Hearts in Atlantis

The novel comprises five interconnected narratives spanning from 1960 to 1999, linked by a shared cast of characters and the long shadow of the Vietnam War.

The first and longest narrative, "1960: Low Men in Yellow Coats," set in 1960, centers on Bobby Garfield, an eleven-year-old boy living in Harwich, Connecticut, with his widowed mother, Liz Garfield. Liz works as a secretary and habitually blames her late husband, Randall Garfield, for their financial hardships. For Bobby's birthday she gives him an adult library card rather than the bicycle he wants, a gift that proves more meaningful than he initially realizes.

On Bobby's birthday, Ted Brautigan, an elderly man with white hair and nicotine-stained fingers, moves into the building's vacant third-floor room. Bobby is drawn to Ted, who introduces him to serious literature, gives him a copy of Lord of the Flies, and engages him in conversations that expand his understanding of the world. Ted offers Bobby a dollar a week to read the newspaper aloud, but the real job is for Bobby to watch for "low men in yellow coats," dangerous beings who are hunting Ted. Ted describes the signs of their approach: lost-pet posters, upside-down for-sale cards, and symbols chalked on sidewalks. Bobby agrees to keep the true nature of his work secret from his mother.

Bobby's closest friends are Sully-John Sullivan and Carol Gerber. During a trip to Savin Rock amusement park, Bobby kisses Carol at the top of a Ferris wheel and wins money from a three-card monte dealer by reading the man's mind rather than tracking the cards. He begins to realize that Ted's touch has awakened a psychic sensitivity in him.

Ted bets five hundred dollars on a fixed boxing match and takes Bobby to The Corner Pocket, a billiard parlor in Bridgeport, to place the wager. There Bobby meets a woman who knew his father and learns that Randall was actually a well-liked, generous man, contradicting everything Liz has implied. On the ride home, Bobby and Ted narrowly avoid detection by the low men, whose purple DeSoto sedan is parked nearby. Bobby hides his thoughts behind vivid mental imagery to block their psychic probing.

Events accelerate violently. Three older boys beat Carol in the park, dislocating her shoulder with a baseball bat. Bobby carries her home, and Ted resets her shoulder. Liz returns from a conference in Providence a day early, badly beaten. She walks in to find Ted holding the bruised Carol and accuses Ted of being a child molester. In the confrontation that follows, Carol perceives that Liz was assaulted by her boss and colleagues in Providence and screams out the truth. Ted threatens to reveal what happened to Liz if she calls the police, and she reluctantly lets him leave.

Bobby discovers that his mother found one of the low men's posters bearing Ted's name and called the number to collect a reward, betraying Ted to his pursuers. Bobby races to Bridgeport to warn him but arrives too late. The low men, tall figures in mustard-colored coats, capture Ted outside The Corner Pocket. Their leader offers Bobby the choice of accompanying Ted or staying behind. Terrified, Bobby chooses to stay.

Bobby takes revenge on Harry Doolin, the ringleader of the boys who hurt Carol, then moves with Liz to Danvers, Massachusetts. His teenage years are troubled, marked by fights, shoplifting, and juvenile detention. Ted sends postcards through Carol, signing them "A Friend," but Carol's letters stop in 1963. Bobby eventually receives an envelope forwarded by Carol containing rose petals of the deepest red and no note. He understands the petals mean Ted has escaped and resolves to do better.

The second narrative, "1966: Hearts in Atlantis," shifts to 1966, narrated by Pete Riley, a scholarship freshman at the University of Maine. On the third floor of Chamberlain Hall, an epidemic of the card game Hearts, initiated by a floormate named Ronnie Malenfant, rapidly consumes nearly every student. Played at a nickel per point, the game becomes compulsive, displacing studying and threatening everyone's academic standing. Pete befriends Skip Kirk, a charismatic athlete, and begins dating Carol Gerber, who works alongside him on the dining-hall dishline.

Vietnam increasingly dominates their conversations. Stoke Jones, a student who uses crutches and wears a hand-drawn peace sign on his jacket, spray-paints antiwar graffiti on the dormitory wall. When the administration investigates, the students have already put peace signs on their own clothing at Skip's instigation, making it impossible to single Stoke out. Carol tells Pete the story of Bobby carrying her up Broad Street Hill after the beating, explaining that Bobby's courage is the reason she participates in antiwar demonstrations. She leaves school before the semester ends to care for her mother. Pete and Skip, facing academic disaster, finally quit Hearts and claw their way back to passing grades. Many of their floormates are not so fortunate. Years later, Pete reflects that his generation's promise was largely squandered.

The third narrative, "1983: Blind Willie," set in 1983, follows Willie Shearman, one of the three boys who beat Carol in 1960. Willie leads a compartmentalized triple life. As "Bill Shearman," he is a well-dressed Connecticut commuter. In a hidden office, he fills ledgers with the phrase "I am heartily sorry" and keeps a scrapbook tracking Carol's life from schoolgirl to antiwar activist to member of a radical group whose bomb killed six people. As "Blind Willie Garfield," he stands outside St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York posing as a blind Vietnam veteran, collecting donations he gives to churches. Willie served in Vietnam, where he saved Sully-John's life and earned a Silver Star. He carries Bobby's old baseball glove, stolen in childhood, as part of his begging act. His existence is structured as penance for his childhood cruelty to Carol.

The fourth narrative, "1999: Why We're in Vietnam," set in 1999, follows Sully-John Sullivan, now a car dealer, as he attends the funeral of a fellow Vietnam veteran. Since the war, Sully has been haunted by visions of a mamasan, an elderly Vietnamese woman whom Ronnie Malenfant killed during the war. At the funeral, Sully reconnects with Dieffenbaker, his former lieutenant, who delivers a bitter assessment of their generation's failures. Driving home, Sully gets caught in traffic. The mamasan appears beside him. In a hallucinatory sequence, objects fall from the sky, including Bobby's old baseball glove, which lands in Sully's hands. The mamasan embraces him, promising safety. Sully dies of a heart attack in the stalled traffic.

The final narrative, "1999: Heavenly Shades of Night Are Falling," brings Bobby, now fifty, back to Harwich for Sully's memorial service. A carpenter in Pennsylvania with a wife and three children, Bobby received his old baseball glove from Sully's executor. Inside the glove he found a title page from a 1960 edition of Lord of the Flies bearing Ted Brautigan's handwriting and a message for Bobby to deliver to Carol. Bobby's current address was inked on the glove's heel in Ted's hand, suggesting Ted remains connected to Bobby across time. Bobby understood that Ted believed Carol was still alive and would come to Sully's service.

In Commonwealth Park at dusk, a woman approaches Bobby. She calls herself Denise Schoonover, a math professor, but Bobby recognizes her as Carol Gerber. She bears a long facial scar and burn scars on her hands from the fire she survived in Los Angeles. She insists that Carol Gerber died on Benefit Street and refuses to discuss those years. She weeps when she sees the symbols Ted drew on the title page. Bobby places his old baseball glove in the grove of trees where Carol once comforted him as a child. They sit together on a bench in the gathering dark, connected by a persistent thread of childhood wonder and the bonds that formed nearly forty years before.