There were many reasons why 2016 was a strange year. One of them was the halfhearted effort by people on both sides of the Atlantic to try to understand why voters had voted the ‘wrong’ way in the Brexit referendum and the US presidential election.

The book that was touted as an explainer for all of this was Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir by someone called J.D. Vance about his upbringing in rural Ohio. After the election of Donald Trump, Vance’s description of family breakdown, de-industrialisation, poverty and drug abuse was said to explain why so many Americans had voted for Trump.

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There was much that was patronising about all this – mirrored in France by the attention paid to Didier Eribon’s Returning to Reims. The presumption in both cases seemed to be that since the people described in these books were the sort that ‘people like us’ never met then ‘we’ should at least make some effort to try to understand ‘them’.

When I read Hillbilly Elegy I was impressed by its skill, but distrustful of the weight that had already been placed on it. The book did not ‘explain’ Trumpism. In any case, at the time the author was careful to distance himself from Trump and even criticise him.

As a politician, he struggles at times to reconcile his faith with his politics. But he is frank about this

As a........

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