The First Novelist Accused of Cultural Appropriation
A couple of news cycles ago, I came upon a Facebook post about the Jeanine Cummins novel American Dirt that hit close to home. Although the book had debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times Best Seller List, criticism was raining down from all corners: It wasn’t good. It wasn’t realistic. It wasn’t deserving of the money and advance praise that had been heaped upon it. Above all, Cummins was being called out for appropriating the immigrant experience, and for worrying that she might not be “brown enough” to tell the story but doing it anyway. In the Facebook post, a friend said she found the charges leveled against Cummins “frightening.” “After all,” she wrote, “William Styron wasn’t a female Holocaust survivor.”
No, he sure wasn’t. In addition to being my father, William Styron was a literary lion of the sort that roamed the cultural savanna in the mid-20th century. His stature, and his privilege as a white man, gave him cover when he created the tragic namesake of his 1979 novel, Sophie’s Choice. My father expected some blowback: “The next few months are going to be very lively,” he wrote to my sister after getting an earful from the critic Harold Bloom. Jewish critics, in particular, detected strains of anti-Semitism in a Holocaust novel whose heroine and creator were both Gentiles. But the book garnered overwhelming praise—Sophie’s Choice was, by most accounts, a very good novel—and the trouble soon died down.
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