The brief Prologue recalls the heartbreaking moment in late summer, 1988, when Samuel, age 11, growing up in rural Iowa, realizes his mother has left. He struggles to understand why he was not “a child worth sticking around for” (3). Her decision was hardly sudden, the mother spent months quietly packing her things. She moved away “imperceptibly, slowly, bit by bit” (5).

Part 1 moves to late summer, 2011. The media is in a frenzy over an attack against a flame-throwing conservative presidential candidate, Wyoming governor Sheldon Packer. An unidentified woman, white-haired and sixty-ish, had been videotaped tossing a handful of rocks at Packer during a Chicago rally while calling him a “pig” (12). The woman was arrested and identified as Faye, a teacher’s aide at a local elementary school. Reporters quickly unearth that she had been a radical in the 1960s, arrested for prostitution during the riots surrounding the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

Across town, Samuel, a 30-something literary professor at a small university, wastes another long night in his campus office lost within the shadowy realm of a video game called World of Elfscape. As a character named Dodger, he helps slay dragons and kill orcs. Once hailed as a promising young writer, he had received an enormous advance to complete his first novel—10 years later, he has yet to start it.