Sometimes, allies can be more harmful than enemies. American Dirt, a novel about a mother and son fleeing a drugs cartel in Mexico, has the literary world clutching its pearls. The problem? Does the writer, Jeanine Cummins (whose grandmother is Puerto Rican but who has identified as white) have the right (or the ability) to portray an authentic Mexican story? The background of the author, something that should have been an irrelevant matter, became the focal point of reviews.

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In the New York Times, a white reviewer agonised over whether it was her place to review such a book at all. “I could never speak to the accuracy of the book’s representation of Mexican culture or the plights of migrants; I have never been Mexican or a migrant,” Lauren Groff wrote. To her horror, she discovers that the writer herself is not Mexican nor a migrant.

This well-meaning nonsense got us, the readers, nowhere. The question that a review answers is simply, is the book any good? If it were a work of nonfiction, all these questions about identity, access and the problematic “white gaze” as Groff called it, become more relevant. But American Dirt is a novel, and a thriller at that, so the angst over the accuracy of its portrayal, rather than whether the world feels authentic, seems misplaced and forced.

It is harder to defend the book against other allegations of “trauma porn”, when decorative barbed-wire centrepieces adorned its promo events and the author herself posted an image of her “next level awesome!” barbed-wire manicure to match the book’s cover. And the inability to appraise the book on its own merit as literature and, most importantly, as entertainment was certainly made worse by the fanfare that preceded its release. It is rumoured that the publishers paid a seven-figure sum for the book. Hollywood snapped up the film rights before a single copy was sold. It arrived, according to another review, “on a gust of rapturous and demented praise”.

Because here’s the real issue. Once one cuts through the noise and actually reads the book, what becomes clear is that the problem isn’t that Cummins wrote a story that wasn’t hers to tell, but that she told it poorly – in all the classic ways a story is badly told. Two-dimensional characters, tortured sentences, an attempt to cover the saga of a migrant without even addressing the wider context of migration or inequality. No wonder the book was so popular with publishers.

The entire publishing industry does genuinely have a problem with telling stories of the “other”, but that issue isn’t one of cultural appropriation. The problem is that publishers, broadly, are only interested in such stories when the protagonists are flat-pack characters that can be assembled quickly into a neat stereotype that fits comfortably into the white, mainstream readers’ worldview. Thus, a smash-hit story about Mexicans must be about cartels and migrants and tortured brown faces on the lookout for the deliverance of a border. A story about Muslim women must be one of escape from “behind the veil”.

Tales of non-white identity must be founded in the most reductive non-whiteness, told without nuance, curiosity or interest in examining what lies behind such experiences. The quality of writing does not matter; all the skill and subtlety that goes into a writer’s craft does not matter. Money is poured into novels such as American Dirt at the expense of other works that tell stories about Mexicans or migrants that are more accurate, more nuanced but most importantly, far more interesting to a reader who the shallow world of publishing assumes is chronically unsophisticated.

The bar has been lowered for books that make up an entire genre of publishing, a sort of instant noodles offering for different tastes – just add water and the components will fatten up into a cheap approximation of the real thing. Despite the claims that white authors are savaged by philistines who cry cultural appropriation at every juncture, the reality is that non-white authors are the primary victims of the publishing world’s habit of catering to cliched taste, forcing them into topical ghettoes. In 2015 the Writing the Future report found that the “best chance of publication” for a black, Asian or minority ethnic writer was down the route of literary fiction that confirms the stereotype on themes such as “racism, colonialism or post-colonialism, as if these were the primary concerns of all BAME people”, said report editor Danuta Kean.

As the criticism mounted, American Dirt’s publisher cancelled the author’s book tour last week. Inevitably, that led the book’s supporters to collapse the backlash into just another episode of PC hysteria. In response, the publisher released a statement that disingenuously addressed the question of “who gets to tell which stories”, rather than engaging with the more complicated and uncomfortable question of how these stories are told and marketed in the first place. The main hysteria in this episode has been on the part of white opponents of the book whose heart may be in the right place, but who are also guilty of believing that only a migrant can write a migrant’s experience, and by extension that a migrant can only write a migrant’s experience.

Cultural appropriation as a criticism often creeps into the debate when the work that is being accused of doing so simply isn’t very good. The writer herself caveated her book by saying that “I wished someone slightly browner than me would write it.” The less controversial fact is that American Dirt didn’t need a browner writer to save it from the opprobrium. It needed a better one.

• Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist and the author of We Need New Stories: Challenging the Toxic Myths Behind Our Age of Discontent