What is happening in Vermont now that new people are moving in and the old agrarian ways are dying? The Simple Life is a deeply engaging rural tragedy about well-meaning ordinary people whose lives tangle with each other in a destructive way. The only true innocents are the team of oxen whose own story is one of the central threads. In 1991, Isabel Rawlings, a middle-aged suburbanite, recently divorced, moves to Severance, Vermont, to try to live a simple, rural life. She gets romantically involved with Leroy LaFourniere, a real estate developer and small-town hustler, and she makes friends with an old ox teamster, Sonny Trumbley, and his great granddaughter, Alison LePage. After a tragic farm accident, everything unravels, and Isabel realizes that the simple life isn't as simple as she had fantasized.