“Hillbilly Elegy,” in my mind, divides into two components: the family stories Mr. Vance tells — most of which are no doubt better experienced on the page than they were in real life — and the questions he raises. Chief among them: How much should he hold his hillbilly kin responsible for their own misfortunes?  In Mr. Vance’s estimation, the answer is: a lot. Economic insecurity, he’s convinced, accounts for only a small part of his community’s problems; the much larger issue is hillbilly culture itself. Though proud of it in many ways, he’s also convinced that it “increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it.”  His frustration with the nonworking white poor is especially acute. He recalls being a cashier at a Middletown grocery store and watching resentfully as his neighbors, who had creatively gamed the welfare system, jabbered on their cellphones as they were going through the checkout line.  He could not afford a cellphone.  “Political scientists have spent millions of words trying to explain how Appalachia and the South went from staunchly Democratic to staunchly Republican in less than a generation,” Mr. Vance writes. He suspects those cellphones have a lot to do with it. “I could never understand why our lives felt like a struggle while those living off of government largess enjoyed trinkets that I only dreamed about.”  Time and again, Mr. Vance preaches a message of tough love and personal responsibility. He has no patience with an old acquaintance who told him he quit his job because he hated waking up early, only to take to Facebook to blame the “Obama economy.” Or with a former co-worker at a tile warehouse who missed work once a week though his girlfriend was pregnant.  Squint, and you’ll note the incendiary nature of Mr. Vance’s argument. It’s always treacherous business to blame a group for its own misfortunes. Certainly, an outsider cannot say what Mr. Vance is saying to his kin and kind. But he can — just as President Obama can say to fellow African-Americans, “brothers should pull up their pants,” as he did on MTV.  The difference is that President Obama believes poverty, though it may have a cultural component, is largely a structural problem, one the government can play a large role in fixing. Mr. Vance, a conservative, takes a far dimmer view.  Whether you agree with Mr. Vance or not, you must admire him for his head-on confrontation with a taboo subject. And he frames his critique generously, stipulating that it isn’t laziness that’s destroying hillbilly culture but what the psychologist Martin Seligman calls “learned helplessness” — the fatalistic belief, born of too much adversity, that nothing can be done to change your lot.  What he’s really writing about is despair.  Never is Mr. Vance more aware of this pessimism and estrangement than when he leaves for Ohio State University. He’s plumped with hope; his neighbors, left behind, feel its opposite. “There was something almost spiritual,” he writes, “about the cynicism of the community at large.”  His friends and relations are convinced that the media lies. That politicians lie. That the military, an institution they revere, is fighting two fruitless wars. Universities feel “rigged” and inaccessible; job prospects are slim. For what purpose do you live under such circumstances? When the stanchions of your life have sunk into the muck?  Mr. Vance doesn’t have all the answers. But he’s advancing the conversation.  A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis  A version of this review appears in print on August 11, 2016, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Compassionate Analysis of the Poor Who Love Trump. Today's Paper|Subscribe
Combining thoughtful inquiry with firsthand experience, J. D. Vance has inadvertently provided a civilized reference guide for an uncivilized election.