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

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.