This is one of Margaret Atwood's dystopian novels. The US has collapsed economically and socially, but not completely, there are still 'the haves'. Stan and Charmaine live in their car, and are vulnerable to roving gangs. In desperation, they sign up to a community in the town of Consilience, and a project called Positron, which is essentially voluntary prison slave labour. All starts quite well, but soon ... The tone is quite wry, the tone light, but the subject material very dark. The combination is rather unsettling and the plot races along with little time for exposition, but the future we may be faced with couldn't be clearer. It's easy to extrapolate from the world we live in today - very powerful multinational corporations that don't want to answer to anyone, compliant political parties, erosion of human and civil rights, social discord, inequality - to where Atwood takes us in a possible near future.
This is not as inventive or as profound as her recent Maddadam trilogy, but it's in the same territory.