Conversation

In one truly bizarre anecdote, he has an anxiety-induced fantasy about a random woman at a gas pump, and how she and her nephew, who attends Yale like Vance, must be sitting around mocking all of the hillbillies in his town.There’s zero basis for this bout of paranoia; like most of the book, it seems predicated on assumptions that seem reasonable and normal in Vance’s own head, but which feel baffling and unfounded — and often blatantly classist — when he lays them out for us.