[4] Dollar is sent by his employer, the multinational "Global Pork Rind Corporation", to scout for locations for intensive hog farming in the Texas Panhandle.

[3] He bases his search in the fictional town of Woolybucket, named after the real tree species, Sideroxylon lanuginosum.

[2] There he gets a job at Woolybucket's Old Dog restaurant, and moves into an old bunkhouse in local historian LaVon Fronk's ranch.

The inhabitants of the town and the region's quirkiness and stubbornness work on the fundamentally decent Dollar.

"[1][3] Writing in The Observer, Adam Mars-Jones described the book as "richer in wishful thinking than in the hard knowledge that the author has so patiently acquired.