Five Reasons Hillbilly Elegy Became A Runaway Bestseller
By: Ed Newman
Tags: Book Review, Books, Appalachia, American Culture, Poverty

…and is now becoming a high-profile Hollywood feature film.

Photo by Wes Hicks on Unsplash

One measure of how widespread a book is being read is to note how many folks have rated it on Goodreads.com or have left reviews. By this measure, it’s quite apparent that J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy has been widely consumed since more than 225,000 people have given it a rating, and more than 23,000 have left a written record of what the book was about or meant to them.

Public domain.

According to the inside cover flap, “Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis-that of poor, white Americans. The disintegration of this group, a process that has been slowly occurring now for over forty years, has been reported with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. In Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hanging around your neck.”

The drumbeat of praise for the book includes this endorsement from The Economist: “You will not read a more important book this year.” To which I would say, “Poppycock.”

When the book was published, J.D. Vance was a 31-year old who grew up in a supremely dysfunctional home in Southern Ohio. I picked it up to read because the narrator’s life path in some ways is an echo of my father’s story, whose roots are Eastern Kentucky, who grew up in Hamilton, Ohio (a few miles from Vance’s beleaguered Middletown) and escaped by way of the military and college on the G.I. bill. (My father was army, and went to college at Hiram in Ohio, Vance joined the marines and found himself at Yale.) My father’s trek along that path diverged at a few key points, however, foremost of these being that his story took place a half century earlier and that though his parents, my Grandpa and Grandma Newman, were dirt poor, they remained married to one another for fifty years.

As I near the end of Vance’s memoir I can’t say I agree that it’s a “must read.” It’s been an interesting read for me personally because I do know the social terrain from which this story emerges.

Here are five reasons I believe the book caught on and has been widely circulated.

Curiosity

Anton Chekhov wrote a short story once about a couple people who stopped to watch something — it may have been the behavior of a couple birds on a rooftop — and a crowd begins to form in the street to see what they are staring at. When the birds fly away and the two people leave there is a crowd still standing there looking up and wondering what everyone else is looking at. Can this be one reason people read books that are on bestseller lists? I don’t doubt it.

I think, too, that there is a curiosity about the lives of people who are very different from our own. This is why shows like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous gain a following. Or stories about Mafia families.

Authority

He writes with authority because it’s his story. He essentially lays down in lines the experiences of his life.

Transparency

There have always been kiss-and-tell books on bestseller lists, but social media has elevated voyeuristic reading to a new level. This book operates on the assumption that by zeroing in on one messed up story we can draw conclusions about all kinds of people in this particular social set, the transplanted “hillbillies” of Eastern Kentucky and Tennessee who migrated a generation or two earlier to the Rust Belt, a region economically challenged now with few ways out for many.

Apparent Authenticity

The story rings true because he just tells it like it was. He is exceedingly candid, possibly urged on my the publisher who sensed that there are profits to be mined from stories like this. I think here of Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again, which was sequel to Look Homeward, Angel. ThoughWolfe recast his rural life experiences as a fictional narrative, there were too many places where real life people had been reflected unfavorably, and recognizably, in the story. I can’t help but wonder how Vance’s friends, family and neighbors reacted to this mucky tale.

American Tragedy

The gap between haves and have nots has grown significantly over the past fifty years. Vance presents his story as a microcosm of the broader issues facing this population demographic.