J. D. Vance’s home town of Middletown, Ohio, is one of the once flourishing Rust Belt towns that feature in his memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.” PHOTOGRAPH BY AL BEHRMAN / AP

“I grew up poor, in the Rust Belt, in an Ohio steel town that has been hemorrhaging jobs and hope for as long as I can remember.” That’s how J. D. Vance begins one of this campaign season’s saddest and most fascinating books, “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis” (Harper). Vance was born in Kentucky and raised by his grandparents, as a self-described “hillbilly,” in Middletown, Ohio, home of the once-mighty Armco Steel. His family struggled with poverty and domestic violence, of which he was a victim. His mother was addicted to drugs—first to painkillers, then to heroin. Many of his neighbors were jobless and on welfare. Vance escaped their fate by joining the Marines and serving in Iraq. Afterward, he attended Ohio State and Yale Law School, where he was mentored by Amy Chua, the law professor and tiger mom. He now lives in San Francisco, where he works at Mithril Capital Management, the investment firm helmed by Peter Thiel. It seems safe to say that Vance, who is now in his early thirties, has seen a wider swath of America than most people.

Had “Hillbilly Elegy” been published last year, or the year before, it still would have found readers: it’s a detailed and moving account of American struggle. This year, though, the book has been adopted by an unusually large and passionate audience. The name Trump never appears in the book, which was written, presumably, before his capture of the Republican Party. Still, anti-Trump conservatives have responded to its largely empathetic portrait of poor, white Americans, which they see as an alternative to the less sympathetic theories about Trump’s least affluent supporters—“They’re all racist,” essentially—that have become popular on the left. Earlier this summer, Rod Dreher, the intellectually restless American Conservative columnist, wrote that “Hillbilly Elegy” “does for poor white people what Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book did for poor black people: give them voice and presence in the public square.” Liberal readers may bristle at the comparison—Vance, to be clear, is a white conservative—but Dreher has a point. Just as the death of Michael Brown, in Ferguson, persuaded many non-black people to read “Between the World and Me,” so the success of Donald Trump has persuaded many people who have never visited the wrecked towns of the Rust Belt to read “Hillbilly Elegy.” Dreher’s interview with Vance—“Trump: Tribune of Poor White People”—was so popular that it crashed The American Conservative’s servers. “Hillbilly Elegy” is now in second place on the Times_ _nonfiction best-seller list.

In many ways, “Hillbilly Elegy” tells a familiar story. It’s a regional memoir about Vance’s Scots-Irish family, one of many who have lived and worked in Appalachia for generations. For perhaps a century, Vance explains, the region was on an upward trajectory. Family men worked as sharecroppers, then as coal miners, then as steelworkers; families inched their way toward prosperity, often moving north in pursuit of work. (Vance’s family moved about a hundred miles, from Kentucky to Ohio; like many families, they are “hillbilly transplants.”) In mid-century Middletown, where Armco Steel built schools and parks along the Great Miami River, Vance’s grandparents were able to live a middle-class life, driving back to the hollers of Kentucky every weekend to visit relatives and friends.

Middletown’s industrial jobs began to disappear in the seventies and eighties. Today, its main street is full of shuttered storefronts, and is a haven for drug dealers at night. Vance reports that, in 2014, more people died from drug overdoses than from natural causes in Butler County, where Middletown is located. Families are disintegrating: neighbors listen as kitchen-table squabbles escalate and come to blows, and single mothers raise the majority of children (Vance himself had fifteen “stepdads” while growing up). Although many people identify as religious, church attendance is at historic lows. High-school graduation rates are sinking, and few students go on to college. Columbus, Ohio, one of the fastest-growing cities in America, is just ninety minutes’ drive from Middletown, but the distance feels unbridgeable. Vance uses the psychological term “learned helplessness” to describe the resignation of his peers, many of whom have given up on the idea of upward mobility in a region that they see as permanently left behind. Writing in a higher register, he says that there is something “almost spiritual about the cynicism” in his home town.

Much of the personal story Vance tells in “Hillbilly Elegy” revolves around his slow and painful divorce from “hillbilly culture.” Hillbillies, he writes, are proud of their “loyalty, honor, and toughness”; of their fierce, unpretentious patriotism; of their work ethic, their tight-knit families, and the decisiveness with which they administer “hillbilly justice.” (“I earned my first bloody nose at five and my first black eye at six,” Vance recalls, of two times someone insulted his mother.) Vance, too, is proud to be a hillbilly: he uses the term in a dignified and respectful way throughout his book. All the same, he comes to believe that his community suffers from “cognitive dissonance”; there is, he writes, “a broken connection between the world we see and the values we preach.” If family is all-important, then why are alcoholism and domestic abuse so common? If hillbillies are so hardworking, then why do so few people in Middletown work? Plenty of people, of course, work hard, often struggling to assemble a livelihood out of part-time jobs. But they live alongside able-bodied neighbors who are lifetime welfare recipients (and experts at gaming the welfare system). One friend quits a good job because he’s “sick of waking up early,” then takes to Facebook to bemoan the “Obama economy.”

In Vance’s view, the depredations of globalization have been sharpened by poorly implemented social programs, which, though well-intentioned, allow “a large minority . . . to live off the dole,” while breeding resentment and rage among everyone else. But “hillbilly culture,” which allows “the white working class to blame its problems on society or the government,” is part of the problem, too. Vance criticizes its violence, its stubbornness, its pride, its incuriosity, and its “bizarre sexism,” which, he thinks, all encourage “reacting to bad circumstances in the worst way possible.” While communities elsewhere in America are enthralled by the prosperity gospel, Vance’s friends and family recite a disengaged catechism: “We can’t trust the evening news. We can’t trust our politicians. Our universities, the gateway to a better life, are rigged against us. We can’t get jobs. You can’t believe these things and participate meaningfully in society.” He concludes, “There is a lack of agency here—a feeling that you have little control over your life and a willingness to blame everyone but yourself. This is distinct from the larger economic landscape of modern America.”

Why is hillbilly culture so defensive, insular, and frozen in time? Vance argues that—because no culture exists in a vacuum—hillbillies are only partially to blame. In the course of his journey from Middletown to the Marines to Yale, Vance finds that hillbilly pessimism is, in its toxicity, equalled by the disdain that metropolitan people feel for those they call “rednecks” or “white trash.” The Marine Corps is a genuine American melting pot and, for Vance, a transformative experience. But, at Yale, Vance learns that he’s better off hiding the details of his upbringing. He elides the fact that he was raised mainly by his grandparents (a normal circumstance where he comes from), and begins talking about his “grandmother” and “grandfather” even though, at home, he calls them “Mamaw” and “Papaw.” He braves Whole Foods, learns to make cocktail-party chitchat, and endeavors to keep his voice down in public (restaurant screaming matches are unexceptional among Middletown couples). He is shocked by the extreme and near-universal affluence of his classmates.