Let Us Now Graze Famous Men
Rereading Hillbilly Elegy so you don't buy it
Everyone’s talking about about J.D. Vance again.
(Sorry, make that “JD Vance” — he thinks women should be only pregnant or post-menopausal, so he got rid of the periods).
This means Hillbilly Elegy1 is back on the bestseller lists and back on the lips of people I know and love, leading to any number of versions of the following:
Friend: “I’ve been thinking I should read that, get a sense of him.”
Me: <incoherent sputtering; blood pressure skyrockets; right temple begins to pulse like the heart ripped out of that guy’s chest in Temple of Doom>
If I’m able to take enough deep breaths before my interlocutor backs away, I’ll offer my friend Matthew Ferrence’s summation of Vance’s cynical project: “a conservative wet dream about Appalachian troubles solved by the bootstrap mythos, overlaid with a veneer of racial-social purity. And it all begins by Vance’s nodding assertions that, yup, Appalachia is what you thought.”
That comes from Ferrence’s much better-written 2020 memoir, Appalachia North, in which he wrestles more honestly with both the amorphous definition of an ill-defined region and his own complicated relationship with the place.2
There have been many good takedowns, dismantlings, and eviscerations of the alleged couch-defiler’s “improbably successful, ham-fisted memoir of semi-Appalachian life.”3
Any and all of the above links should satisfactorily disabuse you of the notion that Vance either a) has anything meaningful to say, or b) can be trusted to mean anything he says. But, in the interest of my resting heart rate, I feel the need to articulate for myself why you, friends and neighbors, should not read Hillbilly Elegy4 — especially if your goal is to understand where the would-be V.P. is “coming from.”
Seven Things I Hate about Hillbilly Elegy
1. Stolen Rural Valor
Vance’s faux rurality is foregrounded on the book’s unfortunately ubiquitous cover:
The experience of growing up in my tiny hometown of Alma, (pop. 400) and being “from rural Missouri” is a significant part of my self-conception. And I’m happy to put eastern Lafayette County up against anyone who says they’re “from the middle of nowhere.” Oh, your town was like Mayberry? Did you also have a mayor who served as custodian at your elementary school? Was your grandma the postmaster? Your population number has four digits in it? GTFO.
So I’ll cop to a thick seam of resentment that runs through through my fulminating rage about this book, my absolute lack of chill about its persistence in conversation. I’m from rural America! This jamoke is from Middletown, Ohio — population 50,000! According to the Census Bureau: “only 4.0% of (780) of all cities had a population of 50,000 or more in 2019, yet nearly 39% of the U.S. population (127.8 million) live in those cities.” Emphasis added.
Vance finesses this by saying he considers Middletown his “address” and Jackson, Kentucky his “home,” even though the latter was just a place he sometimes visited with his grandparents in the summer, where he “felt like hillbilly royalty” after hearing the stories of his ancestors’ violent exploits.
His grandparents left Jackson for Middletown in the 1940s, and neither Vance nor his mother or her siblings ever lived in Kentucky, they were “the first to grow up in the industrial Midwest, far from the deep twangs and one-room schools of the hills. They attended modern high schools with thousands of other students.”
So did he! Gah! I’m pulling my hair out.
2. The NPR Whisperer
In the years after his book first appeared, Vance was often called “the white working-class whisperer.” The alliteration is nice, but this gets it exactly backward. “The ____ Whisperer” formulation comes from the 1995 book and 1998 Robert Redford film “The Horse Whisperer,” in which Redford’s character, with a gentle hand, coaxes traumatized horses back to full health.
In the aftermath of the 2016 election, it was the majority liberal electorate that was badly shaken and in need of gentle coaxing, not the “economically-anxious” white working class.
Vance delivered, in part by reassuring those liberals (OK, us) that “yup, Appalachia is what you thought” — lazy, dumb, and backward.
He offers two anecdotes to that effect early in the book. Vance has taken a summer job at a floor-tile distributor in Middletown to save up money for his first year at Yale Law. There, he meets “Bob.”
“Bob was nineteen with a pregnant girlfriend,” Vance writes “Both of them were terrible workers. Bob missed work about once a week, and he was chronically late. On top of that, he often took three or four daily bathroom breaks, each over half an hour.”
This, to me, sounds like quiet quitting. Bob’s job is not a way station en route to Yale Law, it’s the first in a what is probably a lifetime of similar jobs. As someone whose work ethic is decidedly “mid,” and who, at 17, spent three full days employed at KFC before I stopped showing up, I’d be with Bob in the bathroom.
For Vance, Bob is just one of “too many young men immune to hard work. … carelessly tossing aside a good job with excellent health insurance.” (Bob did not quit quietly enough; he was fired.)
“More troublingly,” Vance adds. “[W]hen it was all over he thought something had been done to him. There is a lack of agency here — a feeling that you have little control over your life and a willingness to blame everyone but yourself.”
Vance is so close. There is a lack of agency here. Bob lives in a steel town whose steel plant has been closed for 20 years. Bob is exercising agency in the ways available to him: reclaiming some of his time by taking preposterously long bathroom breaks on the clock.
We see the same sort of self-destructive agency when we meet, via hearsay during Vance’s visit to his “home” in Kentucky, a “thin man, no older than thirty-five” who could “find the time to make eight children but can’t find the time to support them.”5
Vance says he wants “people to know what it feels like to nearly give up on yourself and why you might do it. I want people to understand what happens in the lives of the poor and the psychological impact that spiritual and material poverty has on their children.”
But we get no sense of what it “feels like” for Bob or for this unnamed holler-dweller to have given up on themselves or to exert agency on the world in the only ways available to them. Vance uses his hillbilly hall pass to tell the East Coast elite some putatively “hard truths” that flatter it: white working class poverty is a result of disaffection and drug use, not the fact that there are no decent jobs.
Not only is their poverty their own fault, there’s nothing for Vance’s elite audience to do about it.
“We hillbillies must wake the hell up,” Vance says, later adding “[t]hese problems were not created by governments or corporations or anyone else. We created them, and only we can fix them.”
3. What ARE Hillbilly Values?
OK, phew! Nothing structural to address here. Hillbillies are responsible for their own predicament — one of their own told us so, in that register of hard-truths-told self-criticism liberals love.
But examine his claims even for a moment, and there’s just a coonhound chasing its own dadgum tail.
On the one hand, Vance argues that hillbillies are responsible for their predicament because of their falling away from “hillbilly values,” which they brought with them out of the hollers into the small industrial cities of the Midwest.
“Sometimes I view members of the elite with an almost primal scorn — recently, an acquaintance used the word “confabulate” in a sentence, and I just wanted to scream6. But I have to give it to them: Their children are happier and healthier, their divorce rates lower, their church attendance higher, their lives longer. These people are beating us at our own damn game.”
The game, we are to infer, involves happy children, “intact” families, and steady faith. (He’s also relying on us to fill in things like uncomplaining hard work).
But the stories he fell in love with as a young boy on his visits to the holler, the ones that made him feel like “hillbilly royalty,” reveal a different set of values — a code of honor enforced with violence and vindictiveness:
“Once, when a truck driver delivered supplies to one of Uncle Pet’s businesses, he told my old hillbilly uncle, ‘Off-load this now, you son of a bitch.’ Uncle Pet took the comment literally: ‘When you say that, you’re calling my dear old mother a bitch, so I’d kindly ask you to speak more carefully.’ When the driver — nicknamed Big Red … — repeated the insult, Uncle Pet did what any rational business owner would do: He pulled the man from his truck, beat him unconscious, and ran an electric saw up and down his body. Big Red nearly bled to death but was rushed to the hospital and survived.”
It was jes’ folks, though:
“Apparently, Big Red was also an Appalachian man, anbd he refused to speak to the police about the incident or press charges. He knew what it meant to insult a man’s mother.”
There are other tales of gothic excess — what Vance calls “classic good-versus-evil stories.” There’s Uncle Teaberry forcing someone at knifepoint to eat his sister’s underwear. Or there’s Mamaw, at 12, shooting a would-be cattle thief in the leg and preparing to shoot him in the head to execute him before her older brother intervenes.
Vance’s aw-shucks manner in these retellings seems more suited to Bob’s extended bathroom breaks than it does to Big Red’s near-dismemberment. Part of that tone — let’s call it Kentucky Keillor — derives from deliberate understatement purporting to be from the character’s point of view. Uncle Pet’s saw assault was his doing “what any rational business owner would.”
He will extend empathy to his ancient uncles — who were “full of vice” and a few of whom “left a trail of neglected children, cheated wives, or both” — but not to any of his contemporaries.
If Uncle Pet was being “rational,” today Vance sees:
“a world of truly irrational behavior. We spend our way into the poorhouse. We buy giant TVs and iPads. Our children wear nice clothes thanks to high-interest credit cards and payday loans. We purchase homes we don’t need refinance them for more spending money, and declare bankruptcy, often leaving them full of garbage in our wake. Thrift is inimical to our being.”
Today’s hillbillies simply refuse to accept the consequences of their actions. It’s not like the good old days when … we would exsanguinate our enemies with impunity.
The contradictory nonsense of “hillbilly values” abides in Mamaw and Papaw, the grandparents who were the most stable force in Vance’s life.
Papaw knocked Mamaw up when he was 17 and she was 14. In order to avoid that wholesome hillbilly vengeance, Papaw married her and they moved to Middletown where, without much education he secured lifelong employment at Armco, the local steel plant. It was a job from which he would retire, with stock in the company and “a lucrative pension.”
Steady employment and a healthy paycheck fueled a few decades of carousing. Papaw was out all the time, while Mamaw stayed home with the three children. She wasn’t necessarily happy about it:
Mamaw told Papaw after a particularly violent night of drinking that if he ever came home drunk again, she’d kill him. A week later, he camehome drunk again and fell asleep on the couch. Mamaw, never one to tell a lie, calmly retrieved a gasoline canister from the garage, poured it all over her husband, lit a match, and dropped it on his chest. When Papaw burst into flames, their eleven-year-old daughter jumped into action to put out the fire and save his life.
Literally two paragraphs later, Vance writes, in earnest: “It’s not obvious to anyone why Mamaw and Papaw’s marriage fell apart.”
The fact that it stayed together is more interesting. And the reason they were able to stay together has as much to do with that steady, stable employment as it does with any hillbilly home truths.
“To my grandparents, the goal was to get out of Kentucky and give their kids a head start,” Vance says (eliding the fact that the original “goal” was to get out of reach of Mamaw’s brothers so that Papaw woudn’t be flayed alive. “The kids, in turn, were expected to do something with that head start. It didn’t quite work out that way.”
4. How Much He Hates His Mother
You may recall that Vance shouted out his mother in his speech at the Republican National Convention for her near 10 years of sobriety. To judge from her story as recounted in his book, it’s been a very long road. She’s fought addiction much of her life and has often found herself in relationships with men who made that fight harder.
Despite his speech’s applause line, Vance doesn’t seem to have much truck with the illness-model of addiction:
Drug addiction was a disease, and just as I wouldn’t judge a cancer patient for a tumor, so I shouldn’t judge a narcotics addict for her behavior. At thirteen, I found this patently absurd, and Mom and I often argued over whether her newfound wisdom was scientific truth or an excuse for people whose decisions destroyed a family.
One gets the sense that he thinks there’s a better, more stoic way to handle things: “Papaw quit drinking in 1983, a decision accompanied by no medical intervention and not much fanfare. He simply stopped and said little about it.”
Beverly Vance was fighting her addiction even as Armco — which “employed thousands of Middletonians who, like my grandfather, earned a good wage despite a lack of formal education” — was purchased by Kawasaki and eventually shuttered, gutting the town’s economy and reprising a theme played all too often in the Rust Belt. Papaw was able to keep a job even as he kept drinking, and then quit cold turkey while relying on his pension. No one who came after him had that kind of cushion.
“Mamaw and Papaw may have failed Bev in her youth,” Vance says, gesturing at the idea that her substance-use issues might have their roots in childhood trauma, before absolving his grandparents in the next sentence. “But they spent the rest of their lives making up for it.”
Once again, Vance will not extend the same understanding to those closest to him. He drops hints that Bev was trying to “make up for” his chaotic, trauma-rich childhood, but he will not foreground it.
He acknowledges that his mom gave him his “lifelong love of education and learning” and even allows that later, as he was getting on his feet she would, “when she was working … always give me money on paydays, almost certainly more than she could afford.”
But the dominant impression Vance wants to leave us with is that “Mom was always good at apologies. … I think she really meant it. Deep down, she always felt guilty … and she probably even believed that — as promised — they’d ‘never happen again.’ They always did though.”
5. It’s Bad as a Memoir
These are the kind of fundamental contradictions — your mother hurts you, but you love her; your grandparents are the best people in the world, but they have also been deeply-flawed monsters — that the best memoirists spend time exploring.
A memoir done well allows the reader to look in on someone’s experience — confusing and contradictory, as most interesting experiences are — and watch as they make sense of it. The best ones can help you think about how you have or haven’t made sense of your own life.
But as Gabe Winant says in his indispensable n+1 essay, “what links Vance the memoirist and Vance the politician is a continuous (if escalating) policy of nearly absolute nonconfrontation with what made him who he is — the nature of the trauma that he pantomimes exploring in his book.”
Even Megyn Kelly(!) in 2016 zeroed in on the undigested nature of the experience Vance describes.
A young woman sitting next to me at Porter Square Books saw me with Hillbilly Elegy (this is before I took the dust jacket off) and said that, when she’d read it in 2020, the book had helped her understand her father. I was briefly alarmed before she went on to explain that she saw her dad as Vance — an unreflective man who faced and overcame early hardship, and who now can’t extend sympathy to those who didn’t have the same breaks.
6. Football Fandom as Flimsy as His Ideology
Excuse me while I get really petty.
Vance loves football — it’s another thing his mother gave him. He says he remembers “watching Joe Montana lead a TD-winning drive in the Super Bowl against the hometown Bengals.” This would have been January, 1989. Young J.D. would have been four and a half, and if we grant that he actually remembers this — it’s possible, since folks would have been focused on the Bengals — then it seems the dominant impression he got was that he needed to abandon his hometown for his favorite player: “Joe Montana, the greatest quarterback of all time,” of whom Vance claims to have “watched every game,” and also to have written “fan mail to the 49ers and later the Chiefs.”
My fellow football freaks will know that it was not possible for Vance to have “watched every game.” This is simply not how NFL broadcasts worked in the early 90s. You got the local team — unless it was a home game that hadn’t sold out — or whatever the networks chose for a national broadcast.
It’s possible that Vance’s family of poor hillbillies purchased DirecTV’s Sunday Ticket package for Montana’s final year in the league (the first year that package was available), but it seems more likely he’s just lying!
In any case, that lie is less telling to me than his abandonment of the hometown team for the man who crushed it. There’s a real parallel with the abandonment of the values that led Vance to call Trump “cultural heroin” and compare him to Hitler, before becoming Sycophant Number One for the guy.
7. Bad writing
—“Our elegy is a sociological one, yes, but it is also about psychology and community and culture and faith.”
Or, you know, sociology.
—“At Yale Law School, I felt like my spaceship had crashed in Oz.”
Spaceship, as we all know, being the traditional method for reaching Oz.
— “watching Joe Montana lead a TD-winning drive in the Super Bowl against the hometown Bengals”
This might seem a little pedantic, but a “TD-winning drive” is not a thing. You can make a “game-winning TD drive.” But you don’t really “win” a TD. You score them.
— [Usha, his future wife] “seemed some sort of genetic anomaly”
I just felt compelled to note this.
—Sonya Sotomayor
He misspelled the name (it’s “Sonia”) of the Supreme Court Justice who addressed his class at Yale Law. I’m sure it was just an oversight, but it’s of a piece with the haphazard nature of Vance’s project.
He wasn’t looking to wrestle honestly with his deeply-traumatic experiences, figure out who he was now and why he got there. This avowed enemy of identity politics7 was looking to trade on his own identity to present himself as both spokesperson for and reluctant-but-necessary critic of “his” people.
To do so, he gave liberals a character they could recognize — a hardworking earnest boy confounded by all the forks and soda water at the fancy Yale Law recruiting dinners — then slapped on footnotes (an insulting 24) to offer the patina of research and/or data, in order to feed us the same old slop.
Not linking to it because you shouldn’t buy it.
Check out the book trailer for his latest, the just published I Hate it Here, Please Vote for Me, about his quixotic doomed ill-fated unsuccessful campaign for the Pennsylvania House of Representatives in a deeply-conservative rural district.
Ferrence’s words again.
And for heaven’s sakes, don’t buy it. If you can’t get it from your library, I can send you my heavily underlined hardcover whose margins are filled with exclamation points and expletives.
This seems like a gotcha, but it literally takes much, much less time to “make” a child than it does to support one?
Yale Law Alum Angry At Big Word
He admonishes us that “in our race-conscious society we’re often only skin-deep,” just before insisting “The Scots-Irish are one of the most distinctive subgroups in America.”
Excellent synopsis. I never wanted to buy the book but now I have very good reasons to hate it without ever even cracking the spine.
Spaceships do *not* land you in Oz! Great piece, Sub!