‘Hillbilly Elegy’: On the Lives of the White Working Class
A review of ‘Hillbilly Elegy’, by J.D. Vance; Harper, 2018.
A Marine sergeant apparently told J.D. Vance, United States junior congressman and author of Hillbilly Elegy, that Marine drill sergeants might be tough, but that they were nothing compared to his grandmother. When one went over to her house, she told him (with gun in hand) that if he set one foot on her property, she would blow it off. That tells you something about the kind of world in which J.D. Vance was raised.
A self-described ‘hillbilly’, J.D. grew up in a world of blood feuds, hard drinking, drug abuse, domestic violence, guns and general misery. And yet – somehow – he made his way to Ohio State, Yale Law and the heights of American politics. That ‘somehow’ is the heart of his story, which starts in Middletown, Ohio, where he grew up. His family are from Breathitt County, Kentucky – dubbed ‘Bloody Breathitt’ first, because of the number of local men who volunteered to fight in World War I and second, because a brutal inter-family conflict once made the New York Times. Due to job losses and other factors, there is real social rot in Breathitt County, but the people nonetheless hold on to a peculiar set of Appalachian values. In childhood, J.D. receives useful advice, like how to hit people who insult your mother (turn your body sideways, punch with your hips). In adolescence, be intermittently does well, then poorly, at school. He acquires friends. He gets in trouble. He witnesses family breakdown. And finally, his fortunes change when he moves in with his grandmother and finds the constancy he needs.
J.D. gets useful advice, like how to hit people who insult his mother.
His central theme is that state support for the poorest only goes so far. Without shared values and standards of behaviour of the kind taught through community and religious faith, those without the luxuries of money and education have no chance. With the collapse of those values and standards under advanced liberalism, J.D. says, the lives of the poor have got demonstrably worse. He experiences this himself: his mother marries five times and develops an addiction to prescription painkillers, while his grandparents, who are arguably far more flawed than his mother and have a relationship that is alarmingly combative, stick stubbornly together and live by a code that gives J.D. the stability he needs to succeed. J.D., like Rob Henderson or Patrick Deneen, clearly has a bone to pick to with a wealthy and educated class that he perceives, as it were, to live conservative and talk liberal – to know the importance of marriage, the need for community, the necessity of a normative structure and so on but, in a bid to seem forward-thinking and easy-going, urges those without their privilege to live lives without structure of any kind.
The temptation of a writer like J.D. Vance is to set himself apart from those by whom he was surrounded as a child and teenager – to claim, or at least suggest, that he is special. He resists this temptation. In fact he goes to some length to play down what, it has to be said, is quite an accomplishment. The deck is stacked against him from the start to a pretty ridiculous degree. At one point in his tale he reflects, as if realising for the first time, quite how doomed the people from his background are.
The deck is stacked against him to a hilarious degree.
His style is casual but not overly so. He is really very readable. He punctuates his narrative with data drawn from sociology but doesn’t overdo it: just as he resists the urge to self-aggrandise, he stops himself from lecturing, too. He comes across as humble, in fact; and that is fitting, because this is very much a book aimed at everyone, and it gives some context to the kind of things you find on his Wikipedia page. If he suggests (for instance) that violent marriages shouldn’t necessarily end, then evidently it’s because if his ‘Mamaw’ and ‘Papaw’ had split up, they and he would have been worse off. Or so goes his thinking.
This is a really good read, and one that frames the plight of the white working class in the U.S. in a much more charitable way than is typical, which I suppose is unsurprising. It is funny, a bit mad, and even – forgive the soppiness – quite moving at times – for instance, when J.D. joins the Marines and for the first time starts to think he has a say over how his life will go. You can’t help feeling for this kid and what he went through. There will be those who will say that the book is some kind of stunt, that it was written to boost J.D.’s political career. (I read the other day that he may be named Trump’s vice president.) But I don’t think that is true. It is far too grounded, too authentic for that. That is hard to fake.
