Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

Read the last 80% of this book in a single afternoon. It was overall a quick, compelling read, but I only award it 4 stars because it felt rough at times, like it had been unedited.

This book is being promoted and reviewed as one explanation for Trump's popularity this election cycle. It is not that, at least not directly. It is a simply-narrated memoir of Vance's 30 years growing up and ultimately “escaping” his Appalachian hillbilly origins. I say escaping in quotes because one never really can escape one's past - and Vance touches on this fact (reminding me of the biography of Robert Peace I read earlier this year). Along with the very real presence of a drug-addict mother who is still in his life, the constant disruptions in his childhood left him with very real emotional trauma and overdeveloped stress reactions to situations that other people would handle calmly.

Again, this is not a book about the presidential race or Donald Trump, but rather a depiction of the cultural, social, and economic problems facing a certain group of working-class whites in our country today, which might help us understand the current political landscape. Vance weaves in statistics gleaned from social science research throughout his writing, but the book succeeds on the strength of its narrative. He writes about his family members in a very nuanced way that shows maturity - no one is either completely a hero or a villain.

Surprisingly, the best parts of the book are his grandparents - his Mamaw and Papaw. It's not the stories of the craziness and chaos of the world he grew up in that will stick with me, but rather the efforts of two far-from-perfect individuals to provide a safe space for his life and set him on a track to rise above the situation of his family.

The lessons in the book resist easy government policy fixes. Vance himself doesn't spend many pages trying to offer solutions, and he admits that he doesn't have many ideas. He skewers liberals for wanting to provide more welfare, more social support, saying that many of the people he met had plenty of opportunity to participate in the economy but chose instead to quit their jobs and blame Obama. One anecdote that really stuck with me is a young Vance, looking at the line-item on his taxes remarking that he was forced by the government to buy his neighbor T-Bone steaks via welfare when he himself would never have spent money on that. He also rips the right for not encouraging people to engage with society - for stirring up broad cultural anger without directing attention at anything positive. He laments the lack of an American role model in society for his kind of people - Barack Obama is too much a product of the elite to connect with these people in the way that Bill Clinton or George Bush did, and there are no astronauts or military leaders like in decades past. Our society now worships “elites”, and this has left the working class feeling like the communal fabric is coming apart. (This is the setup for Trump - a charismatic, strong leader preaching old-school values)

The book could have been tightened up a bit. There were a number times Vance introduced an idea and never followed up on it, dropping themes and threads that seemed like they would be interesting. I wish there had been a more consistent direction to the book - it felt like the only thing tying the whole memoir together was the linear passage of time. Still, a great read and a great reminder of how insulating it can be to grow up a member of the coastal elite and how easy it is to dismiss whole classes of people whom you don't even know.