J. D. Vance's memoir, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, bears witness to the hollowing-out of the American dream, close up and personal. His book will vaccinate you against the idea that whiteness per se is a winning lottery ticket, and it will help you see the people of all races who are struggling in the hollowed-out towns of the Rust Belt. (This review was originally published in The Englewood Review of Books)

Part life narrative and part sociological reflection, Hillbilly Elegy is a beautifully-written book, compelling and finely crafted. Throughout, Vance offers reflections on the causes of poverty rooted in his own life story, incorporating his family history, sociological research, and his observations of the people and places along his life journey as the son of a (mostly) single mother who was addicted to prescription drugs. This addiction ensured that the main source of stability in Vance’s life came from his mountain-tough grandparents.

In Strangers in Their Own Land, the renowned sociologist Arlie Hochschild embarks on a thought-provoking journey from her liberal hometown of Berkeley, California, deep into Louisiana bayou country - a stronghold of the conservative right.

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Vance grounds his narrative first in his family, who migrated from Jackson Hollow, Kentucky, and weremembers of the famously violent Blanton clan. Even while self-critically swelling with a certain pride at the toughness of his family, Vance talks about the weight of continual quarreling on his psyche, a weight that continued to pull him back toward poverty. I will never forget some of the stories he tells—like how when a trucker called his uncle a 'son of a bitch' (the second time), he pulled the trucker from the car, beat him within an inch of his life, and ran an electric saw up and down his body. Or when another uncle heard a man saying he'd like to eat his sister's underwear; and the uncle fetched a pair and made him eat it at knifepoint. Or how, when four-year-old Vance fell asleep on a church pew at a funeral and his grandparents couldn't locate him, they grabbed their guns and sealed off the two exits to the funeral parlor, searching each car as it left for kidnapping perverts. Fascinating stories like this pepper Hillbilly Elegy.

Yes, the Blanton clan was not to be messed with. That's why his grandparents left Appalachia: his 16-year-old grandfather (Papaw) had impregnated his 13-year-old grandma (Mamaw) and right about now was the time to get the hell away from the Blantons and move to faraway Middleton, Ohio. It was a good time to leave. Factories were luring Appalachian families north with promises of steady jobs and wealth.

But when young couples broke off from their networks of extended kin, they no longer had the support they were raised to depend upon. His Papaw drank and his Mamaw fought him with the tenacity of a wolverine. Once, she promised to kill him if he ever drank again. A woman of her word, when he next fell asleep drunk on the couch, she doused him in gasoline and lit him on fire. Only the quick action of her 11-year-old daughter saved him.

And so Vance's mother came out of that tempestuous family with a penchant for violent anger and abuse of the prescription drugs she lifted from her job as a nurse. She latched onto various men who played halfhearted father roles in Vance's life, only to disappear as the fights increased in volume.

But for Vance, poverty was about more than just money. Even when Papaw was rich enough to casually buy a brand-new Oldsmobile and then wrap it around a telephone pole during a bender, the stability of middle-class life was out of reach because of the emotional volatility they'd brought from Appalachia.

But there's much more to Vance's family than the stories a neighbor might relay to Child Protective Services. The tough fibers of salvation and hope run through his family: Papaw's recovery from alcoholism is proof. By the time his mother was totally out of control, his Mamaw and Papaw were solid people, hardworking and ferociously loyal. His Papaw taught him math. His Mamaw took him in during high school and gave him a stable place to live and make good grades. And his mother taught him the importance of intelligence. For Vance, the Scots-Irish extended family was a refuge when his mother lost the plot. A stable family member can be enough to give a young person a boost out of poverty and into self-determination.

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After high school, Vance joined the Marines, which watered seeds of confidence and self-reliance that grew as he went on to Ohio State and later to Yale Law. He attributes his later success to the build-you-from-the-ground-up approach of the Marine Corps. Through all of it, Vance never truly felt like an outsider until he landed at Yale and encountered a culture where, he speculates, many of his friends may never have cleaned up after themselves, leaving them unable to empathize with the waiters and waitresses that bring them their food and clean up after them.

While he doesn't state this, I think Vance wrote the book in part to answer the personal question, 'Why me? Why did I escape from poverty when so many do not?' And so he looks at the personal and familial choices that gave him the foundation necessary to navigate upward mobility.

Before reading this book, I did not recognize the link between poverty and the tenacity of Scots-Irish culture in the face of the homogenizing white culture, tenacity that made it into a permanent cultural underclass. Underlying the casual mockery of poor whites is the question, 'Why can't these people just become white like everybody else?' Implicit in this is the assumption that not all white people are truly 'white,' though they can become so. Vance makes the point that class-based discrimination is a socially acceptable form of bigotry.

While the book includes light intersectional passages on race, I do think that the book suffers somewhat when it does not mention racism in the same breath as classism. That said, I do understand the roots of white poverty better than I did before reading the book, and that alone is worth the price of admission.

I picked up Hillbilly Elegy because I wanted to understand the rage of the white working class that has partly fueled the Trump phenomenon. As Vance said in the widely-read American Conservative article that prompted my interest, 'The simple answer is that these people – my people – are really struggling, and there hasn't been a single political candidate who speaks to those struggles in a long time. Donald Trump at least tries.'

But Vance does not support Trump. He writes in The Guardian: 'The tragedy of Trump's candidacy is that, embedded in his furious exhortations against Muslims and Mexicans and trade deals gone awry is a message that America's white poor don't need: that everything wrong in your life is someone else's fault. No one doubts that globalisation and automation have disproportionately had an impact on the white working class and no responsible politics should fail to appreciate and address that fact. Yet our neighbourhoods and our communities create certain pressures and instill certain values that make it harder for our children to lead happy lives.'

When asked what he would say to liberals, Vance says, '. . . stop pretending that every problem is a structural problem, something imposed on the poor from the outside.'

In other words, those who escape the tides and currents of economics are those who believe in their own agency. And for Vance, programs like welfare can teach people that they don't have economic agency.

It's very difficult to maintain a dual discourse. After all, there is a reason why small factory towns like Middleton, Ohio, are collapsing in on themselves with opioids and unemployment: NAFTA and other trade deals made it easy for factories to pick up and leave for places where wages were lower and unions were weak.

But it is truly essential to keep both discourses alive. Yes, individuals need to cultivate the psychological toughness, even when it seems delusional, to break out of poverty. Vance is writing to people like himself. But Hillbilly Elegy suffers from a lack of critique of the forces behind the forces that create poverty. It's not a glaring omission because it's an elegant book of stories – a memoir – and it can be read alongside other works.

In the end, I highly recommend Hillbilly Elegy. It's a story that's part of the warp and weft of life here in the Rust Belt, and it's one that will enrich and inspire you.

A Review of Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J. D. Vance. Hardback: Harper, 2016

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Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis is a 2016 memoir by J. D. Vance about the Appalachian values of his Kentucky family and their relation to the social problems of his hometown of Middletown, Ohio, where his mother's parents moved when they were young.

Summary[edit]

Vance describes his upbringing and family background while growing up in the city of Middletown, Ohio, the third largest city in the Cincinnati metropolitan area. He writes about a family history of poverty and low-paying, physical jobs that have since disappeared or worsened in their guarantees, and compares this life with his perspective after leaving it.

Though Vance was raised in Middletown, his mother and her family were from Breathitt County, Kentucky. Their Appalachian values include traits like loyalty and love of country, despite social issues including violence and verbal abuse. He recounts his grandparents' alcoholism and abuse, and his unstable mother's history of drug addictions and failed relationships. Vance's grandparents eventually reconciled and became his de facto guardians. He was pushed by his tough but loving grandmother, and eventually Vance was able to leave Middletown to attend Ohio State University and Yale Law School.^[1]

Alongside his personal history, Vance raises questions such as the responsibility of his family and people for their own misfortune. Vance blames hillbilly culture and its supposed encouragement of social rot. Comparatively, he feels that economic insecurity plays a much lesser role. To lend credence to his argument, Vance regularly relies on personal experience. As a grocery store checkout cashier, he watched welfare recipients talk on cell phones although the working Vance could not afford one. His resentment of those who seemed to profit from poor behavior while he struggled, especially combined with his values of personal responsibility and tough love, is presented as a microcosm of the reason for Appalachia's overall political swing from strong Democratic Party to strong Republican affiliations. Likewise, he recounts stories intended to showcase a lack of work ethic including the story of a man who quit after expressing dislike over his job's hours and posted to social media about the 'Obama economy', as well as a co-worker, with a pregnant girlfriend, who would skip work.^[1]

Hillbilly Elegy Goodreads Quotes

Publication[edit]

The book was popularized by an interview with the author published by The American Conservative in late July 2016. The volume of requests briefly disabled the website. Halfway through the next month, The New York Times wrote that the title had remained in the top ten Amazon bestsellers since the interview's publication.^[1]

Vance credits his Yale contract law professor Amy Chua as the 'authorial godmother' of the book.^[2]

Reception[edit]

The book reached the top of The New York Times Best Seller list in August 2016^[3] and January 2017.^[4] Many journalists criticized Vance for generalizing too much from his personal upbringing in suburban Ohio.^[5][6][7][8]

American Conservative contributor and blogger Rod Dreher expressed admiration for Hillbilly Elegy, saying that Vance 'draws conclusions…that may be hard for some people to take. But Vance has earned the right to make those judgments. This was his life. He speaks with authority that has been extremely hard won.'^[9] The following month, Dreher posted about why liberals loved the book.^[10]New York Post columnist and editor of CommentaryJohn Podhoretz described the book as among the year's most provocative.^[11] The book was positively received by conservatives such as National Review columnist Mona Charen^[12] and National Review editor and Slate columnist Reihan Salam.^[13]

By contrast, Jared Yates Sexton of Salon criticized Vance for his 'damaging rhetoric' and for endorsing policies used to 'gut the poor.' He argues that Vance 'totally discounts the role racism played in the white working class's opposition to President Obama.'^[14] Sarah Jones of The New Republic mocked Vance as 'the false prophet of Blue America,' dismissing him as 'a flawed guide to this world' and the book as little more than 'a list of myths about welfare queens repackaged as a primer on the white working class.'^[6]The New York Times wrote that Vance's direct confrontation of a social taboo is admirable regardless of whether the reader agrees with his conclusions. The newspaper writes that Vance's subject is despair, and his argument is more generous in that it blames fatalism and learned helplessness rather than indolence.^[1] Bob Hutton of Jacobin wrote that Vance's argument relied on circular logic, ignored existing scholarship on Appalachian poverty, and was 'primarily a work of self-congratulation.'^[5]Sarah Smarsh with The Guardian noted that 'most downtrodden whites are not conservative male Protestants from Appalachia' and called into question Vance's generalizations about the white working class from his personal upbringing.^[7]

A 2017 Brookings Institution report noted that, “JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy became a national bestseller for its raw, emotional portrait of growing up in and eventually out of a poor rural community riddled by drug addiction and instability.' Vance's account anecdotally confirmed the report's conclusion that family stability is essential to upward mobility.^[15] The book provoked a response in the form of an anthology, Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy, edited by Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll. The essays in the volume criticize Vance for making broad generalizations and reproducing myths about poverty.^[8]

Film adaptation[edit]

A film adaptation was released in select theaters in the United States on November 11, 2020, then digitally on Netflix on November 24. It was directed by Ron Howard and stars Glenn Close, Amy Adams, Gabriel Basso^[16][17] and Haley Bennett. Although a few days of filming were planned for the book's setting of Middletown, Ohio,^[18] much of the filming in the summer of 2019 was in Atlanta, Clayton and Macon, Georgia, using the code name 'IVAN.'^[19][20]

References[edit]

1. ^ ^abcdSenior, Jennifer (August 10, 2016). 'Review: In 'Hillbilly Elegy,' a Tough Love Analysis of the Poor Who Back Trump'. The New York Times. Archived from the original on October 11, 2016. Retrieved October 11, 2016.
2. ^Heller, Karen (February 6, 2017). ''Hillbilly Elegy' made J.D. Vance the voice of the Rust Belt. But does he want that job?'. The Washington Post. Archived from the original on November 25, 2020. Retrieved March 13, 2017.
3. ^Barro, Josh (August 22, 2016). 'The new memoir 'Hillbilly Elegy' highlights the core social-policy question of our time'. Business Insider. Archived from the original on February 13, 2017. Retrieved March 13, 2017.
4. ^'Combined Print & E-Book Nonfiction Books – Best Sellers – January 22, 2017'. The New York Times. Archived from the original on January 27, 2017. Retrieved February 12, 2017.
5. ^ ^ab'Hillbilly Elitism'. jacobinmag.com. Archived from the original on May 7, 2020. Retrieved April 2, 2020.
6. ^ ^abJones, Sarah (November 17, 2016). 'J.D. Vance, the False Prophet of Blue America'. The New Republic. Archived from the original on March 17, 2017. Retrieved March 22, 2017.
7. ^ ^abSmarsh, Sarah (October 13, 2016). 'Dangerous idiots: how the liberal media elite failed working-class Americans'. The Guardian. ISSN0261-3077. Archived from the original on April 18, 2020. Retrieved April 19, 2020.
8. ^ ^abGarner, Dwight (February 25, 2019). ''Hillbilly Elegy' Had Strong Opinions About Appalachians. Now, Appalachians Return the Favor'. The New York Times. ISSN0362-4331. Archived from the original on February 21, 2020. Retrieved April 2, 2020.
9. ^Dreher, Rod (July 11, 2016). 'Hillbilly America: Do White Lives Matter?'. The American Conservative. Archived from the original on March 22, 2017. Retrieved March 22, 2017.
10. ^Dreher, Rod (August 5, 2016). 'Why Liberals Love 'Hillbilly Elegy''. The American Conservative. Archived from the original on October 12, 2016. Retrieved March 22, 2017.
11. ^Podhoretz, John (October 16, 2016). 'The Truly Forgotten Republican Voter'. Commentary. Archived from the original on February 25, 2017. Retrieved March 12, 2017.
12. ^'Hillbilly Elegy: J.D. Vance's New Book Reveals Much about Trump & America'. National Review. July 28, 2016. Archived from the original on March 18, 2017. Retrieved March 22, 2017.
13. ^'Reihan Salam on Twitter: 'Very excited for @JDVance1. HILLBILLY ELEGY is excellent, and it'll be published in late June:''. Twitter. April 30, 2016. Archived from the original on April 17, 2017. Retrieved March 22, 2017.
14. ^Jared Yates Sexton (March 11, 2017). 'Hillbilly sellout: The politics of J. D. Vance's 'Hillbilly Elegy' are already being used to gut the working poor'. Salon. Archived from the original on March 18, 2017. Retrieved March 22, 2017.
15. ^Eleanor Krause and Richard V. Reeves (2017) Rural Dreams: Upward Mobility in America's Countryside, pp.12–13. Brookings Institution. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/es_20170905_ruralmobility.pdfArchived December 6, 2020, at the Wayback Machine
16. ^Williams, Trey (April 12, 2019). Close%5d%5d plays a strong matriarch, Mamaw, who saves the hero./ 'Ron Howard-Directed 'Hillbilly Elegy' Casts Gabriel Basso in Lead Role' Check |url= value (help). TheWrap. Archived from the original on May 13, 2019. Retrieved July 5, 2019.
17. ^WKRC (April 16, 2019). ''Hillbilly Elegy' expected to be filmed locally; more cast members sign on'. Local 12/WKRC-TV. Archived from the original on April 17, 2019. Retrieved July 5, 2019.
18. ^Kiesewetter, John (June 3, 2019). 'Glenn Close, Amy Adams, Visit Middletown For 'Hillbilly Elegy' Meeting'. WVXU Cincinnati Public Radio. Archived from the original on June 7, 2019.
19. ^Walljasper, Matt (June 27, 2019). 'What's filming in Atlanta now? Lovecraft Country, The Conjuring 3, Waldo, Hillbilly Elegy, and more'. Atlanta Magazine. Archived from the original on June 28, 2019. Retrieved July 5, 2019.
20. ^Chandler, Tom (July 3, 2019). 'Netflix to begin filming movie 'Ivan' in Macon'. The Georgia Sun. Archived from the original on July 5, 2019. Retrieved July 5, 2019.

External links[edit]