Women who used to be good girls give the town's mayor a fatal heart attack by ravishing him in a swimming pool. But worst of all, John Reddy Heart fails to appear. In her new novel, the author chronicles this mythmaking process with great skill and humor, presenting characters whom we've all met at school at one time or another, and one character most of us have met repeatedly in our media-enhanced fantasies. As excitement over the missed appearance circulates, old romances are awkwardly rekindled and hearts rebroken. Old scores get settled.
People go around touching their skin, wondering if pimples are starting to appear again.
They fondly remember friends who've passed away. The tragedy of missing John Reddy after all these years fades as the classmates happily reconstruct his myth. None of them really wants to hear Evangeline's brilliant theory that he might actually have been innocent of the charge brought against him all those years ago. Eventually she gives up trying to convince people, probably shelving the idea to put into one of her novels. These questions, best left unrevealed by a reviewer, are movingly explored by Oates in the novel's third quarter.