Describes how English merchant adventurers, in search of new markets and trading partners, were the earliest founders of America, with profit as their primary motive. --

Townie takes place in Oldon, Massachusetts, a burgeoning New England village that has become the favored residence of the mega-rich, a town whose historic past has been preserved and polished until it gleams with the arrogant intensity of a Colonial theme park.   Alan Lowe inhabits a different Oldon, however, a town that he loved as a boy for the "power and rightness of its countryside." Now, in early middle age, he finds himself living on the margins...