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A woman looks at a copy of "American Dirt" at a bookstore in New York on Jan. 30.
A woman looks at a copy of "American Dirt" at a bookstore in New York on Jan. 30.LAURA BONILLA CAL/AFP via Getty Images

Outrage over author and her work is misplaced

Renée Graham’s opinion piece on the book “American Dirt” (“Oprah needs to clean up her ‘American Dirt’ mess,” Opinion, Jan. 29) is the last straw for me in a long line of self-righteous criticisms of the book. Author Jeanine Cummins has been subjected to an onslaught of criticism that seems to assume she wrote the novel to intentionally eviscerate the culture and story of immigrant Mexicans in this difficult time.

Are authors of fiction no longer allowed to write, even imperfectly, about a circumstance or a culture that is not their own? Isn’t the purpose of fiction to imagine yourself in the time, place, and even the shoes of another? Doing so, it seems to me, is the highest form of empathy. How much does it matter that the empathy is based on a somewhat flawed telling of the details?

Henry James wrote often from the viewpoint of his female characters. Maybe he got some of that wrong. Are we to dismiss his writings as a malicious effort to appropriate the feminine world for a quick literary buck? Of course, James didn’t suffer from the Oprah’s Book Club syndrome or the onslaught of social media that demands perfection at the expense of good.

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Jeffrey Green

Somerville


Controversy recalls the flap over Styron and ‘Nat Turner’

Reading Renée Graham’s discussion of Jeanine Cummins’s novel “American Dirt” and cultural appropriation, one is reminded of a similar controversy that arose more than 50 years ago over white author William Styron’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “The Confessions of Nat Turner,” about the life and times of the leader of an 1831 black slave rebellion in Virginia.

The heated response in “William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond” in large part was initiated and led by members of the English and Afro-American Studies departments at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, notably professors Allan Austin, Sidney Kaplan, and Michael Thelwell. The same questions were raised then as are raised now about who owns and can best understand and interpret the history and culture of distinct racial and ethnic groups.

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I heard Styron in 2003, a few years before his death in 2006, on a panel at Suffolk University, still stoutly defending his right to take on the subject and his treatment of it, with other panelists, both white and Black, disagreeing. The more things change, the more they remain the same.

Paul M. Wright

Boston

The writer is a retired editor for the University of Massachusetts Press.


One appreciative reader

As I was finishing “American Dirt” on Wednesday, I read Renée Graham’s column almost simultaneously. I disagree with her suggestion that the immigrant story can be told only by those inside. With good research and writing talent, any author can tell a story.

I read Jeanine Cummins’s novel “The Outside Boy,” which tells the story of the tinkers in Ireland during the 1950s as their way of life was disintegrating. She caught the cadence of the language as well the nuances of their culture. With great surprise, at the end I discovered that she wasn’t Irish. I didn’t feel the resentment Graham felt , as if someone was usurping another’s territory. Rather, I felt appreciation for an author and her craft.

Ann Connolly

Westwood

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