That dream may be the meritocratic myth of classlessness (Philipp Meyer’s sharp 2009 debut, American Rust) or the pretence of a colour-blind justice system (Tayari Jones’s exceptional 2019 Women’s prize winner, An American Marriage). American Dirt is at its best when it knowingly explores the insulations, obligations and tenuousness of privilegeįrom Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925) to Philip Roth’s American Pastoral (1997), there is a particular kind of literary ambition rooted in titularly American tales – a desire to puncture the soft complacency of American dreams.

But despite its flamboyant and breathless first act, that’s not the novel American Dirt aspires to be. But The Owl has eyes everywhere.Īll the elements are in place for a slick cartel thriller: a relentless villain an improbable attraction a clock-ticking chase to safety a conveniently precocious child (Luca has an “intrinsic sense of his position on the globe, like a human GPS, pinging his way through the universe”).

A distant cousin in Colorado offers the only hope of escape from the cartel’s reach, so Lydia and Luca head for el norte with a threadbare plan to reach the border by freight train (the infamous La Bestia), and then bribe a people smuggler to help them cross the desert to US soil.

“There are 16 bodies in the backyard, almost everyone Lydia loved in the world.” Only Lydia and her eight-year-old son, Luca, have survived, but there will be no justice, no protection: the police “do nothing, because that’s precisely what the cartel pays them to do”. Jeanine Cummins’s immoderately hyped third novel, American Dirt, opens with blood-sodden terror as The Owl takes revenge: a machine-gun slaughter at a family barbecue. When Sebastián publishes his exposé, Lydia’s darkest fears come to pass. There are few places on the planet more deadly to be a journalist, and the integrity that attracted Lydia to Sebastián terrifies her now that they have a child – it seems “sanctimonious, selfish”. Lydia’s husband, Sebastián, is an investigative journalist, working to unmask “The Owl”, the leader of an inventively gruesome new narcotics cartel whose grab for power has left the city ravaged and fearful. L ydia Quixano Pérez owns a bookshop in downtown Acapulco, where she is teetering on the edge of an emotional affair with her favourite customer, the alluringly well-read Javier.

Jeanine cummins american dirt