accidentally makes Robert's gun go off, killing the youth. Everyone accepts his death as an accident. Jonathan gradually becomes less responsible and more delinquent, while Swan excels in school and skips a grade. Swan refuses to go to college in spite of his excellent grades, and he breaks off a relationship he has with a girl named Loretta because he is afraid of the carnal sins that his mother warned him against. Eventually Swan becomes Revere's assistant in the business, since Clark has married a lower-class girl and has fallen out of Revere's favor. Swan becomes depressed and finds his attention drifting from everything he does. Swan is in love with a niece of Revere's, Deb, who is married to another man. One night Swan goes to Revere's and Clara's house, yelling that he cannot stand the couple any more. Swan pulls out a gun and tries to kill Clara, only to find he cannot do it. Swan accidentally shoots Revere and then kills himself. Clara has a nervous breakdown and spends the rest of her life in a nursing home. She is visited on occasion only by Clark. Title The title of the novel is taken from the painting The Garden of Earthly Delights, by Hieronymus Bosch. Richard Fusco of America magazine observed, "Instead of moving from Eden through earth to hell, as in the painting, Oates's protagonist travels from the hell of a migrant camp through an uncertain existence where joys are imagined, to an economic and social Eden, represented by Curt Revere's farm. But as was true in the painting, this garden cultivates the seeds of its own destruction." Susana Araújo wrote, "According to Foucault, the garden is the oldest example of heterotopia--a space that allows for the juxtaposition of several incompatible sites within a single real place. He mentions the rectangular Persian garden as a microcosm that brought together within it four spaces representing the four parts of the world." Reception and interpretation In an essay that analyses the "grotesque vision" of Oates's works, Kathleen Burke Bloom observes, "Oates endows her characters with survival skills that metastasize into the obsessions that ultimately destroy them," and concludes, "That the Walpole clan's progression runs full circle from the depths of misery to great heights of satisfaction and back down to misery, greatly intensifies the grotesque effect of the novel." Entela Kushta laments, "Clara's ties, in fact, are not