Earlier this summer, Rod Dreher, the intellectually restless American Conservative columnist, wrote that “Hillbilly Elegy” “does for poor white people what Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book did for poor black people: give them voice and presence in the public square.” Liberal readers may bristle at the comparison-Vance, to be clear, is a white conservative-but Dreher has a point.
Still, anti-Trump conservatives have responded to its largely empathetic portrait of poor, white Americans, which they see as an alternative to the less sympathetic theories about Trump’s least affluent supporters-“They’re all racist,” essentially-that have become popular on the left. The name Trump never appears in the book, which was written, presumably, before his capture of the Republican Party.
This year, though, the book has been adopted by an unusually large and passionate audience. Had “Hillbilly Elegy” been published last year, or the year before, it still would have found readers: it’s a detailed and moving account of American struggle. It seems safe to say that Vance, who is now in his early thirties, has seen a wider swath of America than most people. He now lives in San Francisco, where he works at Mithril Capital Management, the investment firm helmed by Peter Thiel. Afterward, he attended Ohio State and Yale Law School, where he was mentored by Amy Chua, the law professor and tiger mom. Vance escaped their fate by joining the Marines and serving in Iraq. Many of his neighbors were jobless and on welfare. His mother was addicted to drugs-first to painkillers, then to heroin.
His family struggled with poverty and domestic violence, of which he was a victim. Vance was born in Kentucky and raised by his grandparents, as a self-described “hillbilly,” in Middletown, Ohio, home of the once-mighty Armco Steel. Vance begins one of this campaign season’s saddest and most fascinating books, “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis” (Harper). “I grew up poor, in the Rust Belt, in an Ohio steel town that has been hemorrhaging jobs and hope for as long as I can remember.” That’s how J.
Vance’s home town of Middletown, Ohio, is one of the once flourishing Rust Belt towns that feature in his memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.” PHOTOGRAPH BY AL BEHRMAN / AP
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