The Conch Shell Conundrum
A generous response to Pamela Paul
I think of it this way—as a “Mexican writer,” or a “Chicano writer,” or whatever, the unspoken recipe for success in the publishing world is to make a beautiful conch shell of a book. It ought to make people feel good to display on a shelf, and it ought to wail about home like the shell wails about the sea. Hooooooome, your book should cry. Hooooooome.
This hasn’t changed much over the years despite the publishing world’s gestures toward diversity and representation, two words I’ve come to hate. Even with the best of intentions, they reduce the books to objects and the authors to charity cases. These are marketing words, not literary ones, though that line gets blurred as many books are mere marketing exercises dressed up as literature.
At least in my experience, it’s all a bit silly. Authors from marginalized backgrounds casually joke about the governing appetites of the publishing industry, talking about how they made sure to go into detail about times they were bullied or the victims of bigotry because that’s what gets people to pay attention to your book.
There’s this pervasive idea that, when it comes to books from people who aren’t white or straight or cisgender and so on, reading their books should feel like doing activism or community service. This helps your book more comfortably situate itself near the front of the bookstore during your community’s dedicated history month, and makes people want to share it on social media to show that they care or something.
It was out of this cynical ecosystem that Jeanine Cummins’ novel American Dirt emerged like a jewel wasp from the corpse of a tarantula. Well, that’s not quite right. I wouldn’t say the novel itself did that. The novel was a run-of-the-mill border thriller. I confess to reading it and not actually seeing much to talk about or get mad at, though, clearly, many did. When I say American Dirt, I’m not even referencing the novel, but the event, the way it was marketed and the controversy that erupted as a result.
Believe it or not, Cummins is not my enemy, though New York Times columnist Pamela Paul seems to think otherwise in her most recent column “The Long Shadow of American Dirt,” published three years after the fact. “The response from fellow Latino writers,” Paul wrote, “could have been more generous.”
I suppose I am part of that vague group (I’m reminded of the “faceless brown mass” Cummins once referenced). Yes, it seems my hands are American dirty in this situation. Did I satirize the over-the-top marketing that relied on emphasizing the exoticness of the border? Yes. Did I mock the book’s overuse of italics and hyperbolized violence? Yes. But does that make me ungenerous? Does that make me another pitch fork in the mob?
Paul lays the great tragedy of American Dirt at the feet of Latin writers, saying they fundamentally misunderstood how the publishing industry works and want to police who gets to tell what kind of stories.
And, look, Pamela, I’ll be generous. I’ll ignore the blatantly misleading comments Cummins made about having an undocumented husband in the run up to the book’s publication despite him being from Ireland. I’ll ignore the barbed wire centerpieces at the book launch and Cummins’ barbed wire manicure. Tacky stuff, sure, but I’ll take it off the table.
I’ll even say that, yes, in my view, there does exist an overzealous, vocal minority of readers and writers, most of whom online, with a censorious streak. Fine. But what you’ve failed to realize is that it wasn’t the book itself that led so many people to take issue with it, it was the way it was presented to us—as a definitive statement on the Mexican experience, as an urgent work that would give a voice to the voiceless and humanize the undocumented. It was not Latinos who called it that. Publishers did.
Though Paul took great pains to blame Latinos in her piece while declaring the publishing industry innocent, she actually has it backwards. The publishing industry was cynically looking to traffic in identity and cosmetic activism in the book’s rollout, and many people just didn’t buy into it. You do not get to italicize the word quinceañera in your book and include an aside explaining what a quinceañera is while also touting that book as some kind of landmark in Latino literature. You have to choose.
And though I’d love to say that this whole fiasco is now three years behind us, the reality is that publishers are still approaching books this way. Though my personal belief is that anyone should be able to write about just about anything, it also makes sense to me that many authors would end up being defensive over who gets to tell certain stories. They themselves, after all, have been told those are the only stories they’re allowed to write.
In her defense of the publishing industry, Paul says that if publishing were “as monolithic and all-knowing as many critics seemed to presume,” then they would make every novel succeed.
Yes, Pamela, that would be great. But the thing is, publishers know this can’t be the case. It’s not realistic.
What’s more realistic, it seems, is for them to put the heft of their resources behind one “important book” that is especially catered to people looking for exotic flavors of pain, while other authors get relegated to mere shelf decor for Hispanic Heritage Month.