The answer to Doug Willis' mid-life crisis is a sabbatical at his rural retreat in Preston Falls, two months spent restoring the faded splendour of the farmhouse, reading Dickens in the evening and watching summer gently fade to autumn. But following a marathon whiskey drinking session, a disastrous attempt to tear out the living room ceiling and an incident with a sheriff at a local campsite, Willis ends his first weekend away in jail, and it's clear the wired, burned-out New York copy-writer within is still very much to the fore. And while Willis' wife Jean struggles to pay the bills and raise their sullen, sceptical kids, Willis' 'break' crumbles into Dewars- and Cocaine-fuelled disarray, and he embarks on another kind of journey altogether.