New York, NY: Scribner, 2018. 304 pages. $26.00.
Sarah Smarsh’s memoir Heartland joins a new genre that might somewhere down the road be called Trumpology. J.D. Vance’s 2016 sleeper hit Hillbilly Elegy launched the phenomenon by falling perfectly timed into the hands of a public desperate to make sense of the election. The intellectual origins go back at least as far as Thomas Frank’s 1996 What’s the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, which unpacked rural working class Americans’ embrace of Reaganomics.
From the serenity of the ivory tower, voting against apparent self-interest can look like collective insanity. Smarsh and Vance are oracles to the impressively credentialed academics and pundits who probe the mysteries of the great American culture and income gap.
Amazon’s “Frequently bought together” list for Heartland sheds light on what readers seek in emerging Trumpology texts. There’s Bob Woodward’s Fear: Trump in the White House, and Jill Lepore’s These Truths: A History of the United States, which says, “A nation born in contradiction will fight forever over the meaning of its history.” Related bestsellers like Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me and Moustafa Bayoumi’s How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America tell of a battle underway over American identity, maybe even the American soul. We consume Trumpology anxious for a sense of where the battle lines are. These often devastating texts map our new civic reality.
As with any book that strikes so close to home, I approached Heartland reluctantly. From the book jacket I knew that Smarsh was born into luck I didn’t have: her grandparents still owned the land. I grew up envying farm kids as we followed Dad’s lousy lateral job transfers across the plains of Montana, Nebraska, and North Dakota. They had that great luxury, space, and also roots, with 4-H animals, big pickups, and daddies the other men respected.
I also knew that this would be a tough book to criticize. Like the women’s code of conduct that says, Don’t create work for another woman, the rural working class code is Give a leg up wherever you can, with the flip side, Never sabotage one of our own. Working class people often take up each other’s slack and cover each other’s backs in ways that I later discovered are rare, even unheard of, among the professional class. God knows we all need a break, you say to yourself.
In a choice much commented on by reviewers, Smarsh begins with a monologue to her unconceived (not just unborn) daughter. I prepared to roll my eyes a lot. Then she describes learning to drive a combine and wrangle cattle from a funny, generous grandpa, while my kin came home exhausted from blue and pink-collar jobs to sit silently in front of the TV. Suddenly, I wasn’t just skeptical—I was envious.
It took several chapters of low-grade resentment to realize why Smarsh’s story bothered me. In some ways, she had it better than I did. I was subconsciously competing in the Aw Shucks stakes. Poor folks in America like nothing better than to throw down over who had it worse, who pulled herself up farther by what nonexistent bootstraps. I could take this Sarah person in skint-kido, I thought.
But when comprehension hit, I sat back stunned. I was proving Smarsh’s point that Americans at the lower end of the class spectrum lack both a systemic understanding of our economic situation and the sense of solidarity necessary to improve our shared lot. She’d triggered old scripts in me. I’m not that, part of me wanted to argue.
But I am that.
I, too, come from generations of teen moms and broke the cycle. I’ve scrubbed floors, slung pizza, and shoveled shit for minimum wage, cobbled together loans and Pell grants and scholarships to get through school, and grasped for an understanding of why it was so tough. One reality of living poor is little time or motivation to examine the data on why you can’t get a fair price for your grain or earn a living wage at the QuikTrip. You look for common sense answers to Smarsh’s academic question: “If a person could go to work every day and still not be able to pay the bills and the reason wasn’t racism, what less articulated problem was afoot?”
Smarsh answers mostly by anecdote, but also fits in deft sketches of the damage wrought upon farmers by government policies from the 1862 Homestead Act to the farm crisis of the eighties. She spells out how regressive social policies undermine poor women, working mothers, and domestic violence survivors. She mingles poetic insights on poverty’s imprint on the body with family letters so familiar that I hear them spoken aloud as I read.
With first-person perspective reminiscent of Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2001 Nickel and Dimed, Smarsh contributes a necessary voice. Many of us labor in the trenches of low-wage jobs, lousy housing, beaters that won’t start on cold mornings, food with no nourishment, and family members relying on us even as we try to raise ourselves. We feel the effects of generational poverty, lacking the language, clothing, and social codes of the classes we hope to join. The economic policies of the last forty years—Smarsh’s lifetime and mine—have solidified these barriers.
Who records the daily humiliations of not making it in the land of opportunity? Where are the field reports from house cleaners, agricultural workers, and the vast ranks of the underemployed, to adjust the common understanding of American life to something closer to reality? Linda Tirado’s 2014 Hand to Mouth comes to mind. It takes someone who’s been there to offer a view that’s honest while still honoring the value of the lives she chronicles—but how difficult the crossing is from chronicled to chronicler.
That baby that will never be born turned out to be the ally Smarsh needed. I had one too, I realized. As a girl, I wrote constantly to my frighteningly educated and accomplished future self, hoping that she’d understand, remember, and protect me. Smarsh wept bitterly on the night her imaginary daughter left, once her would-be mother had attained a solid grip on the middle class and would never become a poor teenage mom. Mine met me on a cool autumn day in Oxford when I donned bright new academic robes and walked through ornate doors into the Sheldonian Theatre, carrying the dreams of old women and the earnest heart of a little girl.
Both of us clung to these constructs. Functionally, perhaps they’re the same. A life hack, one reviewer called it—What would I tell my daughter? But the fact that Smarsh and I emerged from our crucibles with poignant stories to tell only emphasizes that most of our friends and family didn’t. The breaks didn’t come for them. It’s tempting to make too much of individual success stories and forget that for many Americans, Heartland isn’t a look back. If there’s time to borrow a copy from the library, reading will have to fit into stolen minutes among shifts at the call center and the turkey packing plant, the laundromat and Walmart, broken-down cars and buying on time, bus rides and babies, robbing Peter, holding off Paul—the endless round without respite that is life in America today.
