J.D. Vance's Piece of Garbage

I have a book journal where I put down my thoughts about every book I read after I have finished it. What follows is my entry for Hillbilly Elegy, the book by the then-political activist and now Vice President-Elect J.D. Vance. The text is lightly edited for grammar, but is otherwise my opinion of the book as of January 2017. Not much as changed since then, I guess.

I BOUGHT this book the day after Hillary Clinton lost because I wanted to understand what Trump America was about, and I was told it was a good start. The book sucks. It got off to a good start, with a depiction of hillbilly life in Kentucky, but it never got any better than that.

Mostly the book suffers because it cannot decide if it is a memoir or a documentary. Sometimes it tells social history, sometimes it tells a personal story. The problem with the personal story is that some of what Vance says is helpful in understanding the lives of the poor, but a lot of it is cliched bullshit.

He lost me totally when he went into the Marines. Basically the message there was that the Marines instilled discipline in him he never had. Duh! Like I’ve never heard that before. I was shocked out my mind to discover that discipline and a sense of purpose makes people better. Damn. Newsflash!!!

The last 100 pages were cliches with a whole lot of shallow social psychology that anyone with common sense could figure out. And finally, his story of his life at Yale sounds like privilege to me, tinged with the pathos of a poor boy learning the rich man’s ways. This could have been good, but he didn’t really engage it in a way that mattered to me.

There aren’t too many books I am sorry I have read, but this is one of them.

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I would add by way of expansion that what I truly hated about this book was that Vance’s prescription for the problems of Appalachia is (1) go into the military; (2) graduate with top grades from Ohio State on a military scholarship after you get out; (3) go to Yale Law; and (4) use your contacts at Yale to go work at a venture capital firm with billionaire Peter Thiel; and (5) then you’re set!

The military, while a fine choice, is not for everyone. And almost no one gets into Yale. Put simply, his recipe for getting out of poverty is to “do what I do,” a path that is simply not possible for anyone he purportedly is trying to help. Rather than being an uplifting story, it read as realistically as the old joke that the way to get rich is to get a job that pays a million dollars a minute, work twenty minutes, and then retire.

The book feels more like a sycophantic appeal to the successful than help for the people he left behind. And given where he is now, that makes sense.