From the passionate response pieces that I had read, I was somewhat prepared for the eugenics-tinged genetic arguments that stain the text and the deeply clichéd tropes that strangle the film version, but I was not prepared for a stunningly major omission: the fact that though much of the 265 pages of the book and hour and 56 minutes of the movie are taken over by suicide attempts and domestic and substance abuse, neither one manages to grapple at all with mental health.
The ways in which each version of "Hillbilly Elegy" avoids this crucial topic are different, but both are tragically ill-advised. The book itself is a Frankenstein hybrid of looping, repetitive memoir chapters told almost entirely in a voice-over style summary (the creative writing teacher in me kept screaming give us something to see, smell, feel — any sensory detail at all, please!) sandwiched between slapdash social science commentary on the “lurking” “ethnic component.” Vance argues that the bad genes passed down through his Scots-Irish ancestors are the cause of the current social ills he is examining. He bases this argument almost entirely on a blog post from Discover magazine by a writer with a history of contributing to racist, far-right publications.
