Goodreads had to lock reviews of Republican vice presidential candidate J. D. Vance’s awful Hillbilly Elegy memoir, likely due to review-bombing, but this may be a case where those bad reviews are well deserved.
On July 15, Donald Trump appointed U.S. Senator Vance as his 2024 running mate, and the announcement has raised interest in Vance’s career and political views. Although he has been critical of Trump in the past, Vance has since aligned his views firmly with the MAGA movement, supporting a nationwide abortion ban and repeating sentiments of the white supremacist Great Replacement Theory. However, Vance isn’t most well-known for his fairly fresh political career. He’s arguably more well known as the author of Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, which was also adapted into a film starring Amy Adams and Glenn Close.
Of course, since the book is mainly right-wing propaganda that promotes numerous poverty stereotypes, conservatives ate it up, leaving it rave reviews and making it a New York Times bestseller. Hence, when the book received a flurry of negative reviews following Vance’s latest political career move, it almost felt more like correcting the narrative than review-bombing.
Goodreads bars new reviews of J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy
Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy was likely getting review-bombed on Goodreads, as the website locked reviews on the book. If a user tries to leave a review, they will receive an error message stating that the website is temporarily limiting new reviews and ratings. It states, “This may be because we’ve detected unusual behavior that doesn’t follow our review guidelines.” Usually, review-bombing occurs when trolls leave fake negative reviews on a book, movie, or film to try to skew its performance metrics, often without even having seen or read it. It’s most often done out of hatred for any projects that are inclusive and acknowledge women or the LGBTQ+ community.
The case of Hillbilly Elegy is quite unique, considering it’s pretty deserving of a poor review score. Hillbilly Elegy explores Vance’s childhood growing up in Middletown, OH, and his journey to leaving his small town behind to go to college and begin pursuing a career. However, the book also includes a lot of generalizations. Vance appears to think that his upbringing gives him the right to speak for all of the white working class and Appalachians. He believes that just because he managed to “pull himself up by his bootstraps,” everyone in poverty can do the same, and if they don’t, it’s just because they’re lazy and suffering from “learned helplessness.”
His book has been slammed for making generalizations of the Appalachian region, characterizing it as a region that is inherently impoverished and filled with a bunch of “hillbillies.” He even goes as far as to act like issues of dysfunctional families and drug abuse are specific to hillbilly culture and not national issues that affect individuals in all regions, of all classes and ethnicities. Additionally, it contains a very derogatory perspective of the poor, arguing that they’re all “welfare queens” and responsible for their own situation. He goes as far as to claim they’re all big spenders and are poor because they don’t have the self-restraint he does to save their money instead of buying TVs and iPhones.
Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy was so bad that not even Adams and Close could save it. Meanwhile, when not being evaluated by a conservative market, the movie reviews were extremely negative, as it was decried as “bootstrapping poverty porn.” When you think about it, it’s almost like the memoir was reverse review-bombed initially, as it was inundated with inaccurate glowing praise from conservatives just because it validated their hatred of people experiencing poverty. So, although Goodreads won’t see it this way, maybe the review-bombing isn’t as bad as it seems.
Published: Jul 16, 2024 01:40 pm