In a farewell piece to Barack Obama in the New York Times, the memoirist JD Vance wrote of the departing president as an “admirable man” whose public life “showed that we need not be defeated by the domestic hardships of youth”. In Vance’s eyes Obama had overcome an “unstable” childhood to establish a loving family life that embodied the writer’s sense of the American ideal.
It was a story that, when Vance first heard it as a college student seven or eight years ago, offered him the hope that he too could leave behind a tumultuous upbringing and disprove the notion, widespread among the people he knew, that your past was your destiny. Obama, Vance wrote, was “a man whose history looked something like mine but whose future contained something I wanted”.
In fact, Vance’s personal history bears small comparison to Obama’s. True that as children they’d seen very little of their fathers – Obama scarcely at all – and each had maternal grandparents who loved and cared for them when their mothers couldn’t or wouldn’t. But Obama grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia; he had a Kenyan father and a white American mother and, for a time, an Indonesian stepfather; his father had a Harvard degree and his mother, eventually, a PhD. His surroundings and ancestry suggest a future open to aspiration and possibility.
Nothing could have been further from Vance’s early experience. His memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, which topped the American bestseller lists last summer, describes growing up among the poor white citizenry of the American rust belt, in his case a dilapidated steel town in Ohio to which his hillbilly grandparents had moved from Appalachian coal country when the mines began to close. His childhood is violent and chaotic as “the abandoned son of a man I hardly knew and a woman I wished I didn’t”. His drug-addled mother moves from partner to feckless partner, his grandmother sets fire to her alcoholic husband, and children all around are succumbing quietly to Mountain Dew Mouth, a localised blight of tooth decay caused by drinking so much sweet soda.
The book had a rapturous welcome in Britain as well as in the US. The New York Times said it was “essential reading for this moment in history”; the Observer called it “brilliant” and the Wall Street Journal “beautiful”.
And yet it has none of the pretensions to literature that creative writing schools encourage: it has just as much “telling” as “showing”, no complexity in its structure, no memorable imagery, and none of the novelistic devices – plausible but invented dialogue, for example – that can help create a vivid scene or properly establish a character. Nor, in terms of the misery it evokes, do its scenes and characters come as a surprise. Hillbillies, after all, are thought to be poor, rough and isolated from the American mainstream, with habits of drinking, fighting and music-making that point across centuries of rural deprivation to their Scots-Irish ancestors. Some of Vance’s characters have hearts of gold, but mainly they bear out this general reputation.
In this artful age, the book’s straightforward narration recommended it as a trustworthy account, but other things played a bigger part in its success. The first was its timing – it appeared shortly after the Brexit vote, in the month that Donald Trump became the Republicans’ official nominee – and the second was the light it shed on the political attitudes of the author and the people he grew up among. It began to be seen as a key to the political turbulence: “You will not read a more important book about America this year,” said the Economist.
Vance accepts that the white working class is troubled and depressed – social surveys rate it as America’s most pessimistic community – but refuses to accept economic insecurity as the only reason. In a culture that, in his view, increasingly encourages social decay through the intervention of the welfare state, people are “reacting to bad circumstances in the worst way possible”. The charge sheet thunders: “We spend our way into the poorhouse … Thrift is inimical to our being … Our homes are a chaotic mess … We don’t study as children, and we don’t make our kids study when we’re parents … We choose not to work … but tell ourselves that the reason we’re not working is some perceived unfairness: Obama shut down the coal mines, or all the jobs went to the Chinese.”
Within a generation, the electorate of the Appalachians and the south switched allegiance from Democrats to Republicans. Race, the civil rights movement, old-time religion and social conservatism are usually listed as the explanations, but Vance believes state handouts were a major cause. Poor people who work tend to dislike people no poorer than themselves who don’t.
Vance discovered this for himself – in himself – when he worked as a cashier in a grocery store and saw how people gamed the system by buying packs of soft drinks with food stamps and then selling them at a discount for cash to buy beer, wine and cigarettes. “They’d go regularly through the checkout line speaking on their cell phones. I could never understand why our lives felt like a struggle while those living off government largesse enjoyed trinkets I only dreamed about.” He and his grandmother “began to view much of our fellow working class with mistrust”.
And yet it was complicated. The same person could be a European-style social democrat one moment and a radical American conservative the next. Sometimes his grandmother would rail against the faceless rich, and at other times “the lazy whore” on benefits next door.
A similar account of poor whites in Britain is hard to imagine, because the narrative would probably be in the hands of a visiting outsider who, while he or she might try to “understand” the illiberalism on display, would almost certainly disagree with it. (The book’s subjects would be the victims, if you like, of the liberal elite.) The writer’s patriotism would also strike an unfamiliar note, as would the positive role his time in the US Marine Corps played on his route to salvation among the professional middle classes. In English autobiography, rags-to-riches is no longer a fashionable look.
Today, as a graduate of Harvard Law School, Vance is nicely set up: a happy marriage, a comfortable home, two lively dogs. What gives his book its charge is the author’s refusal to distance himself from the political opinions of his relatives and peers, and sometimes to share them. Obama’s life may be exemplary but he isn’t a political hero. “On January 20, the political side of my brain will breathe a sigh of relief at Mr Obama’s departure,” he writes in the New York Times, hoping for “a better policy from the new administration, a health reform package closer to my ideological preferences, and a new approach to foreign policy”.
What these phrases will mean is hard to gauge. However, US voters who think they are bringing back the steel mills and coalmines may have voted instead for just another stage in their own impoverishment.
