INTERVIEW: Lydia Kiesling by Chelsea Davis
Mobility
Lydia Kiesling
Crooked Media Reads
Interview by
Chelsea Davis
The most despicable industries on the planet share this in common with the noblest: both are made up of people who tell themselves each morning that it’s not so bad, what they’re leaving the house to go do. They might even tell themselves it’s good.
Lydia Kiesling is interested in how complicity like this is born, and flourishes, under the pressures and obfuscations of global capitalism. Her second novel, Mobility, follows Bunny, a feckless American who girl-bosses her way up the corporate ladder of—whoops—the petroleum industry. It’s a portrait of minor evil as merciless as it is plausible. (It’s also impressively fun to read, given its dire subject matter.) We meet Bunny as a teenager, living in Azerbaijan with her foreign service family in the ‘90s, just as the Western race for oil rights in post-Soviet countries is heating up. Despite having witnessed firsthand, and with some queasiness, the exploitation that fuels the world market for liquid gold, Bunny later stumbles into a job with an “energy” (read: gas) company in Texas. There, she embarks upon the thousand little choices that make a career, an ethics, and a life. Meanwhile, climate disaster looms louder and closer.
Mobility is both a closely observed bildungsroman and a lucid history of a dizzyingly vast industry—a public enemy that we could all stand to understand better if we are to keep our planet livable beyond the year 2050. Nor is this calibration of scale the only narrative high-wire act that Kiesling pulls off. She also balances an admirable sympathy for the ways that gargantuan systems of power and money make bottoms of us all with a demand that we nonetheless reject complacency. I spoke with Kiesling by phone about finding accountability within, and without.
Chelsea Davis: It seems to matter to the novel that Bunny is a woman. Why did you want to tell this larger story about ethics and climate change through a female main character?
Lydia Kiesling: Partly I'm just really interested in telling stories about women's lives that share some material with mine. But it also felt important to me when I was thinking about oil and gas and complicity in these structures. I think there's a very particular way that women become complicit, especially white women.
Bunny has many privileges, certainly; she has a lot of mobility within her society. But she also feels the constraints of the heteronormative, patriarchal society that she grows up in. When Bunny enters the oil and gas industry, she sees that it's an incredibly male-dominated industry, even among the many industries that are male-dominated. And so [corporate feminism] becomes a way that she can ally herself with a struggle that is real and is meaningful—to make gains for women in the workplace. But that's at the expense of the women who will be irreparably harmed by climate change and by the work of fossil fuels. So she makes a choice to ally herself with a certain power structure and hierarchy where she could have made other choices.
CD: Bunny becomes a kind of Lady Eichmann to the oil and gas industry, in that sense. And part of why she falls into that trap is that the globalized chain and repercussions of oil are so vast and complex that she doesn’t think she can understand them well enough to make ethical decisions about them. She keeps falling back on her own ignorance as a defense: “Geez, I just can’t wrap my head around how it all works, so I guess I’d better keep plugging away at my petroleum desk job.” Given that the finer details of climate change are often beyond our ken in this way, where can the average person—we Bunnies of the world—carve out some individual agency?
LK: It requires a lot of cognitive dissonance and holding multiple ideas in your mind at once. One of the things that I play with in the novel is that there's one way to look at oil and gas as “energy”—and at energy as something that everybody needs and deserves access to. So it's easy for Bunny to say, “Well, we all want hospitals that work. We all want heating and cooling that is accessible and reliable.” And then oil and gas companies can slide in and say, “Well, thank God we're here, because that's what we do.” Even though often their m.o. is actually at odds with that—because if they're ultimately profit-seeking enterprises, there is a point at which their interests deviate sharply from the interests of a citizenry who does want accessible, affordable energy.
Then, one of the complexities is that oil and gas companies have actually been behind some of the drive to encourage people to think of themselves as individually responsible for climate change. It was BP who introduced the idea of the personal carbon footprint, for instance. Many scholars and journalists have pointed out how farcical and really pretty evil this is, to make people think, “Oh, well, let me drive, like, five fewer miles. It's not like BP has to change.” So on the one hand it is a truly cynical ploy by oil and gas companies. On the other hand, if we—those of us especially in the global North—don't stop equating large houses and endless gas to power increasingly larger cars with the good life, we won't get out of this disaster that we're in.
And again, that's not something that one individual can necessarily do. But there needs to be a collective understanding, and then collective-building power, to shape the institutions that actually make decisions about things like land use and transportation. Is your city encouraging people to drive because they keep cutting bus lines and the public transit is shitty? Or are they saying, “No, we're going to make public transit free and accessible and safe and people are going to want to ride it”?
So, there does have to be individual reflection that leads to collective action. Bunny is such a chameleon of a person—she's very inspired by whatever the ideas are around her. Many of us are like that; I’m certainly like that.
CD: In terms of socially contingent decision-making, the family strikes me as one unit that mediates between the individual and society at large. How does the institution of the American family fit into your portrait of an individual struggling with her ethical place in the world?
LK: Bunny’s dad is a diplomat, working for the State Department, just as my own dad did. And if you are in a family like that, it dictates where you live; it runs the show. In the ‘90s it was still pretty much set up to be a job for men, mostly white men, who had a wife to support them in their professional development and look after the family. And so Mary Ellen, Bunny's mother, quits her job as a flight attendant in order to do that.
Once the children are mostly raised, Bunny’s father leaves her mother. And then Bunny sees Mary Ellen in the later part of middle age, not having worked for pay in decades, just really adrift. So Bunny gets a sharp object lesson in the fact that if you do not find some sort of meaningful employment and occupation for yourself that is not contingent on a romantic partner, you are in a very vulnerable position.
But Bunny also laments the breaking up of her family unit and seeks that kind of belonging in other ways. Ironically, Bunny ends up working for a family oil company, where she stays for a long time, because it's cozy. She’s made to feel valuable, but is still very much in a supporting role in this company. And so she recreates a family structure in a way that actually isn't that beneficial.
CD: Bunny also graduates from college during the Great Recession, which makes it hard for her to be ethically choosy in terms of where she seeks employment, at first; her job search just becomes a question of getting a paycheck, any paycheck. She believes she’ll figure out the bigger-picture moral questions of her career later. But it becomes a can she just endlessly kicks down the road.
LK: Yes, and it’s also significant that she's going to college at a time when the US is invading Iraq, and Bunny's family and Bunny believe that that is a very bad thing. There were many college-aged and younger kids who were protesting on the streets, saying, "No, don't do this!" But it still happened. And Bunny is seeing that. So that sets the tone, too, for a feeling of capitulation in the face of big, awful decisions by powerful people.
The book is very pessimistic in a lot of ways, which I struggled with because there are so many people who have never had the luxury of being defeatist—they have to fight. Or they have a character that allows them to know really clearly, very young, “No, this isn't right and I’ve got to work against this.” But I think a lot of people simply don't have that moral clarity. And then it’s easy to just say, “Well, I can't do anything about this. So I’ve just got to find a way to live.”
CD: Mobility shows us some people in that second camp—the righteous fighters. Sophie and Charlie, some of the novel’s more principled characters, are journalists. By contrast, Bunny manages communications for an oil and gas company; her job is a perversion of journalism, in that sense, warping information to craft a benevolent narrative about her employer’s actions. She also cleverly rides the tide of the corporate fetish for “storytelling” in the 2010s. What implications does the novel's suspicion of storytelling have for fiction writing?
LK: In preparation for this book, I was trying to read any novels that shared the setting of the Caspian region. There was a spate of really bad spy thriller books that were set in that region during the big oil scramble [of the ‘90s]. The movie Syriana, for instance, is one thing they made from that source material. There's a lot of art—I’m using the term “art” broadly here—that is engaged with those topics in a way that I think is really dangerous.
There's a part of Mobility where Bunny is watching the TV show Homeland. And a show like "Homeland" is such a powerful vehicle for some really reactionary ideas. I watched the first couple of seasons, and I was like, “Oh my God, what's Carrie going to do next?” But if you really think about what you're seeing, it's dangerous.
CD: It’s propaganda.
LK: Yeah. It makes certain things feel like a foregone conclusion that absolutely are not. And so I worried about that while writing. Because oil and gas does have, in some respects, a millennia-long, big, exciting history. And human beings have interacted with fossil fuels for thousands of years, though obviously in very different ways before combustion engines were invented. And they also have been powerful vehicles for ideas about worker organizing and national self-determination, though in ways that are very easily perverted and have become harmful.
Also, many of the people who are most affected by climate change, who live in frontline communities—often, they work in the fossil fuel industry because where they live, that is the industry. So when it comes to somebody who works on an oil rig for forty days in a row doing really hard and dangerous work, and work that does sort of fuel the world—I'm not interested in being like, “Well, you’re a piece of shit.” But all of those things need to be considered with what we know about what fossil fuels are doing to the planet, and to people, and what oil companies have done. For instance, it's 116 degrees in Portland, Oregon already, and hundreds of millions of people are already on the move, in ways that are both subtle and very explicit, because of climate change.
CD: The book’s last section is set in Portland in 2051, and includes descriptions of thousands of people dying during heatwaves, of crows falling out of trees, dead. What was it like to write about the likely future climate devastation of the city where you live now? And how did you deal with your own emotions in a way that allowed you to wake up every morning and jump back into the story?
LK: I actually wrote a version of that section a couple months before the Pacific Northwest heat dome. And then, when I was in the editing process, that chapter became very much infused with what I saw and experienced living in Portland during the heat dome.
During COVID, the first week of online kindergarten for one of my kids overlapped with a period where we had to stay inside for about seven days because of wildfire smoke in Portland. And many people were losing their houses and lives in other parts of Oregon. I think part of the reason that that 2051 future-casting section is a little bit quiet is because it's actually just too hard to really look directly at some of the things that will happen because of climate change.
Bunny is very insulated from those repercussions in a lot of ways, the same way that I am and my family is today. So we're experiencing them in a different way than other people who are feeling direct impacts. It’s a strange state because you are experiencing it, it definitely is still very much affecting daily life, but you’re at a remove from many parts of it. And there's this feeling of sort of helplessness. Really, on those days, you just have to get through them.
I do take time to talk with my two kids about why these things are happening, but it's pretty matter-of-fact: “Well, the earth's getting too hot because we burned gas and oil.” I would rather carry the grief myself of just how sad and wrong that reality is. Because this is the only world they know.
