The novel opens with a succession of voices that evoke dramatically the times of which they speak. Jean Hampson's reminiscence to her daughter, Danner, tells of a 30s childhood, a 40s coming of age in small-town Bellington, West Virginia, of birth and death, and of the failure of a long marriage. Mitch Hampson, returning from the Pacific theater to a small-town world already beginning to change, meets Jean in postwar Bellington and marries her three weeks later. The novel continues with the coming of age in turn of Danner and Billy Hampson, children in the 50s, adolescents and young adults in the 60s. Yet even as they move through simple, familiar rites of passage, their world is being shattered by forces outside their control -- the break-up of their parents' marriage, a war in Vietnam that splinters the society around them and leaves the Hampsons, as well as their country, permanently scarred and changed.