American Dirt’ and the tradition of the moral parable

Three years ago, while visiting the University of Alabama to give a lecture, I was browsing at the college bookstore when I heard one of the cashiers saying to another, “I couldn’t stop crying.” They were blond, college-age young women, definitely from the South; it soon became clear they were talking about the hit TV show “This Is Us,” a melodrama about two adult white biological siblings, their black adopted brother and their mother, who raised them alone after their father’s tragic death.

Alabama is one of the most conservative states in the country. “This Is Us” is a show with a distinctly liberal sensibility: disarmingly frank about not only the realities of racism but also class privilege, sexism and fatphobia. These students might not be Trump voters, but it’s likely that many of their neighbors and family members are. Why would they be so caught up in a show so alien from their own lives? What were they getting out of it?

In retrospect, this was a naive and lazy question. Caring about people unlike you is how narrative art works. My favorite TV show is “Friday Night Lights,” set in a fictional small town in Texas that I wouldn’t particularly want to visit, and my favorite novel is “The Story of the Stone,” set in 18th century China. Imaginative projection, the ability to “get inside” a fictional human being or situation, is one of those mysterious human impulses that no critic, neuroscientist or psychoanalyst fully understands.

I thought about this moment in Alabama when I first read about Jeanine Cummins’ novel “American Dirt,” which was the subject of a high-profile marketing campaign and an Oprah’s Book Club selection before a flood of backlash forced an apology from its publisher and the cancellation of Cummins’ book tour. “American Dirt” concerns a Mexican mother and child who flee Acapulco for the U.S. after drug traffickers kill the rest of their family. Its publicity materials stressed that this was an “urgent” narrative intended to humanize the border crisis. In an afterword to “American Dirt,” Cummins writes, “At worst, we perceive [Latino migrants] as an invading mob… a faceless brown mass… We seldom think of them as our fellow human beings.”