No wonder, tons and tons of laudatory reviews and scathing critiques speak for and against Vance in impassioned tones and explicit terms. While the former group hails the work as the most definitive primer on America’s class divide, the latter accuses Vance of being an unabashed opportunist best known for his abrupt political flip-flops, someone who perennially finds fault with all around him only to showcase him as a hapless victim of circumstances who simply could do no wrong even if he tried.
There’s no point in adding another dollop of inferred opinion to an overflowing pile but I feel the truth, whether absolute or relative, lies somewhere in the middle, as it often does.
All of what Vance has claimed and done till date may not be worthy of applause and accolades, but expecting him to be ticking all the right boxes or calling his first-person work an ‘agenda’ is brutally unfair and nauseatingly holier-than-thou, given his book’s rich referential worth as a no-holds-barred account of a childhood spent amid abject poverty, violence-addicted dysfunctional families and neighbourhoods, rampant drug abuse, and scarce employment opportunities, as also of an adulthood shaped by an elusive mix of fortuitous and conscious choices.
You may not agree with Vance on every point he makes, you may find fault with his recent Munich outburst (including the Greta-Musk analogy that drew no laughs but itself became laughable), you may also appreciate why many lament his melodramatic mutation into a hardcore Republican, but you can’t ignore the gist of his real-life tale narrated in a flowing, metaphorical prose that holds your attention for most parts, never mind the few superfluous paras at the fag end that harp on the same point, much like a broken record.
I sought to dive deeper to sense whether Vance’s memoir appealed to me as an enduring piece of literature; it did way more than that actually. The written voice spoke to me with resounding conviction largely because the author has made humour in all its hues and colours his principle weapon, which prevents his moving saga from reducing to another of those sob sob tales that all rave about but no one reads. The saga of how James Donald Bowman became James David Vance is ‘unputdowntable’, a word made famous by the back covers of many a Forsyth and Ludlum novel of a now bygone era.
My favourite chapters narrate his Marine Corps stint and the Iraq posting which together helped him transform within, move from ‘learned helplessness’ to ‘learned wilfulness’, get his physical and financial literacy and health in order, and develop a more holistic and therapeutic world view. I also relished the page which recounts his faux pas during Yale’s August Fall Interview Program when an interviewer asked him why did he wish to work for a law firm. 24 carat hilarious stuff, best read, not described!
At a time when Vance could have easily disintegrated into an eddy of decay and despair like countless natives of his soil, he found both purpose and passion in life that opened the doors to a whole lot - a state university education, an almost free ride at Yale, a career path as a venture capitalist, a phenomenal stint as a senator, and ultimately a place of pride in the White House.
My favourite characters from his book are of course his ‘parents in grandparent form’ Mammaw and Pappaw. I loved the episodes recording his school progress at Math in the guiding light of Pappaw’s tutelage and his brief stint as a cashier at Dillman’s which proved to be a handy sociology class about plausible extrapolations based on the starkly different shopping preferences of the rich and poor.
Wish the book had more on how Pappaw honed his math skills in the first place as also about his typical day at Armco. Wish there was also a para on Usha Chilukuri Vance's education and career trajectory pre-and-post Yale.
Another positively intriguing character is Vance’s biological father who disowned him for reasons Vance learnt only in hindsight, making the father-son relationship extremely complex but equally profound. The author's unbreakable bond with his caring and protective stepsister Lindsay. in some ways, reminded me of the industrious brother-sister duo from Arundhati Roy’s ‘God of Small Things’.
Vance astutely embeds his bitter-sweet personal experiences within the broader cultural and historical context of his familial roots and repositioned co-ordinates, and all of them are relevant for every global citizen. Most truths he underlines are universal in essence and significance – the pain and pathos of the ‘marginalised within the mainstream’ populace, a vulnerable, peripatetic minority that is never the target audience of the government’s reformist agenda, and yet cruelly deemed ‘privileged’ by default and forced to shell out money to fund the deprived as defined by the government. Worse, majority of them lead a wayward life on the ventilator of government support and eventually dissolve into the dark pit of vanity marked by muddled notions of valour and honour.
And the scars remain even after the odd one out has managed his or her upward mobility fighting all odds. As Vance succinctly observes:
“We are constantly ready to fight or flee, because there is a constant exposure to the beat, whether that beat is an alcoholic dad or an unhinged woman. We become hardwired for conflict. And that wiring remains, even when there’s no more conflict to be had.”
“Nothing compares to the fear that you are becoming the monster in your closet.”
US or India, Europe or Africa – we find different versions of this perpetually tragedy-stricken tribe, but the woes are similar if not exactly the same. Thanks to Vance, I gained a few invaluable insights about the idyllic Appalachian terrain and its indigenous people, the trials and tribulations of holler dwellers from Jackson, Kentucky, as also the comparatively well-off life of a less-scenic Middletown in the Rust belt state of Ohio, once singularly led by Armco’s industrial strides of steely resolve.
Why expect Vance to provide definitive answers to eliminate the sticky problems facing the working class whites of the United States; he’s only recounting his life story, not dishing out a ready reckoner of challenges and resolutions (glad he isn’t!).
Yes, there’s some room to suspect if Vance is knowingly or unknowingly one of those who decry their own to get the coveted ticket to a better life of perks and privileges. However, going by the depth and dimensions of his epic tale, we have no qualms in handing him the benefit of doubt.
We only hope Vance tunes in to the White Noise in the White House. The more he does that, better our world is likely to become (given the inescapable interconnectedness across nations now fighting more and more common demons including climate change, depleting natural resources, and a fast impending tech-driven dystopian reality no longer an imagined theme that we relished all along in sci-fi flicks)
Call it wishful thinking if you like but our ‘White Noise in White House’ expectation organically springs forth from the reading of this delightful memoir.
One question for J D Vance, (which I asked his firm Narya and partner Colin Greenspon and got no answer)
How are the companies you invest in "defending the pillars of democracy such as free speech and capitalism."
If they indeed are, our wishful thinking dream is already on its way to coming true.