With ‘Mobility,’ Lydia Kiesling delivers a great second novel
It is very hard to write a great second novel.
Often, a first novel is the product of many years of work, a buildup of everything an individual artist has inside of them that bursts forth in a glorious debut.
Lydia Kiesling’s first novel, “The Golden State” was a fantastic debut. It’s a close-focus story of the life of a young mother trying to single-parent a toddler as her Turkish husband is stuck outside of the United States because of visa problems.
Daphne leaves her San Francisco home for a trailer in rural California once owned by her recently deceased mother and tries to stave off a breakdown as she takes care of little Honey. The power of the novel is in the moment-to-moment work of parenting a wholly dependent child. There is very little action page-to-page and yet Kiesling makes the whole experience riveting.
Defying the pattern, Kiesling has now written a great second novel, “Mobility,” and it is a very different story from “The Golden State.” That she has written two novels of vastly different scope, and yet both manage to worm their way into the reader’s psyche is very exciting considering there are more books to come.
While “The Golden State” spans two weeks, “Mobility” covers 50-plus years in the life of Elizabeth “Bunny” Glenn. We first meet Bunny in 1998 at age 15 when her father, a career U.S. diplomat, is stationed in Baku, Azerbaijan, near the start of a gold rush over offshore oil. Young Bunny is primarily interested in some of the brash older (but still young) men who are involved in the political intrigue surrounding the developing industry. She has internalized a belief that a woman’s worth is wrapped up in the ability to attract men like this, a prospect that seems to simultaneously excite and repel her.
The opening establishes the central question of the novel, perhaps the central question of life: How do you figure out who you’re supposed to be?
From there we jump to Bunny in her 20s drifting aimlessly through east Texas tending to the emotional needs of her mother who has been left by her father and is working a clerical job at a private oil services company. Bunny is diligent at her work, proofreading technical documents she doesn’t fully understand appears to be kind of a gift, but she has little in her life that seems to mean anything to her. She exists.
The remainder of the novel moves through various stages of Bunny’s life that coincide with different shifts in the energy. Bunny rises at the private firm, taking initiative where she can, trying to find work that challenges her, even as she is personally troubled by the effect the industry she works in is having on the world.
Kiesling’s gift (also apparent in “The Golden State”) is her ability to captivatingly render the seemingly mundane experiences of life set against a broader world that seems to conspire against us. In her hands, what should be banal — for example, a conference put on for women working in the energy industry — becomes
a fascinating and dramatic rendering of how one woman (Bunny) negotiates life.
As with “The Golden State,” we are quickly invested in the fate of the central character, but what most moves me is Kiesling’s uncanny knack for freshly illuminating the aspects of living that most of us have deemed uninteresting.
It is a marvel to find the sublime in the mundane, and Kiesling does this over and over again.
I will read any book she writes, knowing it will be well worth my time.