Non-fiction

I still haven't written my 2017 book list. I'll get around to it eventually, I guess. But I'm a few books into 2018. I just finished J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, which had been on my to-read list for some time.

It's a good story. It's not the seminal work of autobiography and social criticism that it was hyped to be, but it's still worth reading. It's hard not to be moved by the life story of a person who comes from poverty and chaos and ends up at Yale Law. Finishing college at Ohio State in two years after four years in the Marine Corps, and graduating summa cum laude is an amazing achievement.

I came from a working-class background (East Coast urban, not hillbilly, but there are plenty of similarities) so I know who Vance is talking about when he writes about the quick-to-anger, clannish, foul-mouthed but often hilariously funny people he grew up with. I know some of them myself. They have Philadelphia accents rather than Kentucky mountain twangs; and they're Catholic rather than Evangelical, but they have a lot in common with Vance's hillbillies.

I don't agree with some of Vance's political opinions, and the writing quality in the book is uneven--very good in some places, and sloppy in others.  And though the personal details read as truthful, there are a few minor inconsistencies--for example, when Vance writes about the first time that he met his wife, and says that he'd never before met anyone as direct as she was, after several hundred pages of stories about his fearless, sailor-mouth grandmother. "Not even Mamaw?" I thought. She seemed pretty direct to me.

But other than that, the book was fine. Not a groundbreaking social history, not the most brilliant memoir ever, but good. I'm glad I read it. The predictable backlash against the book (Vance is a Trump-voter apologist, though the book never mentions Trump; he's not a real hillbilly,* he's boastful and self-satisfied, etc.) misses the point, which is that this is one man's attempt to to both tell his own story and to explain the world through his own experience. Like most of us who try to do those things, he tells only the part of his story that he wants to share, in the way that he wants to share it; and he doesn't get the larger picture 100% right, because no one can, ever.

*****
After I finished Hillbilly Elegy, I started reading Miranda Hart's Is It Just Me? I don't know why. Contrast, maybe--it's certainly very different from Hillbilly Elegy. I really like Miranda Hart, but she's a far better performer than writer. You can't do everything, I suppose. Anyway, it's mildly amusing, though I do have to stop and look up obscure Britishisms every five minutes. I thought that I had a pretty good grasp of British slang, but apparently, I have no idea.

*****
I took a quick break between Hillbilly Elegy and Miranda to read Amy Krouse Rosenthal's Textbook. She was the only person who could have written this quirky little collection of memories and ideas and observations. I finished it in a few hours, and then I was sad to think that there will be no more AKR books to read.

*****
So three very different books by three very different authors. Or maybe not that different. Both J.D. Vance and Miranda Hart are members of very small and insular groups of people: Rust Belt-raised Ivy League-educated descendants of Appalachian hillbillies vs. upper-class lacrosse-playing British boarding school girls turned actresses--not many people fit into either of those little circles, which wouldn't intersect on most Venn diagrams. But neither J.D. Vance nor Miranda Hart would think the way they think or write the way they write if they weren't members of  those little groups. Amy Krouse Rosenthal, on the other hand, would probably have written exactly the same books no matter where she came from, or no matter what language she grew up speaking.

As much as I love to read novels, this is why I love non-fiction. I like to visit an unfamiliar place with a native guide, or to get acquainted with a mind completely different from mine. And now I know that a holler is a hollow in the Appalachian Mountains (I knew, but know I know for sure, if you know what I mean), and I know that a cagoule is an anorak-like jacket. (I had no idea--see what I mean about obscure Britishisms?) Knowledge, after all, is power.

*****

* Hillbilly street cred. Who knew?