By Stuart Mitchner

I started reading J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (Harper 2016) on the rebound from a problem with PayPal, the co-creation of Vance’s venture-capitalist savior Peter Thiel. The 2018 paperback comes with 10 pages of blurbs, including one from Thiel noting that Vance “writes powerfully about the real people who are kept out of sight by academic abstractions.” Quoted on the same page, Bill Gates says the book’s “real magic” is “in the story itself and Vance’s bravery in telling it.”

Friends who read Elegy when Vance was running for the Senate trashed it, calling it “phony.” I read it straight through in one day, absorbed in the story and the characters until the “real people” Thiel refers to were displaced by language like the subtitle’s “Culture in Crisis.” Although I wasn’t looking for “gotcha” moments as I read, I noticed passages that people on the Far Right would hate, and Hillbilly Elegy may yet land on some banned lists in Texas and Florida, given the campaign to rescue red state libraries from “woke” or suspect material. I’m also pretty sure that Mamaw, Vance’s gun-toting grandmother, a Democrat who liked Bill Clinton and The Sopranos, would have told J.D. to stay the hell away from venture capitalists, the Republican Party, and Donald Trump. All of Vance’s retracted defamations of Trump (“Hitler,” “idiot,” “poison”) could have been shouted by Mamaw from beyond the grave, except she’d have loaded her spectral rifle with f-words.

His “Whole” Sister

Hillbilly Elegy’s most sympathetic characters are female. While Vance called Mamaw his guardian angel, she also terrified him; the person he was viscerally closest to was his sister Lindsay, who was five years older, born just months after their tumultuous mother (referred to throughout as “Mom”) graduated from high school. He needed to think of Lindsay as his “full sister,” his “whole sister,” his “big sister” (Vance’s italics) and the moment Mamaw told him Lindsay was only his half-sister “remains one of the most devastating” of his life.

Lindsay’s impact is felt first in a scene guaranteed to shock drowsy readers awake. J.D. and Mom are driving to the mall when he makes a remark that infuriates her. She speeds up to what seems like 100 mph and says she’s going to crash the car and kill them both. He jumps into the back seat. She pulls over, and he leaps out of the car and starts running, finding refuge in a stranger’s house. Mom breaks down the locked door and drags him out screaming. Two police cars arrive (the stranger having called 9-1-1), and the cops put Mom in handcuffs and deposit J.D. in the back of the second cruiser. Recalling “the scariest day” of his life (“I never felt so lonely”), Vance relives the moment “the car door swung open and Lindsay crawled into the cruiser with me and clutched me to her chest so tightly that I couldn’t breathe. We didn’t cry, we said nothing. I just sat there being squeezed to death and feeling like all was right with the world.”

The chapter that follows is mainly about J.D.’s love for Lindsay: “I was obsessed with her, both in the way that all children adore their older siblings and in a way that was unique to our circumstances. Her heroism on my behalf was the stuff of legend…. I always saw her as more adult than child…. When Mom worked late nights or otherwise didn’t make it home, Lindsay ensured that we had something for dinner. I annoyed her, like all little brothers annoy their sisters, but she never yelled at me, screamed at me or made me afraid of her…. I depended on her so completely that I didn’t see Lindsay for what she was: a young girl, not yet old enough to drive a car, learning to fend for herself and her little brother at the same time.”

The Measure of a Man

In the context of candidate Vance’s widely reported misogynistic remarks about women without children, it’s worth noting that his grandfather Papaw once told him “the measure of a man is how he treats the women in his family,” a remark that echoes a reference to the fact that because of their mother’s revolving door relationships with husbands and lovers, J.D. and Lindsay “never learned how a man should treat a woman.” In spite of once claiming that “men will disappear at the drop of a hat, they don’t care about their kids, they don’t provide, they just disappear,” Lindsay went on to have a stable marriage.

Usha

Aware that such fatalism goes back to the tumult of life with Mom, Vance worries that family history might repeat itself in his marriage to Usha, the Indian American law student he met at Yale. As an example, he mentions the time he stormed out after an argument and found that she’d followed him, calmly telling him “through her tears that it was never acceptable to run away, that she was worried, and that I had to learn how to talk to her.” Describing a road rage situation that he resisted taking further, Vance confesses “the sad fact” that he couldn’t have done it “without Usha. Even at my best, I’m a delayed explosion — I can be defused but only with skill and precision. It’s not just that I’ve learned to control myself but that Usha has learned how to manage me.”

Depression Siblings

Vance’s bond with Lindsay reminds of my mother’s close relationship with her younger brother, forever known to her as Brother. Like Lindsay, my mother looked out for him, held his head when he was sick after his first drinking bout, consoled him when some girl broke his heart, and shared with him the impact the Depression had on the family business (she had to quit college after her freshman year to help Brother keep them afloat); she told me about it one night when I asked why she was crying, still mourning him 20 years after his death a year before the end of the Second World War.

Reading Hillbilly Elegy also reminded me of my mother’s courthouse square life working for lawyers and judges in a southern Indiana county seat, where most of the cases were about domestic violence, feuds, and shootings involving “hill people” or “poor people” who lived outside the city limits. I don’t think she ever called them “hillbillies.” For one thing, she was writing stories about them, one adolescent girl in particular. They had last names like Grubb, Deckard, Scroggins, and Whaley (no Vances), which were also the names of the kids I knew during my three years (grades 4-6) at a two-room country school. On long, twisty school bus rides through those hills, we picked up kids from tarpaper shacks, solitary mansions, and small farms. When I moved on to school in town, I found myself at the top of a class system with other white-collar business and faculty kids while some of my best friends were relegated to the lower order of “country kids” no one invited to parties. The one area in which I reunited, awkwardly, with my friends was playing baseball, football, and basketball, where they tended to be the best athletes while the best I could do was co-edit the sports page of the school paper.

“Just a second”

That subhead contains the three little words whose sole redeeming value was that they sent me “on the rebound” from a PayPal quagmire to a day between the covers of Hillbilly Elegy. Instant access is the be-all and end-all of PayPal that made a billionaire of Peter Thiel. Type in your password and you’re on your way. Except the other day instead of access to my account, I was met with a blank screen containing the words “Just a second.” A second, not a minute, so what’s on the other side of that insidious second? — nothing. That “second” could last until doomsday. In spite of the no-doubt-about-it wall behind that wretched non-message, I waited a full minute. Nothing. Undaunted, in disbelief, I tried again and again and it was always “Just a second.” A call to PayPal accomplished nothing better than a suggestion to empty my “cookie cache.” Days later, with no explanation, the situation was tentatively resolved. By then I’d found a semblance of productive refuge in J.D. Vance’s story, whose most compelling character is his grandmother with her cache of rifles and her instant access to handguns in case her grandson’s “venture-capitalist savior” ever showed up at her door. But Mamaw died in 2005, 17 years too late to save J.D. from a fate worse than fame.