Charlie Barnes is a mid-century man devoted to his newspaper and his landline. But Charlie is about to get dragged into our troubled age by his storyteller son, who has a different idea of him than he has of himself. Then there are his other children, his ex-wives, present wife, business clients, friends and acquaintances, all of whom have their competing opinions of Charlie.

A striver, romantic, and thoroughgoing capitalist, he's blindsided by the Great Recession and a dose of bad news. Rethinking his entire life, he starts to wonder: what makes a man real? What makes him good? And how does the story we tell about ourselves line up with the lives that we actually live?