Hillbilly Elegy

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and a Culture in Crisis by JD Vance, 257 pages

Hillbilly Elegy is a tour through the childhood of its author, JD Vance, a childhood set in a world of crime, poverty, violence, substance abuse, mental illness, and shattered families.  From the revolving door of father figures to the preoccupation with respect to the outspoken religiosity to the feeling of being an outsider to mainstream American society, much of Vance's upbringing would not be out of place in a memoir of growing up in the inner city, except that his home was in a "holler" in the backwoods of Kentucky.  Not that Vance is interested in comparing narratives of victimhood or arguing about privilege - his goal is to describe the function and dysfunction of hillbilly America at the dawn of the 21st century through the lens of his own experience.  

It is this experience that is the heart of the book - Vance is wise enough to understand that the problems involved are as complex as life.  His observations do not fit into sociological boxes and do not result in a 6-point public policy proposal.  In his estimation, the crisis faced by his family and culture is not so much an economic crisis as a crisis of values, itself sparked by alienation and a loss of dignity in a society where poverty is considered a personal failing.  At one point, Vance recalls attending one of his mother's court hearings and noticing that the judge and lawyers all spoke with "newscaster accents" quite unlike those of his family and friends.  The sense that "people like us" don't hold positions of influence and authority, don't attend Ivy League schools or start successful businesses, dogged him for much of his life, and although he did eventually graduate from Yale and settle into a stable marriage, one of the major themes of the book is that he couldn't have done so without a great deal of help - beginning with his grandparents and sister and including sympathetic high school teachers, college professors, and the United States Marine Corps.  The lesson is that the only cure for a vicious culture is a virtuous culture, and the first virtue (Peguy's "little one who leads them all") is theological - hope.