The Field of Restricted Emotion: Empathy and Literary Value in Valeria Luiselli's Lost Children Archive

Abstract

eanine Cummins’s American Dirt was expected to become the publishing event of 2020―and it did, just not in the way Flatiron, the Macmillan imprint that published the book, had anticipated. Blurbed as “a Grapes of Wrath for our times” and picked for Oprah’s Book Club (which guarantees bestseller status), Cummins’s novel about a bilingual, collegeeducated bookshop owner and her son’s adventurous escape from a Mexican drug cartel became the object of a spectacular backlash. While few doubted Cummins’s good intentions, her own infelicitous description of her literary project as an effort to individualize migrants who are often perceived as “a sort of helpless, impoverished, faceless brown mass” (381) betrayed her default alignment with a white, liberal, American middleclass demographic (i.e., with those who congratulate themselves for not seeing migrants as a “faceless brown mass”). Parul Sehgal’s New York Times review found this lack of sensitivity reflected in the novel’s deplorable style, which instead of “individuat[ing] people” ends up “distort[ing]” them “by the stilted prose and characterizations” (Sehgal). It did not help that Cummins, even though she had officially “wished that someone slightly browner than [her] would write” her story (382), was found misrepresenting herself as “half PuertoRican” and boasting that she was married to a formerly undocumented immigrant (her husband is Irish) (Shapiro). That the promotional tour for the book used fake barbed wire―a reference to the illustration on the book cover―as table P I E T E R V E R M E U L E N