Every week, we invite you to read something new, a classic or a book to rediscover.
While JD Vance will become this Monday January 20 the 50th vice president of the United States, we can profitably look at the autobiographical story that he published in 2016 (before his political career) and which became a bestseller in his country before a film adaptation by Ron Howard ( with Gabriel Basso, Glenn Close and Amy Adams) will be released in 2020. Published in France in 2017 by Globe and reissued in paperback the following year, Hillbilly Elégie offers a valuable testimony to understanding a part of American realities which often escape the French (to name but a few).
So who are these “hillbillies”, also called “rednecks”? “Rednecks”, “hillbillies”, “little white guys” rooted in deep America and despised by a large part of the political-cultural establishment, workers (or descendants of workers) historically close to the Democratic Party and who have largely shifted to the Republican side in recent decades. Born in 1984 into a poor family in the Rust Belt, this former industrial region hit by recession and relocations induced by economic globalization, JD Vance introduces himself as “ the son of a man who abandoned me, and whom I barely knew, and a woman whom I would have preferred not to know “. Abandoned by a mother mired in her addictions to alcohol and drugs, the boy will be raised by his maternal grandparents in a small town in Ohio that has only known the crisis.
Tribute to the poorest
Thirty-two years old when he published his book, JD Vance said he wrote it in order to “ that we know what life the poorest lead and that we measure the impact of this poverty, material and spiritual, on their children “. And the portrait he paints of his people, of his family (“ a crazy family ), their loved ones, “ the ones that people who live between Boston and Washington make fun of “, hides nothing of their failings and the ills affecting these downgraded people: broken families, a social assistance system that too often reinforces continued poverty, consumer credit at exorbitant rates, junk food, overconsumption of medications, alcoholism, drugs, decay social bonds… However, his grandparents, sometimes brutal and violent, loving and protective, instilled in him moral values, a common decency specific to lowly people.
Everything seemed destined Vance for a dark future, anger and resentment. A commitment in the Marines, from 2003 to 2007, took him from his native Ohio. Sent to Iraq, serving in non-combatant units, he learned from this experience a distrust of US military expeditions. Back home, he enrolled at the public university of Ohio and then, thanks to scholarships, joined the prestigious Yale Law School. He became a lawyer and married an American woman of Indian origin (herself a lawyer). Returning to business, it was only in 2021 that he entered politics and was elected senator of Ohio a year later. We know the rest… After, funny, moving, Hillbilly Elégie is the astonishing story of social ascension, the testimony of a class defector who has not denied his origins. The American dream still exists.
Christian Authier
-> A book for the weekend
Hillbilly Elegy • Gallimard
