First time I picked up Hillbilly Elegy back in 2017, I had to look up the word elegy in the dictionary. Had no clue what it meant. Where I come from, no one ever used the term.
Webster’s says an elegy is a lament for the dead, tracing its meaning to a Greek word for a song of mourning.
J.D. Vance’s bestselling book is about the ways of Appalachia. The title implies the region and those who call it home are as good as dead. Not that Vance is in a position to know. He is not from there.
I’ve visited Appalachia on more than one occasion, and it made deep impressions on me. But that’s all they were; visits, impressions. Vance has had the same; visits, impressions. He’s from an Ohio suburb, not Appalachia. He grew up between Cincinnati and Dayton, got good grades, took golf lessons, was offered a nearly free ride at Yale, visited his grandparents in Kentucky when school was out for the summer.
In his mind, the glimpses into Appalachian life he got during those childhood visits qualify him to diagnose social disorders plaguing a 13-state region and prescribe bootstrapping as the cure. Early on in the book he describes uncles who are these drunks who beat their wives. This part of his extended family’s backstory pulls in readers and softens them up for what comes next. Vance declares his uncles the embodiment of the Appalachian man, transitioning without warning from memoir to stump speech.
Hillbilly Elegy is full of such ugly stereotyping, painting an entire society an unflattering hue with the broadest of brushes. Just look what the author had to overcome to get where he is today. A prestigious New York City publishing house was charmed by the rags-to-riches tale Vance spun.
Vance’s depictions of Appalachians as lazy and backward resonated with readers on the right, affirming their belief that poverty is nothing but a character flaw. Many on the left fell under the book’s spell, too, for it gave them what they interpreted as confirmation that Trump won the White House in 2016 because angry rural whites voted against their own interests and are too stupid to realize it. The renowned Hollywood film producer Ron Howard couldn’t resist making these suspicions into a movie.
For those with sincere curiosity about the region, there is writing about Appalachian life far more thoughtful and thorough and far less self-serving than the pad Vance used to launch his political career, by authors who’ve spent lifetimes actually living there. For one, any poetry by Gloria Jean Watkins, better known by her pen name bell hooks. Appalachian Reckoning, for another. Meredith McCarroll and Anthony Harkins edited this illuminating collection of essays.
I don’t know much of Appalachia, but I do have experience living in the country, working on the farm, going to school in a nearby small town. I recently wrote about another national bestseller, this one about the threat rural rage poses to American democracy. I wrote that the “vast majority of people living out in the country or in the suburbs or cities are not filled with rage. Some are, but that’s not so much a threat to democracy as it is a smoke signal of smoldering resentment over social and economic injustices that sorely need to be addressed.”
A reader challenged this assessment on another online platform, questioning whether the resentment is warranted, if the injustices are real or merely imagined. I answer this way: When plants close their doors and local shops go belly up and family-supporting jobs vanish and never come back and hometowns pretty much dry up and blow away, that surely feels like very real economic injustice to those living it. To be unnoticed and flown over, to be caricatured and belittled, to be told the pain is just perception and not reality, that all feels like very real social injustice to those experiencing it.
I don’t know much of Appalachia, but I do know a place that’s seen in very much the same way. I hear people who’ve never lived there confidently describe it like they know it well. I hear one thing more than any other. If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it 10,000 times. Everybody knows everybody in a small town.
There’s this passage in my upcoming novel Miracles Along County Q: “Curious thing about small towns, there are few places where it’s harder to hide but not many where it’s easier to keep secrets. Everybody thinks everybody knows everybody. Everybody’s wrong.”
Folks in small towns might be familiar with most everyone in the community, but that doesn’t mean they truly know one another. No two of us are alike. Every one of us has a unique life story. We can see and hear each other critically, leading us to judge. Or we can see and hear generously, causing us to sympathize. Understanding depends on seeing the whole person and hearing the whole story.
In writing about a “culture in crisis,” J.D. Vance chooses not to see or hear the whole of Appalachians. He tells his paying audience only what they already are sure they know about people in the region, only what casts him in the most heroic light, only what promotes his agenda and advances his career.
Despite its pretentious title, the book’s no elegy. Its author haughtily judges those he leaves for dead, uses them for personal gain. That’s not mourning.
Mike…When will your novel be out?