Spilled Oil: On Lydia Kiesling’s “Mobility”
Lydia Kiesling | Mobility | Crooked Media Reads | August 2023 | 368 Pages
When Elizabeth “Bunny” Glenn meets the man she will marry for the first time, lingering over mini quiches at a Houston rooftop party in 2010, he asks her if she wants to have kids. She hopes that he is asking flirtatiously. As a self-identified liberal who loves Obama and hates Republicans, Bunny has found it difficult to date since moving to Texas, deterred by the abundance, she imagines, of “meatheads, illiterates, or people who [don’t] believe in abortion.” At least the man before her, who introduces himself as Francis, believes in global warming. Even so, his question about kids turns out to be a leading one, a rebuff against her discomfort about the city’s booming oil industry. Sure, he concedes, fossil fuels might be driving widespread extinction. But what about technological achievement, and the unimpeachable march of human progress? Sensing that Bunny remains unconvinced, Francis encourages her to think about the issue within the scope of her personal life. Assuming that she does want to have kids one day, he says, where would she rather give birth: in a hospital equipped with petroleum-powered machines, or outside in a shed?
That proposition resurfaces periodically throughout Lydia Kiesling’s novel, Mobility, as Bunny grapples with her relationship to the oil industry. Having graduated college during the 2008 financial crisis with an English degree, student loans, and “a vague sense of prematurely thwarted ambition,” she drifts between odd jobs for several months, feeling stagnant. She eventually finds employment through a temp agency at Miles Engineering Consultants, providers of “client satisfaction in the diverse fields of geophysics and seismology, hydrology, hydrogeology, and construction support.” As part of their mostly-women admin pool, she copy-edits reports by mostly-male engineers, whom she resents, amongst other things, for their linguistic and geopolitical ignorance —she constantly changes “Persian Gulf” to “Arabian Gulf,” on their notes about a nuclear power plant megaproject. One day, the young CEO arrives at her desk with a proposal to join his new venture: his father-in-law, Frank Turnbridge, founder of the “oldest family-owned oil company in existence,” has greenlit a new, technology-focused arm of the firm—it’ll mostly be oil and gas related to start, he cautions, but will eventually move toward renewables. Bunny accepts, despite her reservations—after all, she needs the money—and excels at writing a pamphlet about the company’s history. At Turnbridge, her life finally gathers momentum: with an increased salary, company-sponsored business courses, and access to the library Frank donated to a local college, Bunny has the resources to pore over new books, master Zumba, and tour studio apartments.
When Bunny first visited the temp agency, a staffer had reassured her that despite the economic climate, companies would hire in response to climbing oil prices. “Bunny felt surprised for a moment to think that might have something to do with her,” Kiesling writes, while also making it abundantly clear, in part through her rigorous rendering of detail, that every aspect of Bunny’s existence is shaped by the value of oil—down to the frigid air that circulates through the office to mask the Houston heat.
This realization, however, is particularly ironic on Bunny’s part, considering her early life. With a father in the Foreign Service, the Glenns relocated to Baku in the late 1990s following Azerbaijan’s declaration of independence from the Soviet Union. Bunny came of age as the nascent nation was finding its feet, and in both cases, Kiesling depicts the force of Western influence. While Bunny flips through magazines like Cosmopolitan with devotion—“dog-eared to denote the women [she] one day hoped to resemble and the products she one day hoped to buy”—the adults around her frequently reference the “Contract of the Century,” an agreement signed by the new Azerbaijani government and a consortium of foreign oil companies to drill the Caspian Basin. She fantasizes about marrying her upstairs neighbor, Eddie, a British documentarian who explains that he relocated to capture the continuing fallout of this contract: the disparity between the vast wealth flowing in from the oil consortium, and the environmental degradation of Azerbaijan. By offering this sprawling context in the course of charting Bunny’s private desires, Kiesling runs up against a question that applies to most of us in the Global North: how should we think about our privileged existence in relation to the climate crisis, which can feel more consequential and yet less urgent than the stuff of our everyday lives?
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One effect of encountering political details through Bunny’s personal life is that they are often articulated through the male condescension that she routinely endures—amongst the writer-editors and politicos in Baku, the engineers and oil executives in Texas, and of course with her eventual husband, Francis (all of whom feel flattered by Bunny’s claims to her own ignorance). Their dialogic delivery spotlights the politics that invariably shape any act of storytelling. That Bunny’s own life takes off while composing Turnbridge’s history only underscores this concern further: power belongs to those in charge of the narrative, and vice versa. This is no secret to Big Oil, an industry that has historically weaponized and obscured this fact, shielding itself through tactical narrativization—to such an extent that this process remains largely opaque to Bunny, even as she comes to participate in it directly.
In 2013, she attends a conference where a blonde speaker advocates for a professional women’s network—a corrective to the industry’s oversaturation by “old white guys.” At the time, Bunny is too preoccupied to care, and resentfully scans the room for anyone wearing an engagement ring or worse, anyone skinner than she is. But upon her promotion to Director of Turnbridge’s Outreach and Communications group in 2018, she adopts that same Lean In style of rhetoric to broadcast the company’s commitment to “social change.” Online and at conferences, she carefully curates promotional footage: clips of mothers cradling their babies in brightly-lit hospital rooms, where machines are fueled by “cleanly sourced energy.” But undergirding this nominally-feminist shtick are the same profit-motivated values, which continue to serve the handful of men remaining in charge. As one of their privileged beneficiaries, Bunny chooses to believe that a lack of diversity—rather than an extractive bottom-line—is the source of the industry’s problems, as well as its potential for reform. Or this is the story she tells herself, anyway, because it is also the most flattering.
Bunny’s narrative is momentarily exposed, however, by her brother’s partner, Sofie. When Bunny goes to defend fossil fuels—by again regurgitating the idea that they enable women to safely give birth in hospitals—Sofie, an environmental journalist and socialist, calls her bluff. Despite their clear differences, the women agree while dining at an Italian restaurant that the oil industry could be called a “hyperobject”—that is, any object too vast for total comprehension. Coined by the philosopher Timothy Morton over a decade ago, the term has since gathered a kind of cult following beyond academia amongst artists, sci-fi writers, and even pop stars like Björk. It describes how “hyperobjects” defy traditional ways of thinking about reality: they cannot be completely experienced, but also can’t not be experienced; they are apprehended, paradoxically, as both fragmented and inescapable. This certainly resonates with Bunny, who feels that the longer she works at Turnbridge, and the more that she knows about oil, the less she understands. “Every time Bunny learned one thing,” Kiesling writes, “the map she had constructed in her mind shifted….she couldn’t take in the full enormity of the thing, however hard she tried.” This kind of thinking tends to inspire feelings of “weakness” and “lameness,” writes Morton, along with a new awareness of our inability to think, let alone act in response. It follows that “hyperobjects,” they add, “make hypocrites of us all.” If this possibility occurs to Bunny, it doesn’t appear to bother her; she touches the plastic tablecloth, remarking less with outrage than with awe on the inescapable impact of her industry. She finishes her negroni, then promptly orders another one.
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It is tempting to understand Bunny through Morton’s eyes, as a portrait of hypocrisy, and in turn to read Mobility as an indictment of her character. One might recall Jenny Offill’s Weather (2020) or Madeleine Watts’s The Inland Sea (2021), novels similarly anchored by highly-educated white women in the Global North attempting to conceptualize their relationship to the climate crisis, while simultaneously working through personal crises. Weather’s Lizzie, a grad school dropout turned librarian, manages the anxiety-ridden inbox for a doomsday podcast. The Inland Sea’s unnamed protagonist, a doctoral candidate on indefinite hiatus, fields distressing calls as an emergency services operator in Australia. By documenting their days in compulsive, candid fragments, these narrators chronicle how it feels to live through a changing climate, while also projecting, in the process, the weight of planetary catastrophe onto their personal lives: Lizzie concludes that she will “die early and ignobly” during the apocalypse, after running out of breath to catch the bus one day; Watts’s protagonist mentally catalogs the hazards that are normalized in the course of everyday life—cars, trains, mosquitoes, men, collapsed footpaths. What results is a distortion of the feminist slogan “the personal is political.” Instead of illuminating the broader conditions that produce personal, yet collective struggles, the private anxieties in these texts are inflated by the climate crisis, which at some point obscures any meaningful relationship between them. When the climate novel is constrained to this mode, argues Rithika Ramamurthy—who called it the “eco-anxiety novel” in Issue 4 of The Drift—it becomes impoverished on either end: reduced to “an exercise in helplessness” for the writer, who is resigned to recording the horror, and to a kind of alarming thinkpiece for the reader, who is imparted with new awareness of this horror and helplessness alike. These conditions likely suppress, rather than inspire any change, by stoking the kind of resignation that Morton called “weakness”—that is, knowledge of one’s own hypocrisy, as well as its “inevitability.”
One could argue that Kiesling has stretched this mode to its extreme by placing Bunny at her novel’s center: a protagonist who isn’t saturated in despair but instead the kind of peace that requires cognitive dissonance, or perhaps liberal naivete. After several years at Turnbridge, and still lacking any evidence of their transition to renewable energy, she finds ways to rationalize her employment there. Her willed delusion is so blatant that it frequently approaches the register of satire, making clear that Kiesling’s priority isn’t to render her sympathetically. Kiesling does elevate Bunny beyond mere caricature, however, by crafting a protagonist who isn’t lacking emotional depth, only committed to avoiding it. When she first gained access to the Tunbridge archives, Bunny was horrified to learn about their countless catastrophes—the records of dead people, columns of fire, crude-slicked oceans. But as she reads further, feeling that “these tragedies were made small against the inexorability of a steel tube drilling down thousands of feet,” she wills herself into a state of resignation. Several years later, feeling “deeply shaken” by Trump’s election, she tells herself to turn inward toward the things that she can control. “Rather than trying to understand the hyperobject,” writes Kiesling, “she let it wash over her, focused on her own projects.”
That affect, when accounted for by Morton, bears traces of their scholarship on British Romanticism: just as Coleridge and Keats felt overcome by terrifying sublimity of nature, the theory of “hyperobjects” describes the unfathomable strangeness that pervades modern life. While this usefully describes how reality can feel, it supposes that understanding this reality beyond an individual level is too hyper, too overwhelming, too vast for contemplation. As a result, the concept mystifies more than it reveals. And like the “eco-anxiety novel,” its understanding of the personal is constrained politically, because it presents our alienation as an inevitability, rather than as a condition to overcome. Perhaps the character who recognizes this most is Frank Turnbridge: grasping for the kind of grandiosity that Morton describes, he claims that the oil industry’s immensity grants it immunity from economic and election cycles—“There’s no short-term problem we can’t wait out,” he tells Bunny upon their first meeting, like a threat.
What Mobility offers, in contrast with these kinds of narratives, is a model for centering the personal in a way that amplifies, rather than obfuscates, its political context. This owes in large part to the fact that, unlike the women in Weather and The Inland Sea, Bunny’s interiority is mediated by an omniscient narrator, whose gaze isn’t constricted when Bunny turns hers inward. The textures of her everyday life don’t foreclose upon, but effectively elucidate the broader forces that make such material conditions possible. In toggling between these two scales, the novel helps us to see contemporary reality on an intermediate level: one that contextualizes any individual life within a broader system, while still avoiding the incomprehensible magnitude of the “hyperobject.” From this vantage point, we encounter a plastic tablecloth not only as a prop for Bunny’s brief musing, but also as the relic of a world order that has been singularly shaped by the oil industry—which comes into focus not an awe-inspiring behemoth, but an extractive system of capitalist labor relations that is fundamentally hostile to life on earth.
Mobility, then, is less a story of one character’s hypocrisy than it is of our vast, all-encompassing entanglement. Making this distinction might invite mobilization, because it stokes solidarity—and rage—by illuminating our collective exploitation. That kind of insight is of course harder to come by for those whose exploitation feels like anything but; for those like Bunny, who remain happy to address audiences in “frigid and cavernous” Marriott conference rooms, thinking of the complimentary vodka and fluffed pillows that will follow. Over the years she has learned that her professional potential is distinct from—and distinctly valuable to—her male superiors: at her disposal is a style of narrativization that is unmistakably, exclusively intimate. “Like so many of us,” she begins, touching her “beautifully round” stomach, “I have a personal stake in the energy transition.” She makes eye contact with the “us” of her address: the mostly white, mostly married women, who will also give birth in well-lit hospitals; the women who are interested in politics as a way to enlarge their personal lives. What Bunny can’t recognize, from her place on the stage, is that her view is limited. But what she cannot see gradually emerges, plain as crude oil on water, for the reader.