When JD Vance was asked in August 2016 if he knew many people who planned to vote for Donald Trump, he was unequivocal. “A lot of people in my family, my neighbours and friends from back home. It’s a phenomenon I recognise and, frankly, saw coming pretty early,” he told the host of an American public radio chat show.
Vance, then a mere 31-year-old Yale Law School graduate working at a San Francisco biotech company, was talking about his memoir of a “family and culture in crisis”: Hillbilly Elegy.
Three months later, after Trump was elected US president, thanks partly to support from swathes of the Appalachian population that Vance’s book purported to represent, the New York Times hailed Hillbilly Elegy as one of six books that explained the Republican victory. For the Sunday Times it was “the political book of the year”; even Hillary Clinton, in her 2017 memoir What Happened, endorsed Vance’s insights about cultural decline.
Little wonder that Vance—whose grandparents moved from Jackson, Kentucky, to Ohio in the 1950s—became a talk-show staple for his self-avowed roots among “folks [for whom] poverty is the family tradition”, as he writes in the book. “Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash. I call them neighbors, friends, and family,” he continues: “I am a hill person. So is much of America’s white working class. And we hill people aren’t doing very well.”
That was 2016. Eight years later and Vance—now a multimillionaire Republican senator for Ohio who is running for vice president on Trump’s re-election ticket—is doing very well indeed, even if much of America is not. With weeks to go until the 2024 presidential election, the political spotlight is again on Appalachia: the vast region includes three of the seven swing states that will determine whether Trump or Kamala Harris, his Democratic rival, wins on 5th November. Polls are very close between the two candidates in Pennsylvania, Georgia and North Carolina, three of the 13 states that lay claim to the Appalachian hills, which rise over 423 counties across 206,000 square miles and are home to around 26m people.
A region that disparate might balk at being distilled into a single entity explicable by a single book. Yet, by the time Vance joined the Republican ticket in July, Hillbilly Elegy had sold more than 1.6m copies, boosted by a Netflix adaptation and its status as university reading programme staple. In 2017, when my husband was embarking on a fellowship at the University of Michigan, it was the first book I thought of buying for him as we headed to the Midwest. The memory haunts me.
Anxious to make amends and wondering what might need explaining this November, I wanted to know what else people should read. What were the fictional alternatives to—and improvements on—Hillbilly Elegy? Given its prize-winning status, the obvious pick seemed to be Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver’s Kentucky-based retelling of David Copperfield, which was awarded a Pulitzer and, in the UK, the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Kingsolver—who was raised in Kentucky and describes herself as “Appalachian, through and through”—has said that she wanted to tell a different story of Appalachian life to the one Vance presented.
If so, that wasn’t what I took away from Kingsolver’s polemical pages: her Appalachian characters felt every bit as flat and mired in failure to me as the “we” that Vance claimed to represent. A Boston Globe reviewer called Demon Copperhead “a slum tour where pity is the price of the ride. Those on display can only stare back”.
“My whole life I’ve been wanting to write the great Appalachian novel,” Kingsolver said in an interview on publication. But what if that already existed? What if there were great Appalachian writers who just lacked the oxygen of publicity that blasts bestsellers onto the shelves of Barnes & Noble? Or was a New York-based publishing world overlooking the literary output of an entire region of predominantly red states?
Kentucky native Chris Offutt, who won awards for his debut short story collection, Kentucky Straight, in the early 1990s, thinks the trouble is that the lives of poor, rural people don’t interest the majority of Americans who live in cities and suburbs. “I suspect much of it is bigotry related to social class. People tend to like to read about themselves,” he tells me over email.
Mesha Maren, associate English professor at Duke University, North Carolina, and the author of three books, is from southern West Virginia. “Perhaps people in the publishing industry think that there isn’t much money to be made from publishing books that give real depictions of rural life instead of the poverty porn of Demon Copperhead,” she says.
Although Offutt might be familiar to British readers for his crime series set in the Kentucky backwoods (start with The Killing Hills), Maren is unknown in the UK, where she has yet to be published. I was introduced to her by Lauren Groff, the author of Matrix, and a huge fan. Maren “writes like a force of nature… finding truth and beauty where other writers wouldn’t have found the courage to look” is Groff’s verdict on Sugar Run, Maren’s 2019 gripping debut, which I devoured. The noirish novel is set where Maren grew up on Muddy Creek Mountain, “in a house without indoor plumbing and with a father who buried our money in jars in the yard instead of keeping it in the bank,” she writes in an essay entitled “Montani Semper Liberi” (or “Mountaineers Are Always Free”, the West Virginia state motto).
Writers who deserve to be giants of American literature, not just Appalachian literature, are still fighting for recognition
“People talk about Appalachia as if it were only a place to leave behind,” Maren continues, explaining her impetus to create a character who returns to West Virginia to try to make a life in a cabin in the hills with her girlfriend, after 18 years in prison. That attitude towards the region, as somewhere to forget about, hints at why writers who deserve to be giants of American literature, not just Appalachian literature, are still fighting for recognition.
Take Breece D’J Pancake. His story collection, published four years after his suicide in 1979, aged 26, is the West Virginian equal to Hemingway’s Michigan tales, to quote Joyce Carol Oates, or to James Joyce’s Dubliners, according to Jayne Anne Phillips (who this year became the second writer from Appalachia in two years to win a Pulitzer—for Night Watch, a story about a daughter helping her mother to escape a coercive relationship in the aftermath of the Civil War).
Vintage reissued Pancake’s collection as Trilobites and Other Stories in 2014, but he remains startlingly unknown. He studied at the University of Virginia under the writer James Alan McPherson, who introduces the collection, yet my Charlottesville-dwelling sister-in-law has never heard of him. Pancake’s dispossessed characters, from labourers struggling on failing farms in West Virginia to coal miners suffering from pit closures and lung disease, are battling the same economic challenges wrought by so-called progress as anyone today, despite belonging to the 1970s. “I look down the valley to where bison used to graze before the first rails were put down. Now those rails are covered with a highway, and cars rush back and forth in the wind,” Pancake writes in “Trilobites”, a masterpiece of love and loss.
The mountains and hollows of Watauga County, North Carolina, have been home to Ron Rash’s family for more than 200 years. They form the backdrop to his 15 novels and story collections. “I’ve always been amused that somebody who writes about Manhattan is a universal writer and somebody who writes about a region is a regional writer,” says Rash, who is professor of Appalachian studies at Western Carolina University. He has won awards and enjoyed glowing reviews, while his most famous novel, Serena, about how the logging industry stripped the hillsides, was made into a 2014 film with Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper. Yet he is known as the Bard of Appalachia, a strictly regional appellation.
Likewise, a New York Times obituary for John Ehle (1925-2018), another North Carolinian, said his books were “praised by critics for the epic sweep of his stories, their vivid detail, realistic dialogue and the dignity with which he invested mountain people who have often been stereotyped as hillbillies… [earning] him a place in the canon of Appalachian literature.” Yes, Ehle’s seven “Mountain Novels”, which span the late 18th century to the Great Depression, were about his home region—but Canada’s Michael Ondaatje called The Land Breakers, which kicks off the series, “a great American novel, way beyond anything most New York literary icons have produced”. (Harper Lee was another fan, describing how Ehle’s “meld of historical fact with ineluctable plot-weaving” made the same novel, originally published in 1964, “an exciting sample of masterful storytelling”.)
“It’s as if, even in a country as large as the US, we have filled our regional quota. We have the coasts; Southern writing has long been an established thing; and there is a certain kind of gritty, western noir that ripples out to the larger consciousness. But midwestern, red state, Appalachian fiction maybe came a little late to the party,” says Laird Hunt, professor of literary arts at Rhode Island’s Brown University, who began writing novels set in cities but has segued into exploring rural life in Indiana, an unfashionable red state his antecedents called home. “I have become a midwestern novelist by default,” says Hunt, describing his informal triptych of books about Zorrie, an Indiana farm woman, which are to the state what Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge novels are to Maine. Wearing his midwestern hat, Hunt adds of his own reception: “I was shocked to see there was this constant state of grand disinterest and mistrust, in a way, of yet another regionalism. And yet we have plenty of space for, say, the regionalism of Ireland. Anything set in Ireland is universal in some way.” (As Rash put it to me: “Joyce is the most regional writer you can imagine. Ulysses. One city. 24 hours.”)
The regional complaint comes up time and again. “Harriette Arnow’s book The Dollmaker is considered an Appalachian classic, but that book is about America becoming the America we know today (processed foods, loss of traditional family unit) and it was written in 1954,” says Michael Croley, who teaches at Ohio’s Denison University. “My hope is that Kingsolver’s recent Pulitzer win and her cheerleading of [other local] authors will help give a more well-rounded view of the region,” he adds.
The characters in Croley’s own story collection, Any Other Place, live mostly in small-town Appalachia. I spotted his book on a photograph emailed to me by Brian Lampkin, who works at Scuppernong Books, an independent bookseller in Greensboro, North Carolina. Lampkin wanted to show me the store’s current display: “Books From Appalachia (That Aren’t Hillbilly Elegy).” He explains: “When Vance’s book came out in 2016, we felt right away there was something wrong with it, so we wanted to offer alternatives to his take on the region.” While Greensboro falls just outside Appalachia geographically, Lampkin says the region is his customers’ community. “These are questions that matter to us, here in Greensboro,” he says, highlighting issues such as the opium epidemic, which Virginian author Beth Macy tackled in Dopesick.
Idra Novey is a translator and writer who grew up in southwestern Pennsylvania. She takes a different approach to the notion of regional divides. “I don’t think of red state and blue state fiction so much as urban and rural fiction. Things written in cities are seen to represent the country; anything outside of cities is seen as a region. But urban reality is just one reality,” she says. Her recent novel, Take What You Need, was written to protest the “reductive generalisations” about both realities she inhabits, New York and travelling back to her family in Appalachia.
Lampkin thinks the current political focus on the region means attention on literature from the hills is here to stay. But others are less sanguine. Ann Pancake, a distant cousin to Breece, is a masterful writer from West Virginia whose work often explores the consequences of man ransacking nature’s abundance: her novel Strange as this Weather Has Been evokes life in the hollows below a mountaintop-removal strip mine, while Wappatomaka is a story about the aftermath of a devastating flood. “They come mostly from the church to help us clean up, what family we have left moved away from here to find work,” she writes.
“America looks at Appalachia when the contemporary dominant culture recognises in the region’s stereotypes some quality or qualities that explain, demonstrate, fulfil, or scapegoat a contemporary cultural or political or economic need,” says Pancake. “This cycle started as early as shortly after the Civil War. Appalachia has been in a spotlight since Trump won in 2016 because the nation, especially those on the left, can use it to explain an election triumph that was unimaginable to them.” Other examples include the late 1800s, when the nation used Appalachia as a mythical reservoir of whiteness when the country at large was frightened of immigration from southern Europe and elsewhere. “In between the national imagination’s need for Appalachia, recognition of the region goes quiet,” she adds.
Any attempt to impose a unifying narrative would be wrong
Not that Appalachian literature is cohesive. Any attempt to impose a unifying narrative would be wrong. “One of the things that complicates Appalachia is that there is an arch narrative always put upon it from, for lack of a better term, outsiders,” says Croley. “That makes folks living there weary and wary.” Appalachian writers are reclaiming that narrative, he adds, showing the region in its fullness, from wealthy developers and middle-class labourers to poverty-stricken families. “Archetypes exist in every region of every state—and country—but outsiders are fixated on Appalachia’s poverty. It can be a bit of a desolate region with few opportunities for economic growth, but it has an uncommon and exceptional beauty—and that juxtaposition does something to the folks that live there and grow up there,” says Croley.
Vance skips the nuance in his version of Jackson, Kentucky, the tiny town where he spent his formative years and childhood summers, describing it as “undoubtedly full of the nicest people in the world; it is also full of drug addicts and at least one man who can find the time to make eight children but can’t find the time to support them.... Its people are hard-working, except of course for the many food stamps recipients who show little interest in honest work.”
“I told a friend, ‘I bet Hillbilly Elegy is going to be a cliché-ridden view of the region.’ And it was. It is,” Rash says, his melodic repetition emphasising his point. “Pretty much everybody—besides Vance himself—came off as uneducated, not industrious at all, closed minded. Just the stereotype of the hillbilly. What really offended me was he kept saying we hillbillies. His family was in no way indicative of my family and most of the families I know. My parents grew up poor, but they revered education. They went back to school as adults after working blue collar jobs and ended up being teachers.”
I ask Ann Pancake how writers can cover tough realities such as the opioid epidemic without typecasting. “They should write what they actually see and experience, which means being [in Appalachia] for long periods of time and experiencing deeply, while forgetting what they’ve been told this place is. That may mean sacrificing popularity,” she says. Perversely, it may also mean getting pigeonholed as an Appalachian author. “If a writer is taking an ‘unorthodox approach’, which often means a more authentic approach in my opinion, that Appalachian writer has a harder time getting published by national presses and, if they do, more trouble being appreciated.” Conversely: “Appalachian writers [who are] appreciated as American writers are most often those who fulfil dominant culture’s expectations about what Appalachia is,” says Pancake.
Maren takes a sideways dive into the opioid crisis in her latest novel, Shae, which sees the teenage titular character spiral into addiction after horrific post-Caesarean complications and the souring of a love affair. It’s a story that happens to be set in rural West Virginia, rather than one that blames West Virginia for Shae’s situation, and deserves a wide readership.
Scott McClanahan is another West Virginian writer who resists blaming his home state in his work, some of which is published by Tyrant Books, a tiny press. Crapalachia (2013) mixes memories with local stories and shared family history to explore where he grew up. It is a comedic rejoinder to authors such as Virginia-raised Lee Smith, whom he accuses of exploitation due to their participation in “the genre of literature called the Appalachian Minstrel Show” by using caricature to sell their books.
The Sarah Book (2017) details the breakdown of McClanahan’s marriage, which—yes—broke down in West Virginia, but that doesn’t make his divorce Appalachia’s fault. His writing is blunt, deadpan, brutal. “I told Sarah I was going to live at Walmart until she changed her mind about the divorce. After I lived there a week, I decided that she wasn’t going to change her mind…. Then I sat in my car and looked out at the parking lot and said, ‘These are my people. This is West Virginia,’” he writes.
After months of reading, I still have piles of books to go. Steven Dunn’s Potted Meat; Neema Avashia’s Another Appalachia; Ashleigh Bryant Phillips’s Sleepovers; Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle’s Even As We Breathe; Fred Chappell’s I Am One of You Forever; and Robert Gipe’s Canard County trilogy, about a family fighting back against strip mining, are all serious omissions. I’ve also promised to read Carter Sickels’s The Prettiest Star and Jessie van Eerden’s Call It Horses.
And to think, I might not have come across any of them if it weren’t for a certain Republican vice-presidential nominee. “I’m grateful to JD Vance for the attention his terrible book can bring to other Appalachian writers,” says Maren. Or should that be American writers?
