be swifly persuaded to stand with the condemners, shamers, anti-appropriators and no-platformers.


On the other hand, I have to admit the whole idea of this novel does seem rather tasteless and ill-judged, and I have no interest in reading it. But criticising something as a bad idea is very different from criticising it as an outrage to public morals, which seems to be what's going on here. Mostly, it must be said, from people without a jot more authority to speak on behalf of Latino migrants than the author has...

There are tons of examples of inaccuracies in it though. I hate inaccurate stuff in novels that are supposed to be realistic. (Flights by Olga Tokarczuk is probably the worst example I've read in the last couple of years - it won awards regardless. If more novels with similar levels of inaccuracy - about stuff they are presenting as realistic portraits of a culture or life in a certain place, like American Dirt, or as erudite information characters are concerned with, like Flights, were widely criticised so that most readers started the book knowing about these things, I would be very pleased. Even better if the publishers stopped printing them until they could issue an edited version with all the rubbish corrected.)

A lot of this is a phrasing problem and to do with wider problems of culture wars. "Cultural appropriation" versus the less snappy but better point that it is appalling that there is plenty of great contemporary writing out there by Mexican authors and by people who do top-notch research which gets little in the way of publicity and small advances, whilst a book full of inaccurate stuff gets a publicity blitz and seven figures. If they want to do loads of editing (which Amy Einhorn, the editor who acquired both this and The Help, customarily does) why not get a really well-researched book by someone who knows life in Mexico, and edit it into a thriller-style story?

One of the things about reading a lot of lit in translation over the last few years is that it makes it clear there is loads of good writing out there which doesn't get the attention. Publicity seems so arbitrary and unfair.

There has also always been too much going after authors, making people feel they can't /shouldn't write - and contributing to cultural backlash (which does exist, regardless of what some activists and journalists living in bubbles like to say - another example just this morning). It would be morally better to go after publishers - only they are cynical and perhaps even use this stuff for their own ends. She should absolutely write what she feels inspired by, just not be able to get such silly money and astroturfed publicity for inaccurate material.

If all these campaigns could only rewind the best part of a decade and start again with terminology and phrasing that was designed to help people understand, and to persuade, rather than to attack and blame them for not knowing/not having already done work they don't know how to do, it could IMO make a great deal of difference both to their causes and to relations between people with different opinions.

It would be morally better to go after publishers

It would – although I don't think it would help, since this is all just publicity for the book.

I don't even mind inaccuracies, personally. There are lots of books which are historically slapdash that I have nevertheless enjoyed enormously, whereas someone like Hilary Mantel is absolutely punctilious about her historical accuracy but I find the results a bit dry and boring. So for me that doesn't correspond much with my value judgements of a work.

If all these campaigns could only rewind the best part of a decade and start again with terminology and phrasing that was designed to help people understand, and to persuade, rather than to attack and blame…

I totally agree, but the cynic in me says that they're not really interested in persuading anyway. These authors can't possibly think that they will succeed in getting American Dirt stripped of its status and/or visibility; I think the self-congratulatory enjoyment of "attacking and blaming" in itself has more than a little to do with it.

Warwick wrote: "I totally agree, but the cynic in me says that they're not really interested in persuading anyway."

I think there are enough people who are, but too many of those immersed in the discourse have lost sight of how to persuade. Too easy to boil it down to UK electoral politics but it's like where young Momentum activists ended up dismissing large swathes of former Blair voters as not worth trying to persuade, when there probably actually is a good chunk of them they could have, if only things had been put the right way.

I think this book is quite different from something like Girl by Edna O'Brien (about young Nigerian women targeted by Boko Haram), which seems by most accounts to be a sensitively written book by a veteran author who did her research the right way.

These authors can't possibly think that they will succeed in getting American Dirt stripped of its status and/or visibility

Hmm, because it's Oprah, who obviously has some history of standing up for black women's causes, I think what they are attempting makes sense. I've rolled my eyes at a heck of a lot of petitions I think are futile and utopian, but this one I find logical. She's one person who has been sympathetic to similar things. They are pointing out in effect that she has been acting more like a big corporate entity than like her old self.

OK, OK, fair enough. Maybe I am getting too cynical for my own good.

However, if (as I said in another thread) this furore gets some anti-immigration Republicans reading the book because they see it as a free speech issue, and if as a result they end up modifying their opinions about Mexicans a bit, it might do some good that way.