In the 19th century, a Polish actress so brilliant and popular that she is an ersatz national hero, has a mid-career crisis.

?! I was expecting a book about America. Instead I let myself slide into Sontag's introduction in a glittery Krakow dinner party, a dreamy straddle before the story is fully formed. Quickly rewarded -- drawn into this world and this mind of the small band of Polish bourgeois who decide to move to the frontier town of Anaheim to try their hand at communal farming in the model of Brook Farm. The novel continues to tell the story of how they begin to inhabit the desert, then come to grips with their failure as farmers, then embarking on another round of performing life but this time fully American.

I fell easily for Sontag's musings on the American west and on the fickle human mind, many of them still true. In some ways it's an interesting counterpart of Stegner's Angle of Repose.

"Well, you haven't seen the real America. Get out of New York. Nobody cares about anything here except money. Go out west. go to California. It's paradise. Everyone wants to go there."

"The soundless, odorless, monochrome landscape , so drastically untenanted, had the same effect on everyone: an intoxicating impression of aloneness, which gradually gave way to a more active assent to the experience of solitude... Their real initiation into the seductive nihilism of the desert had begun."

"San Francisco... the steep streets in the heart of the insouciantly planned city."

"Because of something you argued the night before, you have something like a moral hangover, but you feel calm because you know now that you're on the right track, while uneasily suspecting that you coudl still think something different tomorrow."