Anklewood, North Carolina, 2000s-2010s

The main setting for the novel is a fictional small town near the Uwarrhie National Forest in Central North Carolina, not far from Greensboro, where Wilky's parents live, or Fayetteville, where Wilky lived while still in the army airborne corps. Irene makes clear that at the town's most prosperous, there were never more than a few thousand people, and in its decline since the town's textile mille closed some years earlier in Irene's memory it has lost much of that population to flight and untimely death through poor health and drug addiction. For Karen Tucker's purposes, Anklewood stands in as an Anytown U.S.A. model of the generational consequences of the erosion of the local manufacturing-based economies into low-wage, no-benefit service jobs. Irene describes the mountainous region's majestic natural splendors, but adds it lies beyond the realm of civilization. The countryside rife with...