Books

“State Department brat Bunny Glenn, Mobility‘s hapless, sometimes feckless, protagonist, likes her lip gloss and her Louboutins, and isn’t likely to let vaguely leftish views stand between her and her rise in the oil industry. But this sly bildungsroman has subterranean intent. A masterpiece of misdirection and a cautionary tale for our times.”

“Mobility is a beautifully written and stunningly smart novel. It’s a deeply engrossing, politically astute tale of the intricacies and intimacies of our daily complicity with late capital, with the collective bargain we’ve all made to count calories and coins while the world burns.”

“This is the story of a single American life, a frank (and often funny) look at one woman’s becoming. But the accomplishment of Lydia Kiesling’s second novel is untangling the forces—politics, sex, and corporate might—that dictate all of contemporary existence. Mobility is at once a tale of family life and an indictment of capitalism itself; a truly extraordinary book.”

“Ranging from Houston to Athens to Baku, and back again, from the mid 20th century to the near future, Mobility is an incisive and beautifully written coming of age story set against the backdrop of the global oil industry and the climate crisis it helped bring about. With humor, insight, and a keen eye for detail, Kiesling tells the story of a young woman finding her way in the world, while at the same time exposing the greed, desire, and seemingly innocuous individual choices that have brought us to the current state of global catastrophe.”

“Mobility is that rare gem that has the power to transport its reader, page to page, moment to moment, while subtly building to a conclusion of cosmic profundity. One could compare the deft Kiesling to any great novelist of our time, but ultimately her exploration of complicity reminded me most of Hannah Arendt; here is a writer who sees the world so clearly that she cannot help expose us to ourselves.  I put down the book feeling both grateful for this author’s all-seeing honesty, and a little frightened of it.”

Utterly absorbing and revelatory about the small, personal parts we play in a world we cannot comprehend. Mobility is a meticulously built stage for Kiesling’s perfectly drawn, wonderfully flawed characters to stumble across. I always see parts of myself in the pages of Kiesling’s books—the lesser angels I’m eager to hide away—and I feel less alone because of it.

“Kiesling’s second novel follows Bunny’s journey from a bored, apathetic teenager to an ambitious, slightly more self-assured adult, with the author skillfully capturing Bunny’s shifting attitudes toward everything from her parents’ failed marriage to her nascent political opinions to the difficulties of working for a Texan oil company. But Bunny always feels genuine . . . this rich and compelling novel makes a strong case for paving your own way.”

“Lydia Kiesling writes beautifully and rigorously about the rotten systems that ensnare her characters and the many imperfect ways in which they try to free themselves. Mobility’s Bunny Glenn is a complicated heroine for the ages, a striver who values the comforts of her oil-industry job even as she must reckon with the fact that the world is quite literally on fire.”

“In Mobility, Kiesling applies her sharp pairing of politics and the personal to a wider scale, encompassing decades in the life of a hapless onetime foreign service brat named Bunny. As Bunny languishes in Azerbaijan as a 1990s teenager oblivious to the global scramble for oil, stumbles into an oil career in Texas in young adulthood, and grapples with our climate-wrecked future, Kiesling explores individual complicity with late capitalism.”

“Through Bunny, a likable enough person with inherent flaws, Kiesling creates a powerful ‘everyperson’ archetype for whom political inertia is the modus operandi, proffering an honest and damning reflection on why the personal is political.”

“Kiesling breaks down the barrier between the personal and political, ingeniously exposing the ways in which a person can be both ruled by and complicit in capitalism.”

“As in her debut, Kiesling peers at America through a global lens in Mobility,  following Bunny through her teenage years in late 1990s Azerbaijan to her middle-age career in the oil industry. The author, a former resident of the Bay Area, uses one American woman’s story as a container for exploring larger issues like privilege, geopolitics and climate change.”

“Modeled on Upton Sinclair’s Oil!, Mobility follows Bunny, a diplomatic brat, from her adolescence on her dad’s posting in Baku, Azerbaijan, where she first encounters the oil choads and NGO hangers-on of the U.S. foreign policy apparatus, to an aimless but privileged adulthood working as an admin then girlboss with the “renewables” arm of an oil and gas consultancy in Texas—throughout the novel, her hands are on the hyperobject of anthropogenic decline, as were her parents’ before that. Momentum speeds as the pages turn; characters live lavishly on student loans they will later have to repay; they profit off the price of an oil barrel, but “[are] not accustomed to thinking of themselves as people who had responsibilities to be bad or good.” … Genuinely a brilliant book, the best piece of motherhood literature I’ve read this year, and a perfectly urgent summer read for a 110-degree day.”

“Kiesling brilliantly captures the swashbuckling arrogance and louche misbehavior of Americans pushing capitalism abroad (where the smell of oil is ‘the smell of money’), and the consequences of Bunny’s choices are clearly drawn and factually sound. The result is an impressively original contribution to the emerging literature of climate change.”

“Lydia Kiesling is a smart and funny writer who is unafraid of getting her hands dirty with politics. This is my favorite kind of novelist. So I am very much looking forward to Mobility, which follows the life of Bunny Glenn (Pynchon says hi) from her teenage years visiting newly post-Soviet Azerbaijan to her present-day career in the oil industry… and all the crazy, globally important stuff that happened in between. It’s almost like history didn’t end, not even one bit!”

“[In Mobility, Kiesling] deliver[s] an examination of the roles of (among other factors) class, gender, politics, and economics in the development of the world’s addictive reliance upon fossil fuels. Bunny, who has been privy to rumors and stories of [oil] industry corruption and avarice, grapples with the need to make a life (and a living) for herself in an arena filled with self-interest and increasingly devastating environmental danger. All the while, she contends with concerns shared with women finding their ways in the corporate world and the world of self-fulfillment. Designer bags, Korean skin care lines, nail polish colors, and the resolution of a long-held sexual attraction take turns as signals of Bunny’s evolving persona in this artful demonstration of how micro decisions have macro results. The personal is patently political in Kiesling’s call to environmental arms.”

“Fiction can capture self-deception so well because an omniscient narrator, like the one in Mobility, shows us both a character’s actions in the world and how she is making them palatable and acceptable to herself. . . . And the hope, surely, of a writer like Kiesling is that we might then wonder how our own stories delude us, how they might keep us from facing up to all we don’t want to see.”

“Kiesling is able to establish the historical conjuncture in which her book is set without resorting to dull exposition. But this formal choice is more than just a canny bit of craft; it also hints at the novel’s true subject. Recognizing the epistemological impasse that Bunny runs up against in her quest to master the industry’s inner workings, Mobility is not really about oil qua oil, but the way it is narrativized—both for good and for ill.”