Housewife Oedipa Maas is appointed as the executor of her former lover, real estate speculator Pierce Inverarity's will. She embarks on a journey through California, trying to discover who Pierce Inverarity was, who she herself is, and what America means. Along the way, she encounters a different world that follows entirely different rules. Surrounded by the eccentric, the isolated, and the disturbed, who have been excluded from society, Oedipa seems to be on the trail of a centuries-old counter-conspiracy. Or is it all just fiction, a delusion?.