Hillbilly Elegy': One man's harrowing escape from the hollers

nolead begins A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis nolead ends

nolead begins By J.D. Vance

HarperCollins.

272 pp. $27.99

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Reviewed by

Dan Simpson

J .D. Vance came from a family from Jackson, Ky., where the men worked in the coal mines until there weren't any. Then he moved to Middletown, Ohio, to jobs at Armco Kawasaki Steel, until that went away. Vance got out, serving as a Marine in Iraq and then attending Ohio State University and then Yale Law School before ending up at a Silicon Valley investment firm near San Francisco. It's a classic "I got out of there" story.

Except he didn't. The hillbilly ethic, including what he calls "the Appalachian honor code," stayed with him and inspired him to try to make that culture and people comprehensible to the rest of us. Thus this book.

The utter dreadfulness of Vance's life ("working-class whites are the most pessimistic group in America") contrasts with his good humor, and his perseverance, despite monumental barriers, in doing what he must to survive and get out of the Kentucky hollers and the American small town.

The central, horrible characteristic of hillbilly life, according to Vance, is domestic violence. He is quite funny about some of it. His eloquently foulmouthed grandmother taught him how to fight effectively. He observes that even the best stepparents, and he had many, "take some getting used to." Vance comments that "nice guys never survived their encounters with our family."

One of the grim facts he cites is that "the life expectancy of working-class white folks is going down." Another I know is true is that "Ohio Januaries are depressing enough as it is." There are two problems here, nestling among the truths. First, there are other groups in different parts of the country whose situations are just as troubling, if not more so, than those of the hillbillies. Second is the tendency toward self-pity in hillbilly culture. The old joke is that if you played a country song backward, you found a job, the car started running again, and your wife came back. Vance escapes these flaws through humor and a neat way with words. He also avoids the perils of what he calls "class tourism."

Hillbilly Elegy is comparable to Winter's Bone, that fine 2010 movie about a family and a life comparable to Vance's, with Jennifer Lawrence's great portrayal of Ree Dolly. Both film and book teach us much. Vance's grandmother told him there was "no greater disloyalty than class betrayal." Vance has not betrayed his people at all in helping us, his readers, understand them.

This review originally appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.