Summary of Hillbilly Elegy : a Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J. D. Vance

This book disappointed me. I was initially compelled, hopeful, but the insight was very short of paradigm shifting and the memoir section was almost tedious. My parents were from Preble county Ohio, (a county he mentions), and my own background is similar. So I was open to this book, and many of his anecdotes and expressions are familiar to me.
While advertised as some kind of manifesto for the rust belt, it is more of a memoir and less of a discerning social critique. To extrapolate a culture from a single representative of one family is arrogant and short sighed. Such a thing can only be done in a perceptive work of fiction. He tries though, because he made it big time. Guess where? Yale. He will tell you that 1000 times.
Yet I also found it hard to care about another white male's journey to the upper echelons. And these accomplishments didn't give him a soul. Yet between the military and Yale his was institutionally delivered. Despite the vulnerability he professes at times, he is smugly proud of himself, and so in awe of the just powers of the ivy league and upward mobility. The lack of self-doubt is dangerous, for all hillbillies and others no matter where they have landed on the social ladder.
His family recollections were sweet and sincere, and reflective. Though in this bleak world your childhood would have to be grim to make most people blink. Not that a memoir should be a horror show contest of childhood, but my sense was that his was unstable but not Oprah book club bad. So how far he had to climb could be a matter of contention. But his grandparents are delightful, and this passages have humor and empathy.
The social analysis part, however, lacked imagination. He applies popular research from sociology 101 research that targets the urban poor (learned helplessness, failure of schools, standard social problems, etc) and transplants it rural white America. Nothing he mentions will be new to a reasonably well-read person. It is too his credit perhaps that he describes when he cannot explain.
Overall, I did find it thought provoking, and I can see why it is a popular book club selection. I found him obnoxious at times. Having spent a few years in the Middle East I think he is rather glib on the military part as well.
Whatever is wrong with America is beyond the scope of this book. It is a starting point, albeit a shallow one, and I hope a better-researched book that feels more mature and authentic will be written on this subject soon. However, the memoir part has more merit.

I think I wish Vance had set out to write a true memoir. Hillbilly Elegy is at its best in those autobiographical moments -- you really feel for teenage Vance, his poor sister/surrogate-mother and his matriarch figure of a grandmother. Many memoirs increase their narrative power by adding analysis, but in Vance's case, I think the result is less than the sum of its parts. When he switches to political or socioeconomic commentary he takes an extremely preachy tone, which I think is not necessarily warranted by the narrative.

Although I would consider this book a four-star work (all for the memoir portions), three sentences really detracted for me. It's highly unusual for me to have such a visceral reaction to a single sentence, much less more than once in a book, but here we are:

1. In the very beginning (and then repeatedly throughout), Vance talks about how "Hillbillies" are culturally distinct from African Americans as a way of justifying their poverty behavior, but not that of African Americans...and then thoroughly fails to prove that. Through years of serving the poor urban African American population as a physician, I found everything Vance talked about as unique to Appalachian whites to resonate about the subset of poor, urban African Americans well. I think the two populations are extremely similar in their Protestant ethics, historic participation in the labor portion of the workforce and disenchantment with the American Dream. I don't know why this bothers me so much, except that it really smacks of White exceptionalism -- even when we're poor, we're special!

2. Vance talks about how patriotic he is and then says essentially that no one on the "Acela corridor" would ever understand that feeling. First of all, the generalization that the Acela corridor is all wealthy, white liberals needs to stop -- I meet plenty of disadvantaged people right here in my Acela-ified city. But secondly, OK, I'm white, I'm Jewish, I've never been working class in my life, I went to a hippy liberal arts college and I'm a doctor, so I'm the epitome of the Acela corridor and I think I've figured out patriotism just fine, thanks.

3. He talks about the loss of American heros. True, the days of astronauts and politicians being the heros instead of teenybopper singers and actors are over (assuming the past was ever truly like that.) but then he brings up Obama. To me, Obama is the American hero of our generation -- a brilliant, charismatic, young president, who pulled the economy out of a death spiral, brought healthcare to millions, brought about the legalization of gay marriage, doubled the number of female supreme court justices in the history of the country and did it all while keeping his nose incredibly clean. To Vance, Obama is an "alien." Not because he's black, Vance hastens, but because he's well-spoken and highly educated. Yes, this is the complaint of someone who less than 50 pages prior said that what the Appalachians need is an American politician hero. But, apparently not a well-spoken, highly-educated (black) one. If you think there's racism between those lines, well, I'm with you.

I kept wondering if I'd cut Vance more slack if I didn't know that he was a Republican, but the fact of the matter is that overall, I felt like he didn't read between his own lines. He talks about his understanding of learned helplessness, but then is dumbfounded when his neighbors won't commit to jobs. He talks about how he believes culture drags down everyone in it, but then says that he thinks the best that can happen is placing a thumb on the scale for disadvantaged kids, rather than the evidence-based practices, like housing-first that's been shown to intervene on culture.

It's not all bad -- some of Vance's comments are both critical and point out a recurrent problem I see in my own larger community: especially an unawareness of need-based aid for college by those who actually need it and the way that community college and other less prestigious institutions often cost more, rather than less for the working class and come with less of the unwritten benefits. Overall, I found Vance bracingly honest and reflective about his own experience growing up in the working class, but I wish he would think about generalizing his experience beyond the Appalachians.

A compassionate, modern update to the hillbilly stereotype. This is a useful book, not because it slices apart race from economics and culture, and not because it's a well-written lyric masterpiece (which it does and it is not), but because it yields a new way of thinking about problems in our education and economic systems, and because it helped me find a pattern in some of the stories shaken from my own family tree.

Hillbilly culture is an honor culture, and defending the family honor goes with hiding the family's problems. The ineffectual treatment of those problems by well-meaning family members helps create a cycle of failure, dependency, and despair. It's this despair of learned helplessness, where someone believes no matter what he does, his fate is sealed and no decision or action can effect improvement in his life, that Vance attributes to the dysfunction and resentment building in his "hill people."

Vance's way out was a family network that provided stability in high school, the Marine Corps, which filled in the gaps in his practical education and life philosophy, and attending Ohio State and later Yale Law. He observes that the people he grew up with rarely enter his new ivy league circle because they didn't know the right choices to make, and didn't have access to the social capital of people who weren't as poor as them. I would have liked more guided application of his insights, but he is still too young and close to things -- looking forward to seeing other responses to this book.