Hillbilly Elegy, by J.D. Vance

I have to think that J.D. is a pretty brave young man, well prepared to take heat and stand by his book.  It’s a loving yet unflinching no-holds-barred account of the culture into which he was born, and from which he managed to escape.  He must certainly have been sharply criticized by relatives, friends (maybe former friends),co-workers, and acquaintances who have read the book, and probably some who haven’t but heard others talking.  “He done forgot where he come from.”  “That boy’s got too big for his britches.”  “He thinks he’s better than us.” “He better not show his prissy face around here no more.”

And why would he?  Somehow he managed to finish high school, do well enough at Ohio State to get into Yale Law, marry a beautiful girl who is also a Yale Law grad, and now he has written a best seller.  The future is wide open for J.D. Vance.  He has a Wikipedia page and his own website. Wait, never mind the website.  I went to it and got nothing but a list of links to headings like “Hillbilly Housewife,” “Bluegrass Music,” and “Arthritis”.  Regardless, J.D. is not about to rejoin hillbilly culture.

The book itself is a memoir that traces his path from Jackson, Kentucky, an area known locally as “the holler”, where he is “raised” by an extended family that includes his mother, a pitiful model of bad choices and drug addiction, a series of men, including his real father for the first six years until he gave JD up for adoption to become a serious evangelical, his grandmother and grandfather, Mamaw and Papaw, and a motley group of uncles, aunts, and cousins, who seem to be about as acquainted with the law as with employers.  He credits Mamaw and Papaw with saving him from a life of poverty and helplessness, and most likely drugs.  Not by setting a good example of how to behave and get along with people (In Chapter 1 he calls Mamaw a “pistol-packing lunatic”), but by caring about and for him. They were always there for him and went to great pains to make sure he was safe and fed. 

It’s still a bit mysterious to me.  How J.D. came out smelling so like a rose in spite of all the strikes against him.  I should probably re-read the book to see if I can make sense of it.  

I should re-read it anyway because it’s an important work. It’s well written, filled with remembrances of actual events [It’s a memoir. Duh.] well told, touching, often frightful, more often sad and pathetic.  Sometimes infuriating.  Like the guy who never shows up on time for work, takes overlong breaks, sometimes doesn’t show up at all, and then blames everyone else when he gets fired.  Ridiculous.  Also, the language in the book is unsparing and true, right down to the expletives, always appropriate to the situation.

Why do I see this book as important?  Vance writes about the need to change hillbilly culture, to give their children a better chance at healthy productive lives.  The book is jammed with bad examples set by the adults in his world, and good examples not set which he realizes only when he gets to college and sees people behaving differently.  

Is it political?  Absolutely.  Isn’t the future of our children something that should be political?  Can’t we look at areas of poverty, high crime, poor health, drug addiction, and high need for government assistance and acknowledge that there is something wrong that can’t be entirely blamed on someone else?  Maybe J.D. Vance is the kind of person who can offer solutions from within the culture, not just calling for more government programs, but calling on the people themselves to do better for their children, to live better lives.

I’m willing to bet there are similar lessons to be learned by other failing cultures, perhaps inner city blacks.  But this is not the book for them.  J.D. Vance can speak to and about hillbilly ways because that’s where he came from, it’s what he knows, and he is living proof that a better life is possible for them.  But it’s hard to change culture.  I can hear a voice from Kentucky, thick with scorn and cigarette smoke, “Well just listen to Mr. England going on with his prissy talk about us.  He don’t know nuthin. Thinks he’s better than us.”

Well. 

The Enchanted, by Rene Denfeld

Wow, this was a hard read.  Not the writing or the language, but the subject matter: death row inmates.  The protagonist is a woman, referred to only as “the lady”, who researches and defends people on death row, not to exonerate them but to try to save them from the ultimate punishment.  These are not nice people.  They are vile, violent, sick, repellent, dangerous, hateful, ugly, nasty, dreadful people.  They are mentally and/or emotionally ill.  They could be called evil if you believe in that sort of thing.  They have committed hideous crimes.  If you were a loved one of one of their victims you would likely want to see them dead, if even with your own bare hands.  And yet.....

These are people, human beings.  They were born naked infants just like the rest of us.  What led them to the acts for which they have been condemned to die?  That is the question that drives “the lady.”  She starts with the assumption, the belief, that something in their past, made them into what they are, or at least the part of them for which they are to be punished.  Maybe the father or mother, maybe a grandfather or an uncle, or a neighbor, maybe a complete stranger.  Someone.  Someone else who can be blamed.  Not to entirely shift the blame, and punishment, onto someone else, but to lighten the weight of responsibility on the inmate.  To create an opening for understanding and sympathy for the person whose hands have committed the depraved act.  

Her task is not pleasant.  It takes her deep into the ominous prison, in a private room with the inmate in an ancient wooden cage, for conversations in which she patiently waits for crumbs of memories--names, places, events.  It takes her to places of the inmates’ childhood, lonely and sometimes dangerous places, to interview people who may have known.  As I said, it’s a hard book to read.  No bedtime story.

The author, Rene Denfeld, based her writing on more than a decade of work with violent offenders, including some on death row.  According to her Wikipedia page, “...her life and writing revolves around preventing and healing trauma.”  She seems to believe that even the worst of us has value and deserves a chance at redemption.  WWJD?

Coincidentally, the New York Times Magazine, in its annual issue of short tributes to important people who died in the previous year, included Scharlette Holdman, a woman sometimes credited with developing the field of “death penalty mitigation.”  Her clients included Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, Jared Loughner, the shooter in Tucson who killed six and wounded others including U.S. Representative Gabby Giffords, and her last, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the accused mastermind of the 9/11 attacks.  Over a fifty-plus year career she held to the belief that her clients were not monsters, just “terribly flawed human beings.”

On reflection, I am reminded of the enduring “nature versus nurture” debate.  These defenders of the accused tilt heavily toward the nurture side, believing that the inmates were not born as felons, but that circumstances in their lives molded them badly.  It’s an optimistic viewpoint in that it argues that if society could be improved, innocent babies would no longer be transformed into the types of flawed humans who commit horrible crimes.

I am reminded also of Anthony Burgess, a lion of twentieth century literature and a personal favorite of mine, who argued that we have the ability to choose good or evil, that we can recognize an opportunity to do good or to do evil, and choose evil.  “If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange--meaning that he has the appearance of an organism, lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil.”

Perhaps society, with its boundless capacity for good and for evil, is the clock winder.

Talk, Talk, by T. C. Boyle

I’ve enjoyed another novel, Tortilla Curtain, by this writer, and Sue has read several, so I decided it was time to revisit him.  His writing is very modern in its subject matter and style.  This story portrays a clash between very different worlds, and a reckoning, a detente if not an embrace.

Dana is a deaf woman, educated, honest, hard-working, in a promising new romance.  Bridger, her boyfriend, is a tech worker, also honest, and headlong in love with Dana.  Peck Wilson is a criminal, ex-con, living the high life on his latest scheme, identity theft.  Peck steals Dana’s identity and, besides binge spending with her credit cards, lets his own history become hers.  So when she is pulled for a minor traffic violation, the cop sees a record of assault, robbery, and other assorted misdemeanors and felonies, he approaches with gun pulled and arrests her.  She endures a long weekend of rough treatment and insult, made incalculably worse by her deafness.  After release, her righteous anger moves her to pursue the thief.  Bridger eagerly joins her.  

The collisions of worlds--between the law-abiding and the criminal, between the hearing and the deaf--is well developed, revealing a rich combination of research and Boyle’s fertile imagination.  I do worry about identity theft.  With the hacker attacks on Yahoo, Uber, even the government, I’m sure much of my personal data is out there.  Just yesterday at a doctor’s office I was asked to sign an insurance authorization that showed, on hard copy, my name, address, date of birth, insurance group number, and my Medicare ID, which happens to be my Social Security Number, a fact that even the lamest of identity thieves would know.  Uber data included a credit card number.  I feel vulnerable, and reading this book certainly did nothing to allay my concerns.  

Perhaps years from now technology will have all but eliminated identity theft.  But the sound wall that segregates the deaf from the hearing, the disabled from the non-disabled, will endure, and the insights into that separation offered by this book will have lasting value.  

This was a good read.  Boyle’s writing sparkles, careens, booms, rumbles, and flashes, in his descriptive passages as well as the plot lines.  Highly imaginative and enjoyable.