The summer Michael Smolij turns seventeen, his father disappears. One by one other men also vanish from outside Detroit where their fathers before them had lived, raised families, and, in a more promising era, lived. One man props open the door to his shoe Wisconsin. store and leaves a note. "I'm going to the moon," it reads. "I took the cash."

The abandoned wives drink, brawl, and sleep around, gradually settling down to make new lives and shaking off the belief in an American dream that, like their husbands, has proven to be a thing of the past. Unable to leave the neighborhood their fathers abandoned, Michael and his friends stumble through their twenties until the restlessness of the fathers blooms in them, threatening to carry them away.