Book Review: Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance
A candid peek into a side of America that I had only ever seen in YouTube videos - mostly those involving people with too-small shirts screaming in Walmarts, waving 2L bottles of soda over their heads as their waist-high children look on apathetically. This book was a thorough lesson in the many different journies the people around me have had to take to end up in the same place, albeit in a kind of typical rags-to-riches format.
This book lightly touches on some heavy problems - ones that are woven together in inseperable knots that even the Author, who grew up in that recalcitrant tangle, struggles to make sense of:
If you believe that hard work pays off, then you work hard; if you think it’s hard to get ahead even when you try, then why try at all? Similarly, when people do fail, this mind-set allows them to look outward. I once ran into an old acquaintance at a Middletown bar who told me that he had recently quit his job because he was sick of waking up early. I later saw him complaining on Facebook about the “Obama economy” and how it had affected his life. I don’t doubt that the Obama economy has affected many, but this man is assuredly not among them. His status in life is directly attributable to the choices he’s made, and his life will improve only through better decisions. But for him to make better choices, he needs to live in an environment that forces him to ask tough questions about himself. There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherents by the day.
How much agency do people have in determining the outcomes of their life? How much accountability does the government have? What role does race play? I have seen a lot of contempt aimed at his reductive attempts to address these questions; Vance only briefly attempts to scrounge evidence-backed answers to these problems, and completely ignores others (i.e. race). I don’t fault him for this. These complex questions are the subjects PhD thesis, economic podcasts, and academic conference… not college-essay-turned-memoirs. Answering these questions, or even simply addressing them all is not the point of this book.1
This is where things get a little disingenuous. This book is sometimes being presented as something more than it is, being interpreted in an ultra-politcal context (a context most of us are living in, to be fair), and the occasional political generalizations/truisms that the author make just add fuel to the fire. Some quotes from reviewers:
A must-read prism into disaffection among America’s white working class and the rise of the new president.
Anyone wanting to understand Trump’s rie or American inequality should read it.
Never be like these fucking losers who think the deck is stacked against them.
Woops sorry that last one is from JD Vance’s Mamaw.
I really enjoyed this book as a memoir because I tried not to think of it as anything more. I appreciate that it was about a culture I knew nothing about, but I didn’t pretend it was a magical window into the complete understanding of millions of rust-belt americans, it didn’t “explain trump”, and it didn’t do much to educate me on the sources/solutions to the inequality it described. It was a depressingly entertaining success story of a man who worked his a** off to get where he is. That’s it.
1. There is definitely an (intersectionality) argument to be made here that even if the point of the book wasn’t to address other forms of inequality, it should have at least acknowledged them more than it did.