Author: 459856pwpadmin

I finished Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance about three weeks ago and it has taken me this long to be able to figure out what I wanted to say about the book.  I picked it up knowing full well it was about the pervasive poverty of a class of poor white people  in failing or failed industrial towns in the mid-west.  I knew the rough outline of Vance's life.  I knew that it was not about Appalachia, or at least what is today deemed as cultural Appalachia, which is limited to the southern and central regions of the range of a far larger area called Appalachia, an area that extends across eastern Kentucky and up into Southern New York.  And this region too, is different, culturally, from the areas surrounding it in many ways.   Middletown Ohio, where Vance grew up is not in Appalachia, although it is in what is called Greater Appalachia,  a term that has gained considerable currency since the publication of Colin Woodward's book, American Nation.  Woodward tracked culture based on migration patterns and thought that specific regional cultures had developed based on those migrations.  And the area called greater Appalachia was heavily populated by an influx of settlers from Northern Ireland, Northern England and the Scottish lowlands, a population that settled the area not only known culturally as Appalachia today, but up into southern Ohio, the Ozarks, and the central hill country of Texas.  I grew up in "greater Appalachia" and I can tell you there is far more cultural similarity between Texas, at least the part of central Texas in which I grew up, and East Tennessee, than there is between East Tennessee and the deep south, or even the greater Appalachian part of Texas and other regions of Texas, which Collins, I believe rightly, puts in different cultural regions.

But this book isn't really about Appalachia, and although Vance considers himself a hillbilly, and his family background is definitely Appalachian, even though his grandparents had moved north before his parents were born,  the book isn't really about Appalachian culture.  It is about a subset of that culture, actually about a subset of American culture, because the problems Vance describes are widespread, and affect a far larger portion of our population than we would like to admit, whether their origins are hillbilly or not.  The book is a memoir, it is Vance's memoir, and although he is young, and there are issues in this book that I do not feel he has fully reconciled, it is a book that explores a problem that plagues our country, a problem that the majority of us do not really see or understand, and it is told from the perspective of someone who has experienced both sides and chosen to share his experience with us, hoping that we might learn something from it.

I still believe the book is an important book about the current state of American culture, I believe it is important even if it doesn't address my segment of American culture, or yours.   Not all Appalachian families are like Vance's.  Not all working class families, or poor families are Appalachian.  But the problems Vance describes are widespread, and it is rare that we find someone who has lived through it and not only survived, but succeeded by the standards of successful America, and who is able and willing to tell the tale in a way that, much as we may not like it, we can understand.  In Vance's story of his childhood, and his struggles, we see a microcosm of the various trends that are indeed plaguing poor white American families.  Although it may not be Vance's intention, I see the point of reading this book being to open our eyes and get beyond labels and look at a problem without anger, and without blame (because although yes the government has abandoned people, and yes we have a long history of disenfranchising the poor, a history that dates back to well before this country was founded, a history that was supported by our founding fathers) because it is a problem of complex and multilayered causes with far-reaching effects, a problem that carries catastrophic implications for our country and the American Dream as we imagine it to be.

I can't say that Vance's experience echoes my own in any important sense, although there are definite parallels in our backgrounds and experiences.  Nor can I say that I fully understand where he is coming from, or even if there are clear answers to the many questions his story presents.  But I can say that his story has helped me understand a few things that I have encountered since I moved to Tennessee, even though his experience is in Ohio, not here.  There are aspects of the culture he talks about that Ihat I have encountered, things that I suspect are intrinsic to a specific culture or area or mind-set, attitudes and biases that I did not encounter when I lived in New York, even though I did volunteer work with economically similar segments of the population in both locations. 

And although Vance wants people, his people, poor white people, to accept responsibility for their own actions and the lies they tell themselves, I do not believe this is an adequate response.  It is admittedly part of the problem.  And part of that problem also comes down to blaming one's ancestry.  Genetics are only a part of who we are.  Many, if not the majority of Scots-Irish Americans, have not succumbed to the pitfalls experienced by Vance's people, but ancestry can also be a crutch and an excuse. But just as the answers do not lie completely in the hands of the poor themselves, they are also only partially the responsibility of the government.  The solution, if there is to be one,  also lies in the hands of the middle class and the wealthy, in the hands of the majority of us, the readers of this book.  We like to tell ourselves that we live in a land of opportunity, and yet a significant portion of our children have little to no access to that opportunity.  Those who have opportunity often ignore, or shield themselves, from the reality that many do not.

Hillbilly Elegy is an autobiography of a person who has come a long way, but who hasn't yet come to terms with everything that his journey has involved or what it all means.  He is still a young man after all, and much of his story still feels raw and unsettled.  But the book offers a sobering look at parts of our culture that we perhaps would prefer not to see.  It is easy to blame the poor, the jobless, the drug- or alcohol-addicted. It is easy to ignore them and pretend like they are irrelevant to our lives.  Except they aren't, and their children aren't.  Their children, as much as our own, are the future of our country, are our children's future.

How can you expect anyone to have any hope, to believe that there actually can be a better life, when all they see is decay, chaos, and despair?  How?  How can you expect children to believe in something they cannot see, that seems unimaginable compared to the world they do in fact see every single day? Can you honestly believe  that people who grow up in such circumstances will not become people consumed by anger and despair?

Do we want to pat ourselves on the back, relegating the idea that we live in a land of opportunity to the realm of myth?  When do we admit that there is a problem and that we are not perhaps as compassionate as we claim to be?  The poor are not the only ones who need to come to terms with their own denial.  Those of us on the other side of the fence must do the same.  We need to admit that we as a society are falling behind if a significant portion of our population is falling behind, and we need to decide if we really are a country of compassion, of opportunity, of liberty and justice for all.

Since my last book report, I have indulged my love of stories. 

First I read The Man in the Glass Booth by Robert Shaw.  Although a play is a story, or tells a story, reading a play is not like reading a novel or a short story.   I personally like reading plays, but they do require a slightly different mind set, as they are really meant to be visualized rather than read.  This particular play was difficult to read, it was probably a difficult play to watch as well, as there is much that is intentionally ambiguous.   In some ways it reminds me of a play I wrote about last fall,  Eve Ensler's Necessary Targets, not really because the story is similar, or the writing, but because both force the audience to address basic assumptions and perceived truths about themselves and society.  But I think it would be even more difficult for a modern audience.  There are significant references to art and music, references that I believe would have been familiar to the audience of the 1960s, but which are not so familiar today.  This is partly because many years have passed, but it also because of a cultural shift that has occurred in the intervening decades.  I think this play, like another book I read earlier in the year, The Dissapearance, assumes a higher level of cultural literacy.  It is a product of a type of high-toned popular culture, often called middlebrow, as it was basically a middle-class culture, but one that still believed that culture built character, and a respectable person should strive to understand the best writing and art as part of becoming a better person.   That culture still existed in the 1960s in large enough quantities that magazines and plays would be marketed to it, but doesn't really exist in any significant way today. 

 Still,  if you are up for it and can find a copy, I recommend reading the play as I am not sure it is performed much anymore.  It will challenge your beliefs and understanding of human nature, and intentionally so.  The play is about Arthur Goldman, a wealthy Jewish industrialist, a holocaust survivor, who is arrested and tried for being a Nazi war criminal. Goldman is outrageously irreverent in both his personas with the effect that one questions who he really is.  It is in this, Goldman's shocking tendency to play against type, to throw his accusers beliefs and assumptions back in their faces, that we find the true and unsettling strength of this play.  Goldman is aggravating, confounding, and both appalling and all too familiarly human. The play turns the reader's understanding of victimhood, responsibility, retribution, survivor guilt, and the complexities of good an evil in the human experience completely upside down, and leaves us with no easy answers, in the end causing us to question not only his guilt or innocence but our own.  I read the play nearly two months ago, and it still slinks through my mind.  It may continue to do so for some time. The play was made into a movie.  I think I will look it up sometime.

Next, I thought some rather light reading along the lines of a murder mystery would be entertaining for a flight, so I picked up Under the Harrow by Flynn Berry.  It is taughtly written and rather compelling although I couldn't say that it was actually very light as I found much about the story that was disturbing and the main character to be completely aggravating.  Yet I couldn't put the book down.  The story is told from the perspective of Nora, the sister of the victim, who finds the body, and it perfectly captures her jittery, haphazard, at times maddeningly obtuse and otherwise emotionally flat affect. Although I am not particularly knowledgeable of the mystery genre, I found it be a good psychological suspense story that told the story in a new and somewhat unexpected way.  The conclusion seemed a bit of an afterthought in some ways, as indeed I believe it was meant to be.  Although the story begins as a search to find a killer, and the killer is indeed found, that is not, in the end the real focus of the suspense in this story.

I also read Elena Ferrante's The Days of Abandonment, a book that probably deserves its own post.  But it is also a book that I can't really write about.  Nothing I put in words is as powerful as the book itself and it is not a book I would recommend to the casual reader.  It is the first book of Ferrante's I have read, and I understand that it is different from her Neapolitan novels, which I am now looking forward to reading.  I love this novel, but it is raw, and gut-wrenchingly intimate and painful.  Basically it is the story of a woman's descent into despair and loss of identity following the dissolution of her marriage.  I have no experience of divorce; it is something I hope to never experience.  And, like the grief from a death, I am sure there are similarities and differences in everyone's experience.  But I am familiar with grief, at least from the perspective of losing a spouse to death, and although death also feels like a betrayal, I can believe that divorce is a betrayal of a completely different nature.  Ferrante's prose is so beautifully rendered, so personal, that I felt drawn into Olga's misery, as if her despair was my despair, as if all the ugliness of dissolution was palpably present.  Since I read the novel, I've read some reviews that find the story overwrought and implausible.  I do not.  Ferrante touches on something, some aspect of grief and loss, of losing oneself and finding oneself again, only changed, that we all must experience at some point, something I can definitely understand, and makes it real.

I'll end with two books that I feel are best read slowly, perhaps as part of a daily practice of meditation.

Plain Living: A quaker Path to Simplicity was picked up for a Sunday School class, a class that I missed most of due to other obligations, but I am happy to have found the book.  The book actually does not have a narrative structure, instead consisting of a series of quotes from various writers that have been grouped according to themes by the author.   Read consecutively, I believe the author is a bit heavy-handed, but that observation does the book a disservice.  I don't believe it is meant to be read from cover to cover, and if one is so inclined, there is much wisdom to ponder here.  I would say the book is more theist than specifically Christian. Although many, if not most, Quakers do consider themselves part of the Christian tradition, this book is not limited to that mind-set but rather on the relationship of the individual to the divine, and the search for simplicity as a pathway  to finding clarity of purpose and meaning in life.

Listening is an Act of Love by David Isay was given to me as a birthday present.  It is a compilation of stories edited from interviews that have occurred as part of the Story Corps project.  Like the previous book, the editor has grouped the stories by theme.  Also like the previous book, I find they are best read one or two at a time.   By reading a story a day, I fond the stories powerful reminders of the importance of everyone's life and story, each revealing in their own way something of the human condition that I could relate to and be inspired by.  They do not stand up to further scrutiny however.  Read straight through one gets the sense of something missing and yearns to hear more of the interviews.