J.D. Vance’s new book, *Communion*, answers a question no one had thought to ask: What would Augustine’s *Confessions* have looked like if the saint’s greatest literary influence had been Hillary Clinton’s immortal classic, *Hard Choices*?
One of the best-selling nonfiction titles of 2014, *Hard Choices* runs to more than 600 pages, many of which consist of factoids copied and pasted from Clinton’s old speeches. It is possibly the least introspective book ever written. Her ghostwriters’ modus operandi was to take a bunch of platitudinous abstractions from her time at the State Department and switch the tenses.
Vance’s book never quite sinks to this level, but it does make me wonder why it was published, and for whose edification. Even by the standards of faith-driven airport nonfiction, *Communion* is not very interesting. Despite what the jacket copy suggests, the book is not “the story” of Vance’s conversion to Roman Catholicism, which had already been recounted in an essay published six years ago in the journal I edit, *The Lamp*. (Unaltered passages from it appear in the present volume without acknowledgment.) If anything, the book, from its Methodist-church-emblazoned cover on, seems oddly squeamish about the Catholic Church, couching most of its arguments concerning religious questions in a generically Christian register. When Vance does address specifically Catholic subject matter, his language is in some cases awkward and in almost all curiously unidiomatic. At one point, he describes himself attending “a Mass mourning Christ’s passion,” a phrase so theologically defective that it could be the subject of an entire ecumenical council.
Like *Hard Choices*, *Communion* is full of what might loosely be described as anecdotes. Take the one about Vance’s future wife, Usha, recommending Joan Didion’s memoir *The Year of Magical Thinking* while they were students at Yale Law School. Usha said she found it “cathartic,” prompting Vance to look up this unknown word in the Oxford English Dictionary. As one does? Until I stumbled onto this passage, I would have guessed that the middle of the Venn diagram of “people who use the paywalled OED rather than Dictionary.com” and “people who don’t know what cathartic means” is empty, like the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. I’m not saying that Vance’s story is impossible. I’m just saying that if it did happen as described, it would be like somebody discovering this Beethoven character in his well-thumbed set of the multivolume *New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians*.
If random disclosure of common-sense-defying detail is your idea of a searing, poignant journey into the light of faith, there’s more where that came from. *Communion* includes what is almost certainly the *ne plus ultra* of a new rhetorical trope - the posthumous invocation of Charlie Kirk to justify whatever the author or speaker wants you to believe or do. In this case, however, the spirit is summoned to explain why Usha had become pregnant again; specifically, we learn that Kirk’s widow, Erika, told Vance’s wife that she regrets not having more kids with Charlie, and that this moved Usha deeply and - Marvin Gaye needle drop.
People decide to have children for every possible reason or none. But until recently, the actual circumstances leading up to their conception were generally a private matter. If a dead friend inspired me and my wife to renew our acquaintance with the facts of life, I would probably not feel comfortable immortalizing his influence in my spiritual memoir slash campaign manifesto. But over and over again in these pages, Vance gives the impression that his book is meant to provide some kind of quasi-evangelical impetus to aspiring parents. If the right-wing dads of America start using “Let’s do it - for Charlie!” as a come-on, the U.S. birth rate is going to drop below that of Vatican City.
This oversharing of small details exists uneasily alongside a surprising lack of reflection on the book’s ostensible themes. A memoir that begins with criticism of anhedonic ambition becomes the chronicle of a man who, in less than a decade, is elected to the Senate and becomes vice president of the United States. Does everything that Vance says about the perfunctory pursuit of empty honors (he gives the example of Supreme Court clerkships) apply to his own rapid ascent to the office memorably described by John Nance Garner, one of its former holders, as “not worth a bucket of warm piss”? If not, why? Vance skates around this question - not, I think, because he is actively trying to do so, but because it actually seems not to have occurred to him.
There is one interesting exception here to Vance’s lack of reflection on his political career: a two-page apology for his remarks about “childless cat ladies.” For what it’s worth, I think he is protesting too much. When these comments came up again during the 2024 presidential campaign, my sister was a childless cat lady, a fan of Vance’s writing, and a Trump voter; she joked about his remarks with her husband, a naturalized citizen born in Mexico, and voted for Donald Trump again. At any rate, for me, this pang (OED: “a sudden sharp feeling of mental anguish or intense emotional pain”) of conscience was oddly precise in its calibration. If Vance now recognizes his comments as churlish, lacking in charity, and utterly unlikely to persuade voters, good for him. But what about those Haitians in Ohio who, it turned out, were not barbecuing Lassie? Does he consider those dog whistles at least equally ill-conceived? Or was the issue simply that dunking on DINKs is a riskier gambit for graduates of Yale Law School than race-baiting?
I could go on. But to what end? I have said that after reading *Communion*, I was left wondering why it had been published. This is not as cutting a remark as it might sound. Even less interesting than a deeply mediocre book is a reviewer taking such a book too seriously. There is not a single person in the United States whose desire to read (or purchase) it will be affected by my opinions.
Could Vance have written a better book? Could *Hard Choices* have been better? Come on. When I say that *Communion* is a complete waste (of time, paper, the resources of the vice presidency, etc.), I really mean it, but I would say the same if I had been asked to review, say, Kamala Harris’s *107 Days*. Here is a sample from what her ghostwriter expects us to believe is an actual conversation. Dialogue is always stilted in these books. But for every ludicrous snippet of fanfic like this, there is at least an equal number of conversations so boring that they must be true. Early on in Jill Biden’s *View From the East Wing*, the former first lady recounts a conversation that begins “Let’s have lunch,” to which her husband replies, “Okay.” A few sentences later, the repartee continues, with the couple addressing a perhaps invisible server whose existence we are simply meant to infer (unless, of course, the Bidens were talking to themselves).
At times the book reads like a bold linguistic experiment, an attempt to discover the absolute minimum level of evocation that can be achieved by what are technically grammatical English sentences. Don’t get me wrong, though. *View From the East Wing* would not have been improved if it had been more lyrical. The single worst thing about the book is that every few pages, we get a high-toned quotation, or at least an attempt at one: “The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard said, ‘Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.’” He didn’t.
The only thing harder than envisioning the end of capitalism is trying to imagine a readable book written by (or attributed to) a contemporary American political figure. These books are not meant to be seriously reviewed, for the very simple reason that they are not meant to be seriously read. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that they are not meant to be read at all. They exist to be announced breathlessly, advertised, embargoed, analyzed via leaks and scooplets, discussed on podcasts - but their final end is to collect dust in the free pile outside used-book stores. For a laugh, go to the books section of a Salvation Army or a Goodwill and see how many copies of Bill Clinton’s *My Life* you can find. My personal record is 43, sitting side by side in their glorious order and array, like the blessed angels in heaven.
The problem here extends beyond books by politicians (and their wives). Already so much of what publishers find room for is “current affairs” slop that is basically indistinguishable from the kind of bad writing I am talking about, save for the fact that the authors are television stars or podcasters or - (shudders) - political reporters rather than elected officials. Only readers can stop this madness, by turning their attention elsewhere. Read about the past. Read about faraway places. Read Macaulay or Sylvia Townsend Warner or Santayana’s letters. Read a real book.