Before booking passage for West Virginia earlier this year (as if I was sailing to a different world, please excuse my poor excuse of a literary license), I was loaned a copy of J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, which is prominently touted as being about the ails of Appalachia.
However, I have a very complicated relationship with the book. Well, to be honest, I have a very complicated relationship with the book's conclusion, because it fails to answer the omnipresent question that lingers over Vance's entire story: how do we fix Appalachia?
Written essentially as a memoir that follows Vance's life, which concludes with him graduating from Yale University after beginning his journey in a dilapidated Ohio industry town, Hillbilly Elegy painstakingly leads the reader through the author's horrible childhood, his attempts to escape the poverty of his home, and his eventual success by first joining the military and later attending college.
It's a classic tale of the downtrodden man fighting his way toward upward mobility, or as we call it in my country, the "American Dream." Vance's rise from ashes to comfort is inspiring and worth the read.
But...
My issue with the tome, however, stems from how it ends with essentially no prescription, plan, suggestion or recommendation on how to address the economic, cultural, medical, and societal ills that have come to define the poorest region in the United States; a region that Vance does a good job of describing in realistic terms, but which he fails in representing to the outside world as a fixable situation.
Part of the author's biggest critique of Appalachian culture is its lack of work ethic, which flatly reeks of a Yale University level of pretentiousness if I may say so, because you would think Vance himself would be able to recognize that (a.) Appalachia has fallen into a self-defeatist rut after losing its cultural identity and (b.) escape is often the easy way off of a sinking ship.
I don't blame Vance for escaping his roots, because he probably never would have written his tome otherwise, but his very escape should speak to the endemic problem of Appalachia, which is to remain is to die. For all intents and purposes, Appalachia is the impoverished white man's version of inner city ghettos, only there's shacks instead of tenements and mountains instead of skyscrapers.
Quite frankly, in order for a culture to possess work ethic and grit, it must have a reason to do so. Poor, uninspired Appalachian communities are not going to find a sense of work ethic overnight when the coal mines have been closed for decades, their culture has become alienated from the rest of society, and its number one media commentator is only capable of being in the position he is in because he fled.
This may just be a personal complaint I possess against the author, however, because I live in one of the poorest counties in New York: Schoharie County, which ironically serves as the northeastern boundary of Appalachia according to the Appalachian Regional Commission, and it too is suffering culturally and economically and the response of most young adults is to leave home as rapidly as possible.
I didn't do that, though. All of my brothers pushed me from a very early age to leave home, but I stayed because I loved my community, I loved my friends and family, and I believed that the only way to be part of the solution was to lead by example and to get my hands dirty in building a better place for everyone to call home.
Whatever the case may be, Appalachia deserves more than Vance's poor (albeit well intended) excuse for a solution to its problems. That poor excuse, in my opinion, is what made Hillbilly Elegy a book that I wanted to love, but I couldn't help but resent.
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