“America America” (Random House, 458 pages, $27): The very name suggests a serious, sweeping, generations-spanning epic, which is exactly what Ethan Canin’s fourth novel loudly strives to be. It is a version of national tragedy told from the perspective of Corey Sifter, who begins the novel a soulful youngster of modest means coming of age in the early 1970s. He is as sweet and innocent as they come, far removed from the manic passions of the previous decade, and his superhuman work ethic catches the attention of Liam Metarey, the richest man in Saline, N.Y., a fictional blue-collar town an hour south of Buffalo. The well-connected Metarey introduces Sifter to a world of unimaginable privilege: private drivers, jets, and schools; magnificent estates with rooms nobody will ever need, and the compromises of the soul that true power demands.

The politics of class are a subject Americans generally avoid in polite company. And yet anxiety over status has animated some of our best literature, tales of strivers and dreamers, tremendous failure, and the terminal feeling of not belonging. In the plucky and stiffly moral Sifter, Mr. Canin has created a character impossible to root against. When he begins working for Metarey as a sort of personal assistant, he regards his new surroundings incredulously: “I didn’t belong here, not on this land or with these people.” But what he feels isn’t indignation or injustice. He has internalized the logic of the caste system: He feels like an impostor who doesn’t “deserve” the charity or attention of the rich. For such a young man, Sifter is acutely and articulately aware of the “under-stature” of his background.

But over time — and with the help of a boarding-school education the Metareys bankroll — Sifter outgrows this sense of what is possible for young men like him. He aspires beyond what his parents can offer, and he comes of age alongside a nation still shaking off the spate of tragedies that closed the 1960s. But there is a new reason for hope: Local Senator Henry Bonwiller, a close friend of the Metareys, has decided to enter a crowded field vying for the Democratic ticket in the 1972 presidential election. Bonwiller is a principled if privately erratic guardian of the American worker who resembles a young Ted Kennedy in many ways — the most relevant being that neither ever fulfilled his presidential promise.

Sifter bears witness to the fall of Bonwiller, a local hero revered by working men such as Sifter’s unrefined father and his semiliterate mates. The Metareys are duty-bound to protect him, even as his campaign collapses under the weight of scandal. Bonwiller and the town become punch lines for a bad political joke. But for the Metareys, their flirtation with history exacts a profoundly awful toll. It is the price of privilege and of possessing more than the common man: There is that much more that needs to be hidden or covered up.

Sifter narrates much of the novel from his perch as editor of the town paper, “the last of the local dailies not to have sold to McClatchy or Gannett or Murdoch.” He is a throwback to a time of simpler morality, and in this sense Mr. Canin’s tale echoes Richard Russo’s “Empire Falls” or Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men,” huge novels about privilege, virtue, and the vexing infinitude of the American way. But the world Mr. Canin creates feels unmoored from history, even though he is painstakingly careful in his references to Muskie, McGovern, Nixon, and the political moment of 1972.

“America America” is an ambitious work that excels in imagining — rather than revisiting — this America on the verge. Mr. Canin’s patient, careful prose is at its best when applied to this old world of scaled-down ambitions and almost pathological modesty. Sifter is, at times, too perfect a lead, and his Saline coming-of-age is an idealized yesteryear, a mythic America encased in amber. But it is so passionately imagined that it is hard to resist Mr. Canin’s retreat to simpler times and his vision of those who would forfeit comfort for the possibility of unknown highs (or lows).

The novel grows confounding as it approaches the present, after Bonwiller’s campaign has gone to pieces. Mr. Canin uses the past to shame us, to measure how far we have strayed, but he does so in a tone that is clumsily exaggerated. Should we dream of a return to the small-town serfdom of old Saline? The grown-up Sifter is embittered by how Saline has changed: It was different before IBM and all the rest arrived, he tells us, before the local shops gave way to shopping malls. Mr. Canin’s rage is a bit too studied, as he dismisses “Toyota Highlanders parked at the upscale malls” — as though there was more integrity in the old money of the Metareys and Bonwillers.

It is Sifter’s romantic and overgenerous portrayal of these local titans that makes him seem like a curious old dinosaur to Trieste Millbury, a quirky young intern at the newspaper whose virtuously meager upbringing reminds Sifter of his own. But where he demanded little of them, or of the world, her pride veers toward a youthful outrage. She listens intently as Sifter recounts his wonderful days standing close to the rich and powerful, but she can’t fathom why he turns time and again to the language of “gratefulness” and being “worthy.” “All this money,” she remarks, “it makes me want to steal sometimes. Doesn’t it ever make you?” Sifter says no, of course. He knows he’s already lost more than one could ever steal back.

Mr. Hsu teaches English at Vassar College. He last wrote for these pages on Keith Gessen.