Books
Life was hard for poor, white farmers in 1980s Kansas, and so is reading about it.
About dirt-poor American farmers, George VI, Polynesian navigators, subantarctic islands and Central Otago vineyards; and by Jan Morris and Eirlys Hunter
To take a liberty with the lyric of Ella Fitzgerald’s hit, “It ain’t what you say, it’s the way that you say it”. The sentiment suits this book exactly. Reading Sarah Smarsh’s memoir, Heartland, I find myself agreeing with nearly every piece of social commentary she writes, but increasingly repelled by the overwritten and egocentric way she expresses herself.
Smarsh was born and raised in the 1980s on a dirt-poor farm in flat, featureless, wheat-growing Kansas, 50km west of Wichita. Mum and Dad scrabbled hard at multiple jobs and put food on the
table, but never made enough to save anything, were never able to move out of cheap houses or trailers and never expected their children to go much beyond elementary education.
In the extended family, and typical of their community, there was a pattern of teenage pregnancy leading to young and unstable marriages and much domestic
She describes the way neoliberalism has destroyed a workable system of social welfare and made education and healthcare less affordable.
violence. Grandma married and divorced six times. Dad was a caring provider, but was permanently damaged by chemical poisoning when his small farm lost money and he had to take a factory job. Mum was rather distant and tight-lipped, resenting the fact that she was given no opportunities to develop her talents. Mum and Dad eventually divorced.
According to Smarsh, this is a book about the “white working-class”, which in the US means a paradoxical blend of “both racial privilege and economic disadvantage”. More bluntly, it is about “what is means to be a poor kid in a rich country founded on the promise of equality”. She describes the way postReagan neoliberalism, followed by all presidents since, has destroyed a workable system of social welfare and made education and healthcare less affordable, while promoting the myth that the poor are poor only because they are either stupid or lazy.
On the evidence she gives, it is hard to disagree with any of this. But then there is that problem of style. Smarsh’s conceit is that she is addressing her memoir to the daughter she never had, as she would never have got ahead if she had children.
But her second-person address verges on the twee with its overwrought attempts at lyricism. It rapidly becomes a device to express her ambiguity about having left her roots behind her and having made it outside the world of poor whites (fellow at Harvard; professor of non-fiction writing). The effect is to sideline the social commentary.