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.
Maybe it's a minor quibble, but there's this thing Jessi Klein does at the end of each chapter of You'll Grow Out of It, which is a collection of personal essays from this comedic writer. It's this glib little kind of sort of couplet-sounding tag at the end, which is I think supposed to sound like a snappy encapsulation of the point but which comes off as lazily tacked on.
In truth, you see it all the time, and it seems essential if you've ever written anything — from an email to a memo to an op-ed piece — so much so that it just feels like you need to do it, sort of like that dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-duuuun in a blues song.
[It's called a "tag ending" or an "end tag" — this:
I tried to google it and immediately came across the concept in this "How to Write an Op-ed Article" piece: "Make your ending a winner."
The problem is that virtually nothing ends well. Novels end stupidly. Plays end stupidly. TV series end stupidly (Friday Night Lights excluded). Unless it's a trick, endings are inherently stupid. I thought The Usual Suspects had a great ending until I watched it years later with someone who'd never seen it and who saw it coming from a mile away. Plus, a suspenseful story is constructed with the ending in mind — sort of like a great country lyric. "Making your ending a winner" is so much of a vapid platitude that it . . . there, I almost got sucked into the cadence of point-making.
Anyway, Grow Out follows this format doggedly, and it comes across as fobbed off and lazy. It's another piece of writing that seems like a first pass (in retrospect, maybe it's unfair to single out any particular piece of writing, when really there's no real advantage to making something really wonderful when it can just be OK: blogs and comedy apparently share this; I'm sure there are other things). I'm pretty sure I can't read a room on this front, but I naively take for granted that if one is given the opportunity to publish something it should be the most completely extraordinary thing he or she can come up with, if not fucking brilliantly essential. Demand better: Fugazi at the high school talent show; Bobby Knight coming to career day; Daniel Day Lewis' bleak early years as a substitute drama teacher.
Instead, you have beach reading. Maybe a charmingly written column about this or that. An observational piece on Weekend Edition.
To Klein's credit, Grow doesn't shy away from the author's own hard truths: she's really successful, she likes nice things, she's privileged but you kind of feel she's earned it. Which is to say, if spa treatments are on her mind she won't hesitate to write about spa treatments. There's an honesty there that feels revealing, and that's still sort of bold. That said, every single person in our book club thought the thing was fucking terrible (I didn't think it was terrible, per se), and threw around words like "privileged" (do you know what a room costs at the Post Ranch Inn?!?!) "Manhattan," probably "vapid," maybe "vacuous" and (I'm pretty sure) "mostly unfunny" (or at least stuff like "I didn't laugh once").
Not to throw everyone under the bus (not that they give a flying fuck), but I didn't think Out was entirely terrible. I was surprised, however, given that Inside Amy Schumer, of which Klein is the executive producer, is so jaggedly transgressive — not to mention hilarious. So much of You'll seemed so tame. Not to say it has to be insanely progressively sun-blottingly poop-evacuatingly transgressive, but it felt positioned, calculated and — most deadly — safe. Like her management is positioning her to have a talk show or some such.
I did laugh at parts. And I thought there were parts that were more fleshed out and had smart — and inspired — takes. The epidural chapter toward the end ("get the epidural!") is one of those (it is adapted here — again, positioning). Part has to be the immediacy: I'd much rather talk about being a parent than being a dipshit struggling through a first job. But I also think there's room to dig deeper on those earlier anecdotes: weave stuff together, use the "winning ending" as a transition to two disparate ideas instead of a dull-thud paperweight.
Other moments were deft: she writes in one chapter about "lying about day drinking" then goes on to mention off-handedly about talking about day drinking with a guy she was flirting with — funny and perceptive but also maybe unintentional: which goes back to my point about how things seem a little undercooked (or maybe undersalted?) (oh fuck it, what I mean to say is that they're not as great as they could be). The chapter about Joan Rivers is good, too.
A point that I didn't make but others did, and really vociferously and pointedly, is that it's kind of a bullshit move (if not a "bad look") to perseverate on one's own perceived ugliness/use it as a bit when in reality one is actually very attractive. Some actually google imaged her while reading it to confirm a hunch/feel outraged.
Even if we all didn't entirely agree that it was fucking terrible, I'm pretty sure 100 percent of us agreed that You'll Grow was thin. Surprising to all was how universally praised it was ("hilarious" is a frequent — suspiciously frequent — adjective). It's as if there's something aspirational about wanting to feel amused, so much so that you can believe it to be true. I feel as if there should be some winning line that can be inserted here, so much so that I can feel it in my seat. It's just not happening. And so this must end.
The graphic novel version of the Paul Auster book City of Glass does an interesting job expressing visually the original work's mirror-filled meta-texture. Like that stab at being clever at the end of the last sentence, the original book in retrospect seems a little too clever — I'd say too clever by half, if I fully understood what that phrase meant [OK, I googled it, I think I've always understood it in basically the accepted way].
To walk that back somewhat, I read City back in either high school or college and thought it was good but didn't really understand it and moreover didn't really know what I didn't know. As an adult I'm more comfortable knowing what I don't know; I just don't care at this point. Rereading the graphic novel form of Glass, I remembered I never read Cervantes (it ostentatiously refers to Don Quixote). Once in a while, usually when I try to avoid using the word "quixotic" (which is only because I've never read Don Quixote) (even though it's a handsome word, what with that "x"), I think maybe I should read it, but of course never, ever would.
I mean, look, Paul Auster is a genius or whatnot, I get it. And I read some of the other stories in the trilogy. Or at least I think I did. Who knows, maybe I just saw the movie Smoke one night on IFC and believed I read more Auster than I actually did. Whatever it was, other stuff didn't seem so purposefully annoyingly heady.
I will say this — and the memory came back to me while I read the graphic version of of Glass — I remembered the vague outlines of the story: the child raised without language, the weird PI cosplay, and then especially the parts where the protagonist needs to get down to business and act serious and really start writing so he strips naked. For a time I assumed this meant that you had to be naked to get real work done — not the obvious work but smart work, like writing mystery novels or preparing taxes. Around the same time (or sort of around the same time, or at least within five or ten years of that time) I got obsessed, as a lot of others did, with the Silos' Cuba LP. The flip side of which features a zoomed out image of a dude on a bluff of some sort playing a Stratocaster — plugged into an amplifier (!) — and singing/strumming into the misty overlook. It's inspiring (the image is here). At the same time you're (read: I'm) also like, Why in the hell are you up there naked? What is this late 80s utopia where people are empowered to strip naked and create art? And why is this so? Do people really do their best work naked? It's occurring to me that I remember reading how U2 recorded something (The Unforgettable Fire) (Also, what a fucking obnoxious title for a fucking album, no?) naked. Why? Really, why?
So anyway, yeah, that part of City where the protagonist strips down and smears his lousy dirty ass on a perfectly reasonable chair in order to "focus," I remembered that part. Other parts, not so much. Especially with this — digging back into that "meta-texture" gem above — kind of weird author within author layers of meaning and there's something obvious but which is not immediately obvious but kind of "impressionistic" (the same word your friendly high school English teacher used to try to pawn off Heart of Darkness on you). Or whatever.
Which brings us to the graphic novel version of City of Glass: it's good! I mean, it's not a bad thing to tackle a laden piece of text this way — and the mopey tone and tenor of pre-Pixar comic storytelling is enigmatically suited to the tone of the book. But there were moments when it seemed like a storyboard for a movie of some sort. And that's the post-Pixar me seeing it as a reader. The DIY comics of the era felt right — conflicted (Clinton-era psychic malaise), personal (humble, yet outsized) and xeroxed (before the internet). The tone and tenor is local, lo-fi, incremental — which feels right for this atmospheric writing.
And then at the same time it seems trapped in that pre-internet, pre-Pixar moment. "Pre-internet" being salient because the internet made everything wider, bigger, more awesome, more biggerly staged, which is the complete antithesis to the hand-drawn comics scene in days of yore; this era was the opposite of clickbait. And "pre-Pixar" being salient because, Jesus fucking Christ, animated storytelling has been blown so far open now, and is so incredible and elegant and human and smart that those black-and-white panels of years ago kind of don't capture it. I understand there was a vacuum before the millennium but stuff — all stuff, from comedy to drama to action stuff, seems smarter and more with it. Wasn't that way before. Now it is. Which is where the storyboard slag comes into play: Art Spiegelman, in his intro to the graphic version of Glass, mentions that Auster told him that various potential film versions of the book were disasters. Now you can imagine these elegant black-and-white boxes turning into a miraculous animated film. Sorry, I think that. It's not a pleasant thought. I know that cassette tapes are experiencing a renaissance, but, really, the future is here, people.
And really, shouldn't a "graphic novel" really refer to a story that is explicit and/or violent? That euphemism/moniker always seemed a little pretentious, though having heard it so much it's become what it is (like "server" versus "waiter" or whatever else). I can't tell you the last time I read a graphic novel. Actually, I can: it was Chester Brown's Louis Riel, which we read for book club in 2009). It was OK. Moody. Cartoon-like. Sort of.
