Confusion reigns over what J.D. Vance’s book really tells us about him

There’s a lot of attention at present on a book that came out eight years ago. Hillbilly Elegy’s author, J. D. Vance, may become the next US vice president – or down the track, even president. What can his memoir tell us about him and his politics? The answer is confusing.

Hillbilly Elegy was a bestseller and was adapted into a film, which you can see on Netflix, and the book is still getting glowing reviews on Goodreads. Vance was the poor hillbilly boy who made good: he grew up in the Appalachian region of the US in a violence-prone family, with a mother addicted to drugs and a succession of stepfathers. Somehow he got through this traumatic childhood, joined the Marines, went to Ohio State University and studied law at Yale.

In the trailer for the film, Glenn Close as Vance’s tough old bird of a grandmother, possibly the most consistent force for good in his troubled life, tells young “J.D.” there are three kinds of people: the terminator, the bad terminator and the neutral. So what can Vance’s origin story tell us? Is he a terminator, a bad terminator, a neutral or something else?

Hillbilly Elegy is as much as anything an analysis of the alienated poor whites who have turned to Trumpism, but the politics were ambiguous from the start. Both conservatives and progressives admired the book because they could identify support for their own ideology. But some progressives accused the book of blaming the victim, and some conservatives accused it of advocating a huge increase in government welfare. Clearly it had something for everyone to praise or blame.

Now the critics are rereading it, and in the light of Vance supporting Trump, the man he once dubbed America’s Hitler, the verdicts are scathing – on the author, if not the book. Laura Miller is thoroughly disillusioned. “All the qualities that made Hillbilly Elegy one of the best books I read in 2016 — its brutal honesty, its challenges to the self-delusional and self-defeating aspects of hillbilly culture, its mournful ambivalence about the identity he’s only partially left behind — have been shamelessly jettisoned by Vance for the sake of his political career,” she writes in Slate.

One of the best reappraisals comes from an Australian writer, Dennis Altman, in The Conversation. He compares Vance’s book with another memoir that launched a political career, Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father. While Obama is the better stylist, “Vance is a competent and vivid writer … As a picture of a complex dysfunctional family, it is a remarkable if somewhat maudlin achievement.”

Altman suggests further reading: an anthology, Appalachian Reckoning, a reply to Vance’s memoir aiming to debunk his “sweeping stereotypes”; and Arlie Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land, an in-depth look at poor white Trump followers in Louisiana. I’d add a work of fiction: Barbara Kingsolver’s award-winning Demon Copperhead, a searing tale of Appalachian hardscrabble survival that documents the epidemic of opioid addiction in the region and the medical profession’s ignominious role in spreading it.