The NYT called American Dirt a 'Homeric epic.' Two weeks later, everyone disagreed.

In January 2020, the New York Times Book Review published Lauren Groff's glowing review of American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins, calling it a 'Homeric epic' of the immigrant experience. Within two weeks, the review had aged worse than milk in a sauna. Latino authors, immigration advocates, and approximately everyone on literary Twitter pointed out that the book was riddled with stereotypes, that the author was not herself an immigrant from Mexico, and that the entire publishing apparatus around the book — including the now-infamous barbed wire centerpiece at a launch party — demonstrated a staggering lack of cultural awareness. The NYT review anticipated none of this.

Let me be specific about what went wrong. Groff's review evaluated American Dirt purely as a literary object — prose quality, narrative momentum, emotional impact. These are valid critical axes. But when you're reviewing a novel that purports to tell the definitive story of the Mexican immigrant experience, and you don't once examine whether the story rings true to the people it claims to represent, you haven't written a review. You've written a blurb. The NYT Book Review had access to the same galley that dozens of Mexican-American authors read and immediately flagged as problematic. Groff's review contains zero engagement with questions of representation, authenticity, or the politics of who gets to tell which stories. For a publication that positions itself as the paper of record on literary matters, this was not a blind spot — it was a blackout.

The structural issue is revealing. The NYT assigned this review to Lauren Groff, a white American literary novelist. They did not assign it to a Mexican-American writer, an immigration journalist, or anyone with firsthand knowledge of the experience depicted in the book. This is an editorial choice. The NYT Book Review made a decision about whose perspective mattered for this particular book, and they chose someone who would evaluate craft over content. The result was a review that called a deeply contested portrayal of Mexican suffering 'dazzling' — a word that tells you everything about the reviewer's distance from the subject matter.

The American Dirt episode became a case study in how mainstream literary institutions amplify certain voices while marginalizing others. The NYT review was a load-bearing pillar in that amplification. Groff's praise helped position the book as the definitive immigration novel of its era, a status it never earned and couldn't sustain. The review is a monument to what happens when the most powerful book review section in America treats cultural sensitivity as someone else's department.