When Hillbilly Elegy was published in 2016, JD Vance’s book is read as a key to understanding the America that elected Donald Trump. The Republican candidate has just chosen his author to be his vice president, and his bestseller is back in the spotlight.
As soon as the White House contender’s decision was announced on Monday, the book shot to the top of Amazon’s best-seller lists in the United States. The publisher has launched reprints, while the book has already sold three million copies in all formats since its release, details the New York Times.
Over the course of some 200 pages, JD Vance recounts his childhood in the white working class, girls getting pregnant at 16, deindustrialization in a rural America that has felt forgotten for decades. The book also shows, in the background, the turnaround of a historically Democratic electorate that has become pro-Trump.
It is also a personal story, that of the social ascent of a child born into poverty who manages to integrate the Yale law school, the quintessence of the traditional American elite.
A “success story”, sums up to AFP its French translator Vincent Raynaud, who praises “a good book”, “well written”, “important” because it “really speaks out for a category that he considers (…) forgotten and neglected by the American power”.
When the book came out, he was just an unknown 31-year-old financier working in Silicon Valley.
But this self-narrative turned Netflix film propels JD Vance onto the media scene. After its publication, he uses his book as a campaign argument and launches into politics, with dazzling success: elected senator from Ohio in 2022, he is now Donald Trump’s running mate.
Appalachian Debate
Four days after the earthquake of Donald Trump’s election in November 2016, the New York Times lists six books “to help understand the victory” of the real estate mogul. Among them, J.D. Vance’s, “a subtle and compassionate sociological analysis of the great white poverty that has fostered … the rise of Donald Trump,” his review wrote.
JD Vance grew up in Middletown, an Ohio steel town that, he writes, had lost jobs and hope “for as long as I can remember.” But his grandparents, who were the ones who really raised him rather than his drug-addicted mother, came from Appalachia.
He describes this mountain range on the East Coast, a country of abandoned coal, as that of whites incapable of leaving their lost valleys, of “welfare queens” bathed in “a culture that increasingly encourages downgrading instead of fighting against it.” He says he loves them and has made their pejorative nickname, “hillbilly,” the title of his book, as if to reverse the stigma.
“He simply says that it is possible, (that) you have to want it,” explains the translator Vincent Raynaud, whose French version, published by Globe before a paperback version, sold some 8,500 copies in total. “By saying don’t expect everything from others, stop complaining and get moving, it’s a very American speech.”
This analysis, however, provokes controversy. In several counter-works, authors — rather progressive — accuse the author of having reduced the inhabitants of Appalachia to the worst clichés that overwhelm the white and rural working class. For them, these populations are not responsible for their decline, but victims of the system that has left them in poverty.
Blame former Democratic President Barack Obama for closing the coal mines or China for scooping up the plants? “These are the lies we tell ourselves,” JD Vance wrote in 2016.
Now a candidate for the vice presidency of the United States, the writer turned political animal has completely changed his mind. He now gives a virulent speech on China and immigration, which he believes are responsible for America’s ills.