Hillbilly Elegy: commentary, review

Commentary/Review:  Hillbilly Elegy

            Hillbilly Elegy is a memoir by J.D. Vance.  Vance, a former hillbilly and Yale Law School graduate's greatest claim to fame is that he got out.  Attention: he has not written a White Lives Matter book and the publisher, Harper, wants to make sure we know this.  There are 11 solid pages of "Praise For" blurbs right up front. With most books there are a few on the back cover and maybe a couple of pages in the beginning if it’s really good.  So when I picked up Elegy I figured it must be the best book ever written in the entire history of the world.

            It’s not, but it is an interesting account of the catastrophic combination of tribalism and traditions born of living in poverty.  Vance’s tribe springs from Scots-Irish immigrants that landed in Appalachia, mostly becoming coal miners, but moved to a small town of the so-called rust belt of Ohio when the coal mines began to shut down in the 1970’s and 80’s.  He gives an account of his life from his earliest memories to the present with kind of unflinching representations of the extended family he grew up with.  “Kind of,” because he’s stuck with the memoirist’s dilemma.  Some of the people he writes about are still alive and he doesn’t want to hurt them.  There is his mother, who winds up a homeless heroin addict, while his sister and aunts remain virtuous and stalwart to the end.  Vance himself, having survived a childhood full of domestic violence (though little of it directed at him), substance abuse, poverty, and an emotionally enmeshed extended family so dysfunctional that it doesn’t have time for anything but rescuing kids from abusive parents, divorce, bailing each other out of jail, going to rehab, battling obesity and diabetes, and dying early due to unhealthy habits and extreme stress, grows up, pulls himself up by his own bootstraps—U.S. Marine issued-- and attends an ivy league law school by virtue of extreme smarts and the fact that such institutions take a few poor people in to prove they’re not elitist, (which of course, they are.)  Unfortunately, Vance grows up to be a conservative Republican.  In the Afterward he claims he didn’t vote for Trump, but I don’t believe him.

            This book was published in 2016, which means it was written before the current shit storm of the Trump White House commenced.  But for all its virtues, and it has many, the greatest of Hillbilly Elegy is that it explains the mentality of the people who put Trump in the White House and continue to support him.  They are white and they are furious.  The latter is not necessarily directed at anyone in particular; it’s aimless.  It is simply the ambient emotional state of a particular segment of the population, and they like Trump because he is aimlessly furious too.  One day he is mad at the Democrats, then next woman, then Latinos, then Muslims.  Later he is enraged by the FBI, or Rex Tillerson, or Alec Baldwin.  Rosy O’Donnell.  Venezuela.  Then come educators, environmentalists, animals—especially that pesky eagle that attacked him while he filming a commercial.  After that you’ve got the EPA, all regulatory agencies, LGBTQ people, Californians, black people, the Pope and Elizabeth Warren.  This ranging, aimless anger is the most defining feature of Donald J. Trump, and as Vance describes succinctly, is the defining feature of every wife beater, mean drunk, dinner plate hurling, drug seeking, chain smoking, jailed or recently paroled member of his Hillbilly family.  This fact combined with their incredible clannishness—they are suspicious of virtually all outsiders and value family loyalty above all else-- successfully insulates them from every possibility of learning ways of life that might provide escape or an iota of happiness for any one of them.  In other words, Hillbilly Elegy is not so much an account of a segment of the population of the United States, but a roadmap describing how one person got out.  Most of the individuals he describes are “losers,” but he, by virtue of twists of fate, one of which is that he was genuinely loved by his grandparents, escaped.

            Books about anything are always products of a selection effect.  By definition, people who write books share several qualities in common.  One, they can read and write.  Two, they can think (usually), and three, they are alive.  Whenever I’ve read great tomes on the reasons for a world war, it is by necessity written by someone who survived it.  I’ve always wanted to hear the point of view of the guy hanging in shreds on the wire strung across the battlefield for the exact purpose of trapping him in that exact predicament.  Did he think the war was a good idea?  Serial killer books are always, and again by necessity, written about the psychologies of the perpetrators and not the person who is now a skeleton chained to a drainpipe in a moldy basement somewhere.  Analogously, Hillbilly Elegy is written by a survivor of cultural, socioeconomic, and familial chaos of a type rife in virtually all sectors of the American public in which clinging to destructive traditions is the only clear option presented.  It would have been a much more interesting book if penned by the heroin addicted, homeless mother.  But of course she can’t write, or think, or probably, remember her own name.