In Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Civilization in Crisis , erstwhile marine and Yale Law School graduate J.D. Vance offers a personal account of growing upwardly in – and somewhen leaving – an impoverished white working-class 'hillbilly' community experiencing social and economic crunch. While the volume has been praised for offering insights into why Donald Trump proved then attractive to the U.s.a. white working class in the 2016 Presidential election, Peter Carrol is less convinced past Vance's broader and overtly politicised sociological analysis of his community. Nonetheless, he finds the vividness of Vance's unflinching recollections compelling.

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family unit and Culture in Crunch . J.D. Vance. HarperCollins. 2016.

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hillbilly-elegy-coverWhen J.D. Vance was eleven, his drug-fond female parent chased him across farmland after threatening to murder him by crashing the car, with Vance taking refuge in a stranger's business firm until the police force arrived. When he turned xviii, Vance managed another dramatic escape, this time from his dysfunctional 'hillbilly' background, joining the marines to serve in Republic of iraq, going on to earn a law degree from Yale and somewhen landing a lucrative job far away from his family.

The 32-year-old Vance's memoir chronicles this impressive ascent from the poor, white working-class communities of Scotch-Irish descent who alive forth the Appalachian Mountains in such states as Alabama, Ohio and Kentucky. Vance calls these people 'hillbillies', and his book comes as these communities are living through social and economic crisis. Suffering at the precipitous terminate of the U.s.'southward rapid deindustrialisation, the well-paid, skilled jobs of previous generations have disappeared, leaving towns and cities in permanent recession and mired in habit and poverty. Vance paints a captivating portrait of his formative environment: as he puts information technology, of 'what it feels like to have poverty and addiction hanging round your neck from birth'.

In addition to her crippling addictions, Vance's mother moves through a conveyor chugalug of partners, regularly uprooting his family throughout his childhood. When Vance's mother is incapacitated or he is removed from her care, he is raised by his alcoholic grandfather and his tearing, gun-toting grandmother. Their securely disturbing behaviour is unsparingly detailed: at ane point Vance's grandparents threaten to murder a shop assistant who asks a cousin not to play with an expensive toy, while in i of the many acts of violence recounted, his grandmother douses his grandpa in petrol then sets him on fire when he returns home drunkard. Amid Vance's firsthand and extended family, marital breakdown, adultery, alcoholism and sexism are all normalised everyday behaviour.

hillbilly-elegy-imageParadigm Credit: (stu_spivack CC BY SA ii.0)

Vance identifies a number of broader trends that are rotting the US white working class from the inside. A work civilisation where parents fail to plow up to their jobs and barely practice anything while there, fostering a culture of long-term unemployment aslope welfare dependency. Widespread financial recklessness, where families earning an almanac household income of $100,000 (£81,000) are ruined by excessive debt. Vance writes: 'We purchase homes nosotros don't need, refinance them for more spending money, and declare bankruptcy, often leaving them full of garbage in our wake. Thrift is inimical to our existence.'

Since its autumn publication, Hillbilly Elegy has been praised for its insights into why Donald Trump proved so attractive to the The states white working class in the presidential ballot of November 2016. Aside from the fact that information technology is like shooting fish in a barrel to see how many 'hillbillies' could embrace Trump – a xenophobic misogynist with an unpredictable temperament – as one of their own, Vance identifies how a mutual sense of victimhood and tendency to arraign others was successfully tapped during Trump's campaign. Foreigners, the government, 'littoral elites' are all seen as responsible for the predicament of the 'hillbillies', who, Vance argues, blame everyone apart from themselves.

Not all of Vance's memoir is as convincing as his personal reflections, however. In one sentence he extols the United states as the 'greatest country in the world', while he afterward laments the fact that it is a nation with 'no heroes' to inspire its citizens. Vance chastises his ain customs for their addiction to debt and materialism, merely continuously advocates a kind of aggressive pursuit of wealth every bit central to his understanding of realising the 'American Dream'.

Vance claims that drug addicts are solely responsible for their plight, apparently absolving successive U.s.a. governments who have pursued a war on drugs that has criminalised whole swathes of social club and the pharmaceutical corporations that aggressively marketplace the painkillers that are fuelling the prescription drug epidemic. He makes glib criticisms of the Democrat party equally enablers of dependency through their welfare program, ignoring the fact that in the USA the majority of welfare recipients are actually in work on poverty wages.

Vance idolises his grandmother, 'the nicest person in the world', despite her every other sentence seeming to contain an insult or a threat of violence. (Vance seems to have a soft spot for women who trade in personal insults: he later describes how he falls for his partner when she tells another person in a bar that they take a small caput.) When he is studying as an undergraduate at Ohio State, he describes how the criticisms of Usa foreign policy in the Centre Due east past a 'dipshit' with a 'spotty beard' are the catalyst for him to condense his studies and so he can graduate in under two years, presumably to avoid any farther encounters with those who challenge his worldview.

At the beginning of the book, Vance describes a 'hillbilly' code of silence, which forbids family members discussing their problems with outsiders. By refusing to acknowledge their behaviour, Vance feels that his community are hiding their vices while leaving outsiders ignorant of the extent of the problem. In this sense, by shattering the 'hillbilly' omerta on the pages of his book, he has done a valuable service by shining a light on a dark corner of US society. But by extending these observations to generalise an entire population, oft with selective and cursory utilise of external evidence, Vance is guilty of overreach in his wider analysis.

Vance's unflinching and painful account of the life he has left behind deserves rich praise, as does Vance'south achievement to overcome such huge disadvantages to achieve academic and career success. But while Vance's personal recollections are compelling, his broader sociological analysis is ofttimes too broad and feels overtly political. The latter is likely to be intentional: Vance's uncritical patriotism and his delivery to the politics of personal responsibility will prove great assets within the Republican party when he embarks on his inevitable political career.

Peter Carrol is a Media Relations Officeholder at LSE and MSc graduate in Politics and Advice. Read more by Peter Carrol.

Note: This review gives the views of the author, and non the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics.

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