Although the novel is set in California, many of the characters are really from the East Coast, New England, or the South, with their more defined social codes and ethic of self-reliance and reserve. Molly Bonner "had grown up in Richmond, Virginia, trained to listen to men and to laugh at their jokes—true of all women, of course, but even more so if they are Southern." This evasive, overtly submissive Southern inclination is tested by time and geography in her short-lived early marriage to hard-drinking Henry, the consummate New Englander who could offset Southernness: "Molly had fallen in love with New England, along with Henry, or perhaps the other way around," and later to Paul, from adventurous, wide-open Montana, more Western even than California itself. Molly herself, although intelligent and resourceful, is in many ways a damaged character—overly nice and compliant, perhaps because of...