When Adriane decides to test the limits of her tightly controlled world, she is punished by being sent back in time to a region of North America, "Wainscotia, Wisconsin" that existed 80 years before. Warned that she cannot hint at the future, or step out of bounds in any sense of the word and sent to Wainscotia with a new name and identity, Adriane is on the path of "rehabilitation." However, when she senses someone else in Wainscotia may also be an exile, she decides to risk everything to make a connection with him.
I found Oates' vision of a future world to be quite scary, but also within reason to imagine (which is, in itself, kind of scary). The way that Adriane exists in her own world, she is obviously trying to fit within all of the rules and restrictions, but you can tell that something in her is naturally rebelling. When she is exiled back in time, you can't tell if some of her concerns about where she is and the people around her is due to paranoia, or actual risk. And then, you start to question if anything is really how she believes it to be. This is an interesting and, to me at least, a sad story.
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