It’s the summer of 1998, and Bunny Glenn is bored. The 15-year-old is with her father and her older brother in Baku, Azerbaijan, until the siblings return to an American boarding school in the fall. Bunny spends her days wandering the city, sneaking cigarettes, and nursing a crush on Eddie, a twentysomething British documentarian who lives upstairs.
And yet, if Bunny is at loose ends, she has no way of knowing that her months in Baku will shape the trajectory of her life. Her story is at the heart of Lydia Kiesling’s second novel, Mobility—a devastating, and devastatingly smart, look at personal responsibility in an age of unchecked capitalism and climate change.
Mobility opens at a Fourth of July party in Baku; Bunny has been dragged there by her father, a State Department diplomat. She kills time by scouring British Cosmopolitan, “its pages already read and digested, dog-eared to denote the women Bunny one day hoped to resemble and the products she one day hoped to buy.”
Bunny’s boredom is alleviated when she encounters Eddie, who introduces her to Charlie, an American who publishes a newspaper called the Intercock, dedicated to covering—in a skeptical, irreverent way—foreigners doing business in the former Soviet Union.
It’s from these two young men that Bunny learns why business is booming in Azerbaijan—there’s oil under the Caspian Sea, and everyone wants a piece of it. Charlie explains the key players—BP Amoco, Chevron, the Clinton administration—and the Contract of the Century, an agreement that opened Azerbaijani oil to an international consortium and made a few people very, very wealthy. As Charlie notes, “they show up somewhere, they say, ‘You can’t do this without us. You need us.’ And then they fuck you, and a small percentage gets rich, and everyone else stays poor.”
Eleven years later, Bunny is once again adrift. Having finished college with a solidly unremarkable track record, she’s living with her mother in Beaumont, Texas, and dealing with a breakup, her parents’ divorce, and the tail end of the Great Recession. She finds a temp job at an engineering consulting firm that does “hydrogeologic and seismic work”; her work involves proofreading documents “she did not understand about environments she could not picture—under seas, under mountains, stratigraphies and topographies that carried with them a temporal exoticism.”
Bunny, it turns out, is good at her job, but when an executive’s half brother offers her a position with the new arm of an oil company, she accepts, believing in the promise of a transition to renewables and clean energy. This, of course, requires some cognitive dissonance: Bunny is a liberal who loathes the environmental costs of oil exploration. As she rises through the ranks, however, she finds ways to justify her work, even as she remains not quite convinced of her own logic. She recalls the “tragedy and waste and environmental degradation” caused by the Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon spills, but still, she reasons, people need their air-conditioning and gas for their cars.
“There was no arguing with it, Bunny felt. Astronauts died going to space, she told herself.”
Mobility is a deeply American novel, but also a deeply Texan one. Kiesling understands well the role that oil and gas have played in the state’s mythology, and she writes about southeast Texas with stunning accuracy, from the C-suites of Houston’s Energy Corridor to the new-build suburban homes of the Woodlands. Reading her book, you half expect to see Oscar and Lynn Wyatt make an appearance.
Novels such as this can turn didactic very quickly, but Kiesling never falls into this trap. This is chiefly because Bunny (who reverts to her given name, Elizabeth, as she matures and becomes successful) comes across as a person—well-intentioned, mostly, but flawed and unsure of how much guilt to feel about her work. “I want to keep making money and doing something that’s interesting,” she admits late in the book. If that’s a weak defense, it’s still honest; Bunny is like most Americans, no better and no worse. Kiesling could have made her a clear-cut villain, a stand-in for the worst in American greed and consumerism, but she chose instead to write a character study—a very good one—and avoid the agitprop.
Which is not to say that Mobility throws up its hands in the face of moral quandary. Rather, it’s an urgent cri de coeur that asks us to consider what, if anything, we are willing to sacrifice to ensure the continued existence of a habitable world. Where does self-care end and stewardship of the future begin? Kiesling seems to ask. How much longer will we tolerate a plutocracy that we’ve thus far allowed to reign unimpeded? Mobility doesn’t have the answers; there might not be any answers. But it poses the questions in a haunting, and existentially terrifying, way.•
