It was a town carved out of the untouched wild, mountains on one side, ocean on the other, accessible only by a single coastal road and patience. It existed through pure stubbornness, pushing back against nature from both sides.
-- Narrator (The Plus-One Party paragraph 3)

Importance: Within the first few pages of the novel, Miranda has Avery (as the narrator) set the scene of Littleport. The reader is immediately thrown into a small coastal town that is split into two halves: the upper-class Lomans and seasonal renters and the working-class year-round residents. The fact that Avery says the town is forged from stubbornness reflects on the fact that the working-class residents refuse to leave their town, although the competition from the upper-class threatens to drive them out.

Tonight circumstances leveled us out, and you couldn't tell just from looking who was a resident and who was a visitor. We pretended that: Strip us down and we're all...
-- Narrator (The Plus-One Party paragraph 4)