In the run-up to the 2010 elections, a divorce and midlife crisis steer William Lang Jr., a forty-one-year-old freelance journalist and diehard New Yorker, away from the big urban world in which he has always lived to a small, upstate town that is culturally unfamiliar. William takes on an assumed identity, Jack Stone, his conservative alter ego, and heads for the road. He settles in for a year among the conservative residents of Littleton, a one-street town in upstate New York. Except for the occasional letter back home, he cuts himself off from his former life and throws himself headlong into the new one he plans to experience and write about. A journey that begins with preconceived notions about those who live in "Small Town," America, careens in an unexpected direction when William disregards the cultural taboos that keep liberals and conservatives apart and draws himself into a relationship with Sue Ellen, a townie, which turns his world upside down and causes him to experience what is at the heart of the nation's cultural divide.