万斯已经背弃了他最忠实的读者
2024-07-21 06:31阅读：
'Hillbilly Elegy' Gets a Blockbuster
Sequel
Our critic traces J.D. Vance's shift from bootstrap memoirist to
vice-presidential candidate.
By A.O. Scott
“I am not a senator, a governor or a former cabinet secretary,”
J.D. Vance wrote on the first page of “Hillbilly Elegy,” by way of
establishing his regular-guy bona fides. That was all true in 2016,
when Vance was a former Marine and Yale Law School graduate with “a
nice job, a happy marriage, a comfortable home and two lively
dogs.” His memoir reads a little differently now.
This is partly because Vance is, in fact, a senator, and also, as
of Monday, the Republican vice-presidential candidate. Much has
been made of his political evolution over the past eight years,
from never-Trump conservative to MAGA loyalist, from analyzing
right-wing populism to embodying it. While Vance’s critics view
this as brazen opportunism, he has explained his ideological shifts
(including in a recent interview with Ross Dout
hat of The New York Times) as a result of a twofold intellectual
awakening: It turned out that Donald Trump wasn’t as bad as Vance
had thought, and that American liberals were much worse.
This turnabout is notable because part of the legend of “Hillbilly
Elegy” is that liberals were its intended audience and biggest
fans. Published by a major trade house, respectfully (if at times
skeptically) reviewed and widely discussed, it was both a message
to the establishment and an application for membership.
The book tells the story of two migrations. One is the large-scale
movement of poor whites, among them the author’s maternal
grandparents, from rural Appalachia to the cities and towns of the
Rust Belt. The other is Vance’s path from one of those places —
Middletown, Ohio — to the geographic and demographic precincts of
the ruling class: New Haven; Silicon Valley; Washington, D.C.
To the extent that “Hillbilly Elegy” is a bootstrap narrative — the
chronicle of a young person’s rise in the face of adversity — it
can be read as a vindication of the status quo. An imaginary
reader, comfortably ensconced in the seat of relative privilege,
will be gratified to learn that this ambitious Ohioan has pulled up
a neighboring chair, and fascinated by the story of how he got
there. The tale is painful but also inspiring. Vance’s childhood
was shadowed by his mother’s struggle with opioid addiction, but he
was saved by his loving grandparents, in particular by his salty,
tenacious grandmother, Mamaw, whose portrait is the book’s most
memorable literary achievement.
Mamaw, the Marine Corps and Ohio State lifted young J.D. out of
Middletown and helped give him the confidence and the skills to
write “Hillbilly Elegy.” (Yale did its part to supply him with
connections, most consequentially his mentor and contracts
professor Amy Chua, author of “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,”
among other books.)
Part of the message of this kind of memoir is humble and
aspirational: If I can make it, the writer suggests, anybody can.
But that encouraging moral is accompanied by the somber
acknowledgment that many people don’t. The plucky, lucky
protagonist is at once representative and exceptional, a paradox
that gives personal reflection the weight of social criticism.
What’s stopping everyone else? Why do so many of Vance’s peers seem
destined for joblessness and underemployment, substance abuse and
domestic chaos, poverty and despair?
Often, in the autobiographical genre to which “Hillbilly Elegy”
belongs — a genre whose shelves are full of books by Black,
Indigenous and immigrant writers — the answers are systemic. What
the author has overcome is injustice, prejudice, a fundamental
unfairness in the way the world is organized. The implicit
political claim is usually more reformist than radical: We need to
fix things so that more kids like this can make it, by removing
barriers and expanding opportunities.
Vance’s argument is emphatically not that. If the Americans he
calls hillbillies — a somewhat elastic category that can be
regional (Appalachian), ethnic (Scots-Irish) or sociological (white
working class) — are falling or stuck, it’s largely their own
fault.
The same cultural traits that make Mamaw and her kin such vivid
presences on the page and in Vance’s life — love of fighting,
clannishness, hatred of authority — have trapped them in poverty
and dysfunction. “Working class” may be a misnomer: “People talk
about hard work all the time in places like Middletown,” Vance
writes. “You can walk through a town where 30 percent of the young
men work fewer than 20 hours a week and find not a single person
aware of his own laziness.”
The harshness of this judgment — and the cultural determinism
underpinning it — drew some criticism, including from writers with
backgrounds like Vance’s. At the same time, the idea that members
of a marginal or disadvantaged group have caused their own
misfortune is music to the ears of those in power. If those people
are just that way — lazy, uncooperative, sexually promiscuous —
then any policy designed to help them is useless.
That kind of argument has long been marshaled by conservatives
against social programs aimed at African Americans, Latinos and the
urban poor. Vance was not the first writer on the right to wield it
against rural and proletarian whites. Charles Murray’s “Coming
Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” published in 2012,
anticipates some of the themes of “Hillbilly Elegy.” During the
2016 presidential campaign, Kevin D. Williamson published a series
of caustic essays in National Review linking the rise of Trump with
the decline of the white working class, concluding that the
woebegone citizens of places like Middletown had “failed
themselves.” “Nothing happened to them,” Williamson wrote. “There
wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a
plague or a foreign occupation.”
In the years since, it’s safe to say that this perspective hasn’t
found much purchase on the intellectual right, which is now less
interested in diagnosing Trumpism than in writing its playbook.
Vance has been part of both projects, which has involved a change
in tone and orientation, and not only with respect to Trump
himself.
There is a tension in “Hillbilly Elegy,” a dissonance between the
way Vance celebrates his family and the way he sells them out,
othering them in the service of a dubious argument. I say dubious
because it’s clear now that he doubts the thesis that the American
working class is to blame for its own troubles, or at least doubts
the political utility of saying as much. He is more apt to blame
China, NAFTA, Mexico and certain corporations, and also the
political and cultural establishment that he was once determined to
join. In other words: He has turned against the most devoted
readers of his book.
