One of the things I love most about reading is the focused stillness of it. Most of the time, the inside of my head is a staticky place, full of the competing clamor of sensory inputs and the day’s to-do list and the strands of whatever piece or pieces of writing I’m currently working on. A book, and especially a good book, is like a radio signal that cuts cleanly through that noise: the only sound in my head is the story.

Reading Jeanine Cummins’s American Dirt was not a quiet experience — not at first, anyway. I tried to focus on the narrative, but other voices kept intruding: the ones of critics who have been roundly and loudly denouncing the book ever since its release. Long before my own copy of American Dirt landed on my doorstep, I had been reliably informed by various commentators that it had not a single redeeming quality. The writing was “so lumpy and strange it sounds like nonsense poetry.” The characters were “thin creations,” “stereotypes.” Its Mexican setting was a “a clumsy and distorted spectacle.” The story itself was “harmful, appropriating, inaccurate, trauma-porn melodrama,” “an adrenaline-packed cartoon,” and “lab-created brown trauma built for the white gaze.” Even the tacos, apparently, were all wrong.

For this reason, my first critical thoughts about American Dirt were mostly centered on other people’s criticisms, and whether or not they have a point, and so let’s start there:

Yes. Yes, they do.

It is absolutely true that this book does not authentically mirror the lives of most migrants or most Mexicans — in the same way that Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons fails to authentically depict what it’s like to be a Vatican priest or a Harvard art professor. This is part of the problem: American Dirt is a thriller with a literary bent, and Cummins has done no less (and in some cases, probably much more) research than most genre authors when it comes to setting her book in a place she doesn’t know intimately. Only the most knowledgeable cultural insiders would notice the things she gets wrong, and even then, the errors aren’t salient to the success of a fast-paced and tightly-plotted tale of a mother and son fleeing for their lives.

If only that were enough. Even 10 years ago, American Dirt would have been received as a well-written commercial literary thriller, and Cummins would have been applauded for a book that repackages a timely topic as a gripping tale of survival, rendered in poetic but very readable prose. But in 2020, American Dirt has to occupy a different kind of landscape: one dominated by conversations about the lack of diversity in publishing; about whether authors can (or should) balance imagination with authenticity, sensitivity, and adherence to their own identity lanes; about whether it’s enough for a book to be entertaining, or whether literature has a responsibility to advance progressive politics (especially given the current occupant of the White House). In what publishing insiders now seem to agree was a mistake, Flatiron Books touted American Dirt as not just a good book, but possibly the most vital, necessary, and definitive novel about the border crisis ever written. The cover blurb reads, simply, “A Grapes of Wrath for our time.” Perhaps most foolishly, an afterword was appended in which Cummins (most likely at the behest of a cautious editor) tried to preempt identitarian criticisms of her work by saying she’d wrestled with this issue herself, even going so far as to register her wish that someone “browner” had written it.

In hindsight, everything about American Dirt — from Cummins’s million-dollar book deal, to her lack of Mexican or migrant background, to a marketing plan that positioned the novel as not just entertaining but groundbreaking — was practically tailor-made to arouse the outrage of literature’s social justice wing. Cue the scathing reviews, extended tweetstorms, accusations of profiting off the trauma of the marginalized, and (because why not) insinuations that Cummins had stolen parts of her book from other writers.

As of this writing, Flatiron has cancelled Cummins’s book tour, citing threats to her safety, though this has only served to further infuriate her detractors (many of whom insist that the threats are a fabrication, and that in fact, the only threats of violence are being directed at them, the critics, by deranged American Dirt fans). But whatever the deal with the death threats, it’s undeniable that Cummins has become a scapegoat for all manner of literary grievances, including a host of decisions that she had absolutely nothing to do with — and that while her critics roll their eyes and say that she can go cry about it on a pile of money, she’s clearly devastated, and the vitriolic abuse she’s been subject to is the kind of thing that anyone would find soul-crushing. Cummins is no stranger to trauma herself, and has grappled straightforwardly in her work with the way that violence, race, and privilege intersect. Unless you have a small pile of lint where your heart is supposed to be, it’s impossible not to feel a least a little bit sorry for her.

And in fact, Cummins didn’t write a bad book. It’s true that if you’re looking for an authentic, no-frills, unsensational depiction of the migrant experience, American Dirt is not it — and that’s especially true for the migrants who make the dangerous journey depicted in the book, traveling north for thousands of miles on top of the cargo train known as La Bestia, for whom happy outcomes are vanishingly rare. Of all the improbabilities and inaccuracies in Cummins’s novel, chief among them is that her characters live to see how it ends.

But that’s why it’s a good story. Not in terms of its adherence to progressive norms or identity politics, but in terms of entertainment value. It’s “good” in the way that stories need to be in an industry that needs its massive bestsellers — the Fifty Shades of Greys, the Da Vinci Codes, the Harry Potters, the books that get optioned for film and TV and translated in dozens of countries worldwide — to keep the doors open and the lights on. Flatiron threw a seven-figure advance and a massive marketing budget at American Dirt because they believed it would make big money, which would in turn let them publish more books (most of which won’t ever turn a profit). And that’s because it’s the kind of light literary commercial fiction that the unwashed masses, those Dan Brown-loving, Oprah-watching, basic book-buying bitches, can’t get enough of.

The unfortunate truth about American Dirt is that everything people find offensive about it — the sensationalism, the violence, the italicized Spanish words and phrases sprinkled throughout the text like little spicy accents — make it profoundly attractive to average readers who just want an exciting yarn. When writers complain that publishers don’t pay a million bucks for #OwnVoices memoirs from migrant authors, what they’re actually bemoaning is the American public’s stubborn refusal to develop more sophisticated literary tastes.

This is where writers and publishers find themselves in a fundamental conflict, and where those negative reviews come back in. The people who will read and enjoy this book are not the one reviewing it, and the reviewers are clearly not assessing its quality for an audience of appreciative readers. Instead, the most scathing reviews of American Dirt are determinedly offense-seeking, sometimes to the point of factual inaccuracy. Consider this damning moment in Parul Sehgal’s New York Times review, in which she complains that Cummins “has a strange, excited fascination in commenting on gradients of brown skin”:

Characters are “berry-brown” or “tan as childhood” (no, I don’t know what that means either). In one scene, the sisters embrace and console each other: “Rebeca breathes deeply into Soledad’s neck, and her tears wet the soft brown curve of her sister’s skin.” In all my years of hugging my own sister, I don’t think I’ve ever thought, “Here I am, hugging your brown neck.” Am I missing out?

Reading the book myself, I anticipated that these examples would be representative of a larger trend (I don’t know how many weird skin descriptors constitute “a strange, excited fascination,” but surely more than three). Instead, I discovered that not only did Sehgal apparently zero in on the only such moments in the book, but that to call them “strange” was, well, strange. Describing someone’s neck as a brown curve might be odd in casual conversation, but it was so natural in the flow of Cummins’s prose that I missed it the first time I read it; there’s also a similar moment earlier on in the text where another (white) character’s face is described as “an unreadable smear of pink and blue.” Meanwhile, “tan as childhood” is how main character Lydia describes her own complexion after she’s spent several days on the run, trekking through the countryside under an unforgiving sun — and while it’s certainly possible that Sehgal really doesn’t know what that means, the reference made immediate, resonant sense to me (as it will to anyone with skin that tans easily who spent a lot of time outside as a kid).

Sehgal’s review (among others) brings to mind a quote by Sam Rayburn: “Any jackass can kick down a barn.” Basically, it’s incredibly easy to go through a 120,000-word book line by line, pick out a handful of phrases that don’t read well out of context, and claim that they’re representative of macro-level flaws not just in the work itself but in the author’s character. (Check out the racist weirdo obsessing over people’s brown skin!) It’s even easier if one imagines that because the author already brought home a million-dollar paycheck for her efforts, panning her work is a noble act, punching up against an oppressor who’s profiting off the struggles of marginalized people. It’s easiest of all if everyone you know has already determined to hate the book on principle, has no intention of reading it, but will happily spend the next several weeks on Twitter gleefully amplifying your takedown. But for the basic book bitches among us, it’s hard to see the value of a review so uncharitable that it actually misrepresents what’s right there on the page.

As for a review of American Dirt, here’s mine: At its best, this is an artfully paced and tightly plotted thriller, with vivid language that treads the line between lyrical and breakneck. Some elements are pulpy and a bit predictable; in particular, Lydia’s relationship with the cartel boss who massacres her family falls pretty flat, though it’s thankfully confined to flashbacks. And the backstories of the other migrants she encounters on her journey are sometimes presented in a way that feels like a self-conscious educational sidenote. But the book always returns to Lydia and Luca, whose dangerous journey is the heart of the story — and when it does, it’s unputdownable. The taco toppings may not be authentic, but the story, the setting, and the stakes all feel very real. And as for the naysaying voices of other critics, by the time I had read a few more chapters, that intrusive clamor had vanished, drowned out by the urgent rhythm of Cummins’s compulsively readable prose. No more noise. No more chatter.

Only the story remained.