Synopsis: Paperboy

James is working-poor in a small town in the Midwestern US. He works two jobs, pizza delivery evenings and then delivering newspapers overnight. But this is a strange paper route; quite a few people are awake when he's making his deliveries, and among the people he has met there are six characters who he begins to think of as "oracles," because they make offhand comments which end up having a great deal of significance in his own life. He doesn't know (or remember) any of their real names, so they live in his mind as nicknames and stereotypes, doing things like lecturing James on personal responsibility and the dangers of trusting corn.

In the meantime, he is divorced with joint custody of his son, and he has no idea what he did wrong that caused his wife to leave him; one night over ten years ago he got drunk, and the next morning she seemed to hate him, and this overnight change persisted, but she would never tell him what he did wrong. His fellow paper delivery people in town hate him because he goes out of his way to do whatever the customers want, which makes them look bad and causes them to lose money.

The story covers 24 hours of his life, in which he hits a cow on the road (as predicted by two of the oracles), breaks a tooth, quits the pizza job, finds out what happened that night ten years ago, and then has to face the oracles and the new reality of the meaning of his wasted life.