Hillbilly Elegy (2016) By J.D. Vance

 

Multiple people have recommended I read J.D. Vance’s book Hillbilly Elegy which came out a few years ago.  I’ve resisted, primarily because I don’t particularly like its title.  But Vance has been in the news a lot this year, particularly since he eked out a victory in the Republican primary for a U.S. Senate seat from Ohio earlier this year.  The book was a best seller and made him a lot of money. 

Elegy is his memoir, a very readable sociology text about “hillbilly” culture, in which he plays the lead role of the “despite the odds” success story, complete with a law degree from Yale.

The setting of this story is the rural hills hugging either side of the Ohio River -- “greater” Appalachia if you will – towns and farms that never recovered from the Great Depression.  They migrated along what became known as the “Hillbilly Highway” back and forth between home and the factory towns in central Ohio and western Pennsylvania.  Their collective story does not stand alone, in many ways it mirrors the Great Migration of Black Americans from the South to the big cities of the North, and the refugee/immigrants from forever-at-war Europe to the steel mills and automobile plants of the once mighty industrial Midwest.  Vance acknowledges these similarities but is careful not to equate them. 

Vance grew up in poverty, with a drug using mother and an absent father, along with a string of stepfathers most of whom did not hang around long.  His saving grace was a “colorful” grandmother. His success wasn’t a case of luck.  He worked hard and methodically to escape his upbringing without repudiating it, most of the people in the book have not.

While Vance’s book is a very good sociology text (recommend), it is important to keep in mind it is also the pre-campaign autobiography of a wannabee politician.  It succeeds on one level, it proves that he has a compassion for working class people, and that he understands “their” problems.  What it clearly does not do is give the reader a clue as to what he would do as a U.S. Senator.

Recommendation:  Yes, as a sociology text.  No, as a political text.