Dreams Of My Mamaw

J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy is a taut, intriguing, engaging memoir of sorts that seeks to get America woke about the issues (felt like going for that overused word "plight" but pulled back in spite of my heady topic sentence laziness) of the white working class of the Rust Belt. "Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash," Vance writes. "I call them neighbors, friends, and family."

This is a buzzy moment for such an inquiry, and obviously why a lot of reviewers and pundit-y folk glommed on to this buzzy book. That's all germane and good, but in the end the stuff you really take with you revolves around living in or near poverty with and around addiction, abandonment and abuse. That said, Vance definitely delivers with context and detail about how and why the hillbilly came to be, along with generous personal details and anecdotes therein. His tone is by turns vulnerable, guileless (in a good way, if you can imagine what that might read like), humble and magnanimous (which might be why he can seamlessly drop references to semi-controversial figures like Charles Murray and Amy Chua in there and keep you nodding along; among our group this tack worked less well with his Times op-ed that came out right around when we met).

When it comes to Elegy, Vance's tone, as a messenger — and I can't emphasize this enough — is pitch perfect. He says he holds onto a sort of culturally preordained short-fused temper, but you read the book and can't believe it. As buzzy as it is, nothing about it seems of the moment, which is a very, very good thing.

Which is to say Vance is intuitively or by design a perfect guide to this world he sets out to describe. And you may surprise yourself as you begin rooting for the focus of Vance's story, his grandmother Mamaw. Perhaps you would be inclined to read Mamaw (pronounced "ma'am awe") as a foul-mouthed vindictive kind of abusive fucking shotgun-toting piece of redneck-hillbilly-white trash, and that's probably mostly accurate, but she's also Vance's moral center and, as a child, the best thing he has going for him. Plus, she's fiercely protective ("fiercely" being a lazy fucking adjective, I know) and, when not espousing vigilante justice (which is just kind of a thing that happens), seems like a really decent person.

The book's best Mamaw anecdote (page 97-98) is hilarious, shocking and insightful at the same time: after seeing a fire-and-brimstone preacher on television, Vance — at age 8 or 9 — worries might be gay because he dislikes girls and has a best friend who is a boy. He confesses to his grandmother that he might be gay. "Don't be a fucking idiot," she begins before asking him whether he wants to "suck dicks." Of course not, he says. "Then you're not gay. And even if you did want to suck dicks, that would be okay. God would still love you."

It's a great anecdote — and it has to be true, because if this cringe-inducing yet brilliantly effortlessly tolerant life lesson didn't happen exactly like Vance says it did, then it undercuts the portrait of Mamaw. Not that I think he's making up stuff, but if he were, it's the kind of detail I'd want to have made up. And maybe I'm reading a lot into it, but his transparency-positive disclaimer in the introduction — "I am sure this story is as fallible as any human memory" — seems a little self-protecting. And I only note this because I don't want it to be so . . .

A sort of debate broke out at book club about whether Hillbilly was somehow making the case that the Scots-Irish that settled in the middle part of the country were somehow so special. Very much to the contrary: Vance's take seems more that the redneck-hillbilly-white trash is the socially acceptable path to begin a national conversation about the role of personal responsibility (or whatever you want to call it) for everyone of any race, color or creed. And if not an all-out path to a conversation (so bold — a conversation!) then at least a lens into the underclass that doesn't get tripped up on matters of race, especially. Basically, who gives a shit about offending redneck-hillbilly-white trash? Thus the glib title, in my opinion . . .

Oh, and then in the introduction Vance explicitly writes, "I do hope that readers of this book will be able to take from it an appreciation of how class and family affect the poor without filtering their views through a racial prism." I think I called it a Trojan horse, but that didn't feel right at the time. Suffice it to say, it seems pointed. Since we read this there's a great SNL skit that explores this exactly (and has the added benefit of everyone being in on the joke):

All that aside, Elegy is at its strongest and most pointed when Vance talks about growing up in a family full of addiction, abuse, neglect and the general precarious line between the fraught zone straddling the middle class, working class and poverty. He explains — from his firsthand perspective — the pathology of feeling like you're "taking advantage" of people (Page 104: "We were conditioned to feel that we couldn't really depend on people — that, even as children, asking someone for a meal or for help with a broken-down automobile was a luxury that we shouldn't indulge in too much lest we fully tap the reservoir of goodwill serving as a safety valve in our lives" — if you've ever scratched your head about someone you know who exhibited similar behavior, it's painful to finally hear this explained in full). Elsewhere, the concept of a "nice Christmas" (page 250).

I've never read Dreams of My Father — memoirs by aspiring elected officials being probably the least likely thing I would ever read, just behind Miranda July novels and just ahead of Jonathan Safran Foer's treatise on vegetarianism — so I'm going way out on a limb here, but I wonder if someone somewhere — even if it's not Vance himself, because he seems like a decent guy who wouldn't do this — sees Elegy as a white working class counterpart (complement?) to that book. The thing feels pitch perfect in that way — heartfelt and mildly/subtly policy oriented. Shit, I'd probably vote for the guy — as long as he didn't grope a bunch of people, that is. And if you thought my comments on the "sucking dick" thing above were nitpicky, this is where I'm coming from.

To that point — and again, maybe I'm just overthinking it — but after learning 200-some-odd pages before about how it is a supreme violation of the hillbilly code of honor to call a man's mother a bitch, Vance calling himself "one lucky son of a bitch" seemed a little odd — like a little wink. Like I said, I'd like to think I'm overthinking it (or not getting it — I don't have a particular problem with people calling people's mothers "bitches," since clearly what do they know about anyone's particular mother, and if it actually were the case, mightn't you not disagree?), but part of me wants to think there's a little magic happening here.

Which brings me to my final point: Hillbilly Elegy is good, but I don't see who the particular audience is — part of it, at least the part of it that needs to be understood before November 8, 2016, seems to be about a type of voter. Another part is what Vance says: he wants to reach out to kids like himself to tell them to pull up their pants (or whatever). But the other part that is the grand unified theory, at least for me, is if it is a Dreams of My Father for rednecks — and that's the book that combines it all.