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theculturalkrusader · 7 years

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On Hillbilly Elegy: 3 Stars

I read J.D. Vance’s bestselling memoir in less than a day, so I can’t say it wasn’t a good read. As a native Staten Islander, I have long been torn between the ultra-conservative Island culture (I’ve realized since reading Elegy, SI is more akin to Vance’s beloved “hillbilly” culture than I could’ve imagined) and the more progressive, liberal politics of the City and state of New York encompassing the Island. I was interested in what Elegy had to offer me in the way of insight into things like Why Trump won, Who these people I couldn’t stand to live among really are beneath the surface, and most urgently, How to rectify these two cultures I’m constantly caught between. I was eager, thanks largely to the overwhelmingly positive press the book has received since its release last year, to read this book and gain new insight into this self-obsessed, isolationist, myopic, white [middle-to-lower-class, in this case] patriarchal culture I’ve spent my life amid and relatively appalled by.

I didn’t.

Vance, foremost, struck me as macho. Clearly not one to have dabbled in Buddhist teachings despite his Ivy League education and pedantic obsession with self-responsibility, Vance’s language betrays a lack of compassion beyond the scope of his own fragility. One example that really struck me was in an anecdote he told about overcoming hillbilly fight culture in the outside world: Vance had been cut off by another driver, and planned to get out of his car at a red light and demand an apology, if not fight it out with the guy. But he stopped himself. He acknowledges he had acted appropriately in forgoing a fight, but rather than forgive himself for getting angry in the first place (compassion), he spent the hours afterwards “[doing] the right thing, I silently criticized myself.” (p.247) This admission strikes me as of precisely the same mindset Vance spends his book proselytizing against: that beat-down, my-choices-don’t-matter-and-neither-do-I schema that supposedly separates the more typical hillbillies from one of his success. In one sense, his choice here did prove significant, because no fight ensued, and everyone walked away unscathed.

In a much deeper sense, though, I can’t help but feel these ‘proper’ choices he’s making still resonate with him as somewhat useless, given his reaction to his own flaw in this case is still criticism. Why does one criticize the self? To deprecate, to beat down - the very things Vance can’t stand to see his hillbilly neighbors constantly excusing their lack of accountability with.

I don’t think Vance is terribly self-aware. Disciplined? You bet. Conscientious? Certainly. Intelligent? Absolutely. But self-aware? I’m not convinced. He claims to be self-assured now, but how self-assured are you if you can’t even make a mistake without staying mad at yourself about it for hours upon hours? Moreover, how could a truly self-aware grown man - who’d spent four years in the Marines and three in the Ivy Leagues - really believe that his folk don’t hate President Obama for the color of his skin, but for his difference in class, as Vance lamely tried to argue on p.191? What self-aware scholar says that?

In this one inadvertent clue, I find an entire argument essentially made moot. How can someone claim to have overcome a mindset, want to preach on how he’s done so and why you should too (and why not doing so will doom all affected to depravity and depression), and then, without any sense of irony, continue to employ this mindset as he writes the very work composed to deride it? While Vance’s story was, for the most part, genuinely compelling, his larger narrative fell flat in conveying clear and defined insight, and instead read more like a successful white american male haranguing his people for not being as wise, as strong, as willful, or as great as him. Here I was, thinking I’d be reading a book full of carefully-described bullets delineating why this culture should concern and compel me; a book dense with information and wisdom and well-thought-out insight; a book like Evicted, or We Should All Be Feminists, The New Jim Crow, or Between The World And Me. To my disappointment, it didn’t hold a candle to those works, and certainly did not deserve the level of praise and literary prestige it received, in my mind. To say, “You will not read a more important book about America this year.” (-Economist) feels obsequious and plain untrue. What insight have I gained?

Here are some bullets:

-Hillbilly culture is rooted in the Appalachian mountains and surrounding regions. Sometime in the mid-19th century, a mass emigration in pursuit of better job opportunities made its way from the poorer regions of Appalachia up to northern states like OH, PA, IN, IL, and MI, and pushed this culture up and out of just the Rust/Bible Belt. Hillbilly culture subsequently spread far and wide within middle America, and remains heavily entrenched there to this day. These folks are traditionally Scots-Irish, and are generally considered distinctive in their “persistent and unchanging regional subculture in the country. Their family structures, religion, and politics, and social lives all remain unchanged compared to the wholesale abandonment of tradition that’s occurred nearly everywhere else.” (p.3)

-In describing these Scots-Irish and their culture, Vance weighs the good - intense sense of loyalty, fierce dedication to family and country - and the bad - distrust of and disdain for outsiders; and disclaims himself as Scots-Irish at heart - presumably to allow for wiggle-room in his misguided arguments about self-responsibility, political culture, and overall cultural climate. Of the latter, he conveniently made almost no thoughtful mention, despite drawing a direct comparison between poor whites and poor blacks in their overwhelming cultural similarities more than once. This struck me as incredibly odd, since so much of the 2016 election revolved around racism, racial tension, and shamelessly racist hillbillies punching black people at rallies and threatening to kill them. Given Vance’s task, this should have been explored.

-These qualities he mentions - “good” and “bad” - are exactly the qualities I’d assume drove the majority of hillbillies to vote for Donald Trump. E.g., intense sense of loyalty (to America, however misguided); fierce dedication to family and country (however egregiously misguided here as well); distrust of and disdain for outsiders - in this case, the majority of “outsiders” happen to be non-white…and women (sexism is yet another extremely important factor in assessing both the 2016 election and this culture that remains conspicuously unaddressed in Vance’s book). And who did Donald Trump tout as the biggest enemy of them all? Others! Mexicans are rapists - other. Blacks are thugs - other. Women are fodder for men - other. Hillary is a criminal - other. 2016 was the election of Trump versus The Other. (Vance did not explicitly state this, but since Vance’s non-explanations leave much to desire, the reader is left to deduce for herself, and this is a conclusion I have come to. In fact, I’ve deduced every point on Donald Trump made in this essay so far, because Vance did not give me straight answers. I was sure he would.)

But, Donald Trump was an outsider too - if Barack Obama was intimidating to hillbillies because he was too upperclass, then why are these same people toting Donald Trump as the next greatest thing, when he’s far more ostentatious in displaying his status than Obama could or would ever be? This takes me back to labeling Vance’s aforementioned claim on Obama’s lack of appeal to hillbillies sheer and utter hogwash.

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The bullets above together may explain why:

1) Trump won office at a time when most of us couldn’t understand a vote cast in that direction (which, ironically, Vance made absolutely no effort to himself address or deconstruct…an incredibly lazy cop out, if you ask me). Wasn’t the election what compelled Vance to write this book? What happened to all that sociological insight his book promised? Anecdote - Vance’s narrative tool of choice - here lacks insight; Vance tells anecdote after anecdote, but makes hardly any effort to tie these stories back into the larger picture for which they served as an example, and therefore does not outright explain their significance in relation to our country’s cultural climate; all he does instead is offer reasons to pity these hillbilly people - the very same people he himself lambasts to do better - as if to say, They know not what they’ve done, so forgive them for putting our country in such indescribable danger. It’s an incredibly entitled approach, saturated in what I could only register as white privilege. This takes me back to arguing against Vance’s self-awareness: Vance does not seem at all in-touch with his male white privilege in posing these arguments.

2) Vance himself struggles to narrate from outside his experience, and consequently lacks an objective tone; the subjective tone we’re left with is again, heavily proselytizing instead of plainly informative. Even he doesn’t really understand the WHYs.

3) These people are so goddamned hard to get through to; they’re all absorbed in the same mindset as Vance: I have done this, while I watch others do that. That is wrong because this is right. This is right because look at how much I have to humblebrag about now. All other problems must just be the result of laziness and lack of discipline. Vance argues it’s not the govts. fault (but it is!), it’s not society’s fault (but it is!), it’s your fault, and there is no way to fix it. Except, what Vance does not seem to grasp, is that this culminates exactly the kind of defeatism his people must move away from. He is clearly still immersed.

J.D., I really wanted to tell everyone I know that your book was brilliant, and required reading. I can’t do that, though I will recommend it to anyone seeking a readable hillbilly memoir.

The book was good, but not great. It informed but did not teach. If Elegy exists to inform on what hillbilly culture looks like, acts like, and moves like, I already carry all the info I needed on this topic from growing up on Staten Island, where hillbilly culture is uncredited but very much present. Sass aside, I found this book frustrating, and incredibly overrated. His story is interesting, yes. I read the book in a day without getting bored or restless, and even enjoyed it, yes. His success with self-discipline genuinely inspires me, and I give him credit for making his way out of poverty and into the Ivy Leagues. I respect his unique transition from dejected nobody to Marine, but I respect it as just that - UNIQUE. I wince at his idea that he can extend his narrative to encompass - and shame - all hillbillies not following his lead; his experience is not universal, as demonstrated by his holier-than-thou tone. So how does reading about his non-universal experience actually help me to deeply understand this culture?

It doesn’t.

Did I really learn anything, take away some insight I was certain going into the book I’d come out with? No. This Hillbilly Elegy felt less like a tribute to the dead, and more like a tribute to Vance himself. He cites only 21 sources in a 257 page text. This is not a sociological evaluation, a philosophical text, or even an academic work. This is a memoir, of a hillbilly boy, who, despite an unusually-education-centered upbringing, an Ivy League education, military service (God bless), and what he calls perspective, still sees the world through questionable lenses.

But he married a woman of color, so I’m sure he believes he’s better than his kin in Kentucky and Ohio, even as he still wears their uniform on the pitch.

#hillbilly elegy #j.d. vance #culture #society #american culture #hillbilly culture #white supremacy #conservatism #book blogging

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