Books that teach, but still disappoint
Hillbilly Elegy is an important book, but it came up short
Like many of you I have been doing a lot of reading over the winter and spring. I watch for new books that come along. If they are highly recommended by friends who are good readers or in the reviews, I seek out a copy. Then, as time allows, I take up the book with great, or more accurately, modest expectations.
On occasion I come away from the experience enthused and keyed up. My reading justifies the hoopla. When my pleasure is considerable and the book merits attention for its ideas and story I am ready to write a column about it.
At the same time I sometimes find myself disappointed in some fundamental way, though I am often unsure about how to define my dissatisfaction. I am not the kind of reader who gives up on a book if the first few chapters don’t work for me. Nor do I slack off when the middle parts fail to live up to the beginning. Rather I plow on patiently, awaiting some fresh illumination or connection which will carry me forward to the book’s end.
It so happens that I have found several books SOMEWHAT disappointing in recent months. The one I want to bring forward today is J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy (2016). It’s been on the
New York Times Best-Seller List for many months and was heartily urged upon me by several American friends in Nova Scotia. It is clearly an important book and “a good read” in many ways, but it came up short for me in the reading, despite the fact that it awakened me to certain aspects of American culture about which I knew very little.
Subtitled A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, Hillbilly Elegy dramatizes Vance’s youth in an Appalachian hill-country family that moved from rural and backwoods Kentucky in the 1940s to rustbelt Ohio. They moved from sharecropping and just muddling by to good-paying jobs in Midwestern steel mills and factories. In Ohio for a time their lives approached middleclass status, at least in terms of income, but then the jobs literally went south and they fell back on their old inward ways.
These Kentucky families kept up their habitual outlook and habits in Ohio. Because of the behaviour of his unstable mother, young J.D. fell back on his Kentucky-born grandparents, known affectionately in the family as “Mamaw” and “Papaw.” They become the stars of the story. In their own youths Mamaw and Pawaw had been far from middle-class role models. Pawaw was a persistent and unreliable drunk and Mamaw was a violent and foul-mouthed spouse who practiced the rough justice of her hill-country family, the Blantons. It was only in their later years that they reconciled with each other and were able to provide stability and direction for their grandson.
The Blanton-Vance family stand forth as a much larger social problem. They are at heart “hillbillies” or, still more negatively, “white trash.” Beyond telling his compelling family story, Vance draws on current sociological studies to provide a telling analysis of Appalachian or hillbilly culture. It details the ongoing and painful stasis of a particular set of rural people; they can be seen as the kind of conservatives who, in their unprogressive way and cultural stasis, sincerely hoped to find a new raison d’etre for themselves in Donald Trump’s promises to make (middle) America great again.
While analyzing the failure of his own people, Vance himself moves beyond their limited view to achieve high levels of (American) success; however, he is a hillbilly at heart and, despite the drama of his personal achievements, he continues personally to wrestle with the psychological roots of their outlook. One sociologist Martin Seligman defines that problem as “learned helplessness.” Too many rural Kentuckians have become “welfare bums” in the present, creatively embracing cell-phone culture and local opportunism while seeking political grounds to justify the stagnancy of their lives.
His family were tough “hill people” of Scots-Irish descent, prone to violence, alcoholism and other excesses, while preserving a strong familial insularity and pride. Attracted by government promises of gainful employment in the 1940s, they left the hill country to find work in “Middletucky,” aka. Middleton, Ohio and other such towns. They found gainful work for a time, but have remained there even though most of the jobs have melted away. Stuck without employment in a broken economy, they have turned to drugs, alcohol and the black market as refuge. As well, they turned on a government that in their minds had deceived them.
Once loyal Democrats, they evolved into aggressive Republicans who saw large, bureaucratic government as their new enemy. At the same time, as they had done in the past, they turned their backs on available educational opportunities and carried on in a repetitive circularity. Having approached the middleclass dream for a time, they now rejected it as part of their defeat.
Vance managed to escape all that. He credits his grandparents for their hard-won guidance. In their later years they had managed to lift themselves out of the ongoing cycle of violence and stasis to provide him with a coherent sense of direction. That led him to reform his lazy and unproductive habits late in his high-school years. Then with the prospect of attending Ohio State he entered the military and learned the discipline he needed from the Marines. Thus trained, he was ready to take advantage of his educational opportunity. Fast forward a decade: the J.D. Vance of the present has an undergraduate degree from The Ohio State, a law degree from Yale, a happy marriage, a legal career and a promising career as a writer.
But still the book frustrated me both for its elegiac depiction of the mindset of static conservatism today and for the state of mind behind the narrative. I wanted Vance to take a more pro-active approach to his life. In his memoir he relies far too much on teachers and advisors rather than his own efforts, vision and initiatives. This is not to say that teachers and advisors are unimportant. Far from it. In his self-presentation, however, he falls back on sociological and psychological theories—from “learned helplessness” to ACES (adverse childhood experience syndrome)—seemingly giving these conditions power over individual autonomy, self-respect and personal drive. He credits the Marines with making him over into a man, but he leaves us in the final chapters with a sense of his continuing suspension, despite having achieved so much in the present. While being grateful for the changes in his life, he seems sadly hampered in his actions as a mature individual.
Hillbilly Elegy is both forward and backward looking as a selfstudy. But Vance does manage a further kind of success as an author. He vividly portrays a backward but insular culture that has had a powerful influence on current American politics. I now think about his “hillbilly” world every time I try to understand the people who seem so solidly to support Donald Trump as president.