Ask any reading group: People disagree about books all the time. But it’s rare for a novel to be quite as polarizing, or as controversial in the wider culture, as Jeanine Cummins’s new book, “American Dirt,” has turned out to be.
Essentially a narcothriller — it’s about a Mexican woman and her son fleeing to the border to escape a murderous drug lord — the book is already a huge hit. Oprah Winfrey recently picked it for her book club, and it enters this week’s best-seller list at No. 1. But it has also been widely condemned, on political grounds by readers who say it resorts to stereotypes and exploits current events to make a fetish out of trauma, and on aesthetic grounds by readers who say it’s just badly written. (That’s where The Times’s critic Parul Sehgal landed in her review.) In the wake of the outcry, the book’s publishers announced on Wednesday that they were canceling a planned author tour.
So why are we recommending it?
For one thing, “American Dirt” is clearly the book of the moment. It has spawned a galvanizing conversation — if not the one that Cummins might have been hoping for — and anybody who wants to follow along would probably do well to read the book at the center of the discourse. For another thing, both Lauren Groff (in the Book Review) and the editor who assigned it to her were genuinely impressed by the book’s propulsive momentum and topical concerns. You might be, too — or you might hate it! Either way, you’ll have something to talk about at your next book group.
If you’d rather fight about nonfiction, we can help with that too. This week we recommend a book about Donald Trump’s presidency, a study of economic conditions in some of the world’s most troubled environments, the history of a racist coup in Reconstruction-era North Carolina and a look back at the speculative and largely fraudulent Florida land boom of the 1920s, along with a cultural critic’s take on the enduring appeal of minimalism. In fiction, we offer a collection of Zora Neale Hurston’s short stories, a novel about body image among the girls at a British boarding school, and a debut novel about a Chinese physicist who immigrates to America intent on hiding her past. Finally, poetry: The venerable Robert Hass returns with his first new collection in almost a decade.
Gregory Cowles
Senior Editor, Books
Twitter: @GregoryCowles
A VERY STABLE GENIUS: Donald J. Trump’s Testing of America, by Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig. (Penguin Press, $30.) The Washington Post reporters Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig composed this book, they write, out of a desire to step out of the churning news cycle and “assess the reverberations” of Donald Trump’s presidency. The result is a chronological account of the past three years in Washington, based on interviews with more than 200 sources. “They’re meticulous journalists, and this taut and terrifying book is among the most closely observed accounts of Donald J. Trump’s shambolic tenure in office to date,” our critic Dwight Garner writes. “It reads like a horror story, an almost comic immorality tale. It’s as if the president, as patient zero, had bitten an aide and slowly, bite by bite, an entire nation had lost its wits and its compass.”
THE LONGING FOR LESS: Living With Minimalism, by Kyle Chayka. (Bloomsbury, $27.) The cultural critic Kyle Chayka admits to being a minimalist, but only “by default,” a consequence of living as an underpaid writer in New York. When he began writing “The Longing for Less,” he was put off by how minimalism had become commodified — a smug cure-all that countered late-capitalist malaise with self-help books by Marie Kondo and seasonal pilgrimages to The Container Store. “But those two kinds of minimalism — enforced austerity and sleek lifestyle branding — don’t quite convey the enormousness of the subject Chayka explores in this slender book,” our critic Jennifer Szalai writes. “Delving into art, architecture, music and philosophy, he wants to learn why the idea of ‘less is more’ keeps resurfacing.”
WILMINGTON’S LIE: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy, by David Zucchino. (Atlantic Monthly, $28.) This account of the violent overthrow of a multiracial government in a North Carolina city at the end of the 19th century recovers a forgotten episode in American history that is both deeply disturbing and terribly sad. “With economy and a cinematic touch, Zucchino recounts the brutal assault on black Wilmington,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. writes in his review. “A town that once boasted the largest percentage of black residents of any large Southern city found itself in the midst of a systematic purge. Successful black men were targeted for banishment from the city, while black workers left all their possessions behind as they rushed to the swamps for safety. Over 60 people died. No one seemed to care.”
EXTREME ECONOMIES: What Life at the World’s Margins Can Teach Us About Our Own Future, by Richard Davies. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28.) Davies, a British economist and journalist, toured nine places where humans live in extremis, including Aceh province after the 2004 tsunami, a Jordan refugee camp and a Louisiana prison — all of which, he argues, hold valuable lessons for the future. Matthew Yglesias reviews the book, favorably: “All nine studies are engagingly written and genuinely interesting, each a dive into a corner of the world you don’t hear much about that conveys, briefly and clearly, a sense of how this far-off place works,” Yglesias writes. “The book is simultaneously entertaining, informative and balanced.”
OLIGARCHY, by Scarlett Thomas. (Counterpoint, $26.) The privileged teenage girls in this dark comedy, attending a dysfunctional, third-string boarding school in the countryside north of London, get caught up in a mass-psychogenic, contagious version of anorexia nervosa. “Thomas’s humor has a sharp, rhythmic perfection,” Lydia Millet writes in her review. “Her prose is fast-thinking, entertaining and punchy, her dialogue fully authentic without sinking into the tedium of real-life conversation.” Millet calls the novel “a study in obsessiveness” and adds that “intriguing, fluid and frequently funny interior monologues are what Thomas does best.”
LITTLE GODS, by Meng Jin. (Custom House, $27.99.) At the heart of this ambitious debut is a brilliant, difficult Chinese physicist bent on erasing her past, and the daughter trying to uncover the truth after her mother’s death. Gish Jen, reviewing the book, praises the protagonist’s “larger-than-life talent, drive and perversity. In her intelligence, vulnerability, volatility, desperation, narcissism and self-destructiveness, Su Lan — despite her voicelessness — is a compellingly complex protagonist, portrayed with exquisite irony. … ‘Little Gods’ expands the future of the immigrant novel even as it holds us in uneasy thrall to the past.”
BUBBLE IN THE SUN: The Florida Boom of the 1920s and How It Brought On the Great Depression, by Christopher Knowlton. (Simon & Schuster, $30.) The story of the 1920s real estate bubble in Florida has been told before, but Knowlton brings to it a vivid, spirited style and a colorful cast of schemers who made quick fortunes and lost them just as quickly. “His characters are a writer’s dream,” Daniel Okrent writes in his review. “At one point, as national magazines began to expose the worst of the fraudulent real estate rackets, the industry fought back with an event called ‘The Truth About Florida,’ which was exactly the opposite. The luminaries who traveled to New York to make the case that Florida’s real estate market wasn’t speculative at all included its governor, its leading newspaper publishers and a phalanx of at-risk developers and overextended bankers — ‘the very men,’ Knowlton writes, ‘who were most culpable in creating the speculative boom in the first place, a boom that they now insisted didn’t exist.’”
SUMMER SNOW: New Poems, by Robert Hass. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $27.99.) Rife with elegies and far-reaching digressions, Hass’s first gathering of new poems since 2010 is a book that looks meaningfully back on the long life it took to write it. “Over almost 200 pages of new poems, Hass checks in with himself and his readers, as though he’s providing a public update on his private thoughts in sequences of linked poems,” Craig Morgan Teicher writes in his review. “Some may find that Hass has grown too comfy in his effusive style and his old lefty politics, but to me it all sounds like mastery, like singular virtuosity attained on a very popular instrument — common American speech.”
AMERICAN DIRT, by Jeanine Cummins. (Flatiron, $27.99.) Cummins plunges readers into the Mexican migrant experience in this dazzling and deeply empathetic page-turner, which follows a mother and son fleeing the cartel assassins who have targeted their family. “The narrative is so swift, I don’t think I could have stopped reading,” Lauren Groff writes in her review. “The book’s simple language immerses the reader immediately and breathlessly in the terror and difficulty of Lydia and Luca’s flight. The uncomplicated moral universe allows us to read it as a thriller with real-life stakes. The novel’s polemical architecture gives a single very forceful and efficient drive to the narrative. And the greatest animating spirit of the novel is the love between Lydia and Luca: It shines its blazing light on all the desperate migrants and feels true and lived.”
HITTING A STRAIGHT LICK WITH A CROOKED STICK: Stories From the Harlem Renaissance, by Zora Neale Hurston. (Amistad/HarperCollins, $25.99.) A collection of 21 stories that span the career of Zora Neale Hurston, including eight that show the effects of the Great Migration north. “Against the backdrop of Harlem Renaissance bigwigs calling for positive depictions of high-achieving Negroes, Hurston unpacked the lives of everyday black people doing everyday things,” Jabari Asim writes in his review. “Add her matchless powers of observation, exemplary fidelity to idiomatic speech and irresistible engagement with folklore, and the outcome is a collection of value to more than Hurston completists. Any addition to her awe-inspiring oeuvre should be met with open arms.”
