Summary

Chapters 1 and 2 are included in the first section of the novel, titled “The Point of Dynamism,” which occurs with 2010. As Chapter 1 opens, Dark Elephant’s star employee Bobby Frame drives a “brand-new Dodge Ram with Texas plates” through rural Bakerton in western Pennsylvania introduced in the prologue (12). While in town, he stays at the Days Inn and goes to the county courthouse for deeds to determine who owns property in Bakerton. Once he has this information, he pays the land owners a visit. He has stopped “at the Fettersons’, the Nortons’, the Kiplers’, Marlys Beale’s” (9). At the Mackey Dairy Farm, the Mackeys ask dismissively if he is trying to sell them something. Though he claims not to be, his strategy suggests otherwise.

Bobby is practiced and exacting in his strategy, as the reader sees when he stops to visit the Devlin’s...