At just 26 years old, Édouard Louis is France’s foremost writer of post-industrial despair. His extraordinarily successful debut, The End of Eddy, was a coming-of-age memoir that shocked French readers with its portrait of grinding poverty in the northern rustbelt of Louis’ childhood. Who Killed My Father is something of a coda to that book, though the perspective shifts to now tell the story of the parent: once the homophobe antagonist that inspired the son’s flight from home, he is now the fallen patriarch, depicted with a mix of resentment and pity. At age 50, with his body savaged by a factory accident that precipitated a rapid decline, he can barely walk and needs an apparatus to breathe. Yet he’s been “incentivized” back to work as a streetsweeper after losing his disability benefits.

Louis’ book seeks to make sense of the life that was, but...