There are books that define a region.

"American Rust" defines the tri-state area -- the ex-steel towns of southwestern Pennsylvania, the West Virginia panhandle and southeastern Ohio -- an area also defined by its rivers -- the Ohio, the Monongahela, the Allegheny and the creeks, runs and cuts that feed them.

The author, Philipp Meyer, in his first book, catches the character of the area unerringly even though he is not "from here," that significant label that is applied, or not applied, in a signature fashion in this region.

How many people from this area know someone who killed himself, or tried to kill himself, or thought of killing himself, "in the river"? I certainly do, in my immediate family.

This phenomenon features prominently in "American Rust." At one point, a wife and mother fills her pockets with rocks and walks out into the Mon. Her body is found at a lock. Her son contemplates the same end.

Books that for me have defined regions include J.D. Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye" for the intellectual Northeast, Harper Lee's "To Kill A Mockingbird" for the Jim-Crow South, and the late John Updike's books for upper-middle and middle-class eastern and northeastern America.

But Mr. Meyer's book is not just "a regional novel." He also seeks to put us in the shoes of people whom most of us don't understand. There are many of them in this region, but they are everywhere across the country.

Most of them work, or want to work. Most of them don't go to college, or go and drop out. They are chronically short of money. Their credit is usually bad or marginal. They live in trailers, or in older family homes which they cannot afford to maintain. They can scarcely afford to go out, or, if they do, they gather in bars and roadhouses where everyone knows everyone.

Mr. Meyer takes us there through a novelist's device -- speaking in different characters' voices -- and in a sequence of short chapters takes us into their heads, making them, to some extent, comprehensible.

By the way, politicians -- starting with the president -- have taken to referring to this large group of Americans as the "middle class." This doesn't quite catch the reality of the country's current class structure, if it is necessary to divide us into piles by "class."

If the people whom Mr. Meyer writes about are "middle class" -- he doesn't use the term -- who rank below them? What are we supposed to call the unemployed, drifters, grifters and criminals? They aren't the former "working class" for sure.

Mr. Meyer's voices include two young men just out of high school; a young woman who got a scholarship to Yale that hoisted her physically but not spiritually out of the Mon Valley; a middle-aged police chief and his girlfriend, employed at manual work, who is one of the boys' mothers; and a disabled ex-steelworker who is the father of the girl and one of the boys and the widower of the woman who drowned herself in the river.

Mr. Meyer tries to explain lots of things to the reader through his interlocutors. These are not apologia; they are attempts to explain what may be inexplicable when one reads about it in the paper, or sees an interview on the late TV news.

A very bright, basically nonviolent young man kills with a industrial-sized ball bearing to protect a friend who had started a fight. We read about such killings. How do we make sense of them? Cold and hungry, he steals from a Wal-Mart. How could he do that? Try cold, hungry, no credit card, no money.

Then come two elements that are at the core of life in this region: heredity, and community knowledge of it.

The suicide history of one family illustrates this well, but the best example is a young man. His grandfather was a poacher. His father never held a job, cheated anyone who ever trusted him, ran around on his wife, and his whereabouts are now unknown to his son, wife and anyone else who might have cared about him.

The son is angry, and, although he looks good and his mother loves him, is violent and provoked to homicidal anger easily. He was a high school football star and could have gone to college, but didn't, always intending and promising to call that coach at Colgate. He refers to people as "trailer trash" and lives in his mother's double-wide.

Violence provoked by unemployment, hopelessness and the sense that life has dealt one a bad hand is common in this region.

Through this character, Mr. Meyer also takes us inside a prison. Even though one in six Americans has spent some time incarcerated, few of us have had the misfortune of doing time in a hard-core lockup. Mr. Meyer's truths about them are horrible. These institutions are to a good degree run by the inmates, not the wardens and guards, who survive through complacency and violence.

Inmates are divided by race, even if this is not intended. We all know quite well to what degree racial differentiation is a characteristic of this region, perhaps of the whole country, in spite of the happy talk that has accompanied the election of America's first mixed-race president.

The tri-state area does not come off as all bad. Mr. Meyer's narrative makes clear the role of sex in making life not only tolerable but meaningful here. There is also kindness -- the waitress who calls the boy on the run "hon" and who gives him a good meal for only $2.08. And there is the police chief who deems the troubled sons of the region "worth saving," and does so, at considerable cost to himself.

I predict that "American Rust" will achieve definitive book status. And I continue to wonder how Mr. Meyer wrote it, not being "from here."