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When did we become guilty of the crime of climate change? It’s worth trying to determine when plausible deniability was lost. There are some milestones: Was it in 1988, when scientist James Hansen testified before Congress with NASA-grade data? Or 2003, when a Powerpoint-wielding Al Gore had to add a second and third story to his carbon-dioxide line graph? Or some other date, far earlier or far later, depending on accidents of information flow and party affiliation? The verdict of guilt is seemingly a foregone one; the task is only to backdate that guilt, and decide how much of our pasts—miles driven, products used, all the things we did and did not do—must be viewed through a pall of retrospective shame.
It’s a trial to make Kafka proud. It is also, as in his own Trial, enough to utterly paralyze the accused. Any number of writers have tried to nail down the terms of our collective culpability, some with agonized self-absorption. But thankfully there are other ways to grapple well with our role in climate change, as Lydia Kiesling’s latest novel Mobility proves. In place of grand pronouncements, it does something trickier and richer: It commits itself fervently to the story of one funny, flawed young woman, oil-industry employee Elizabeth “Bunny” Glenn, and her long slow slide into complicity. Readers are invited to find themselves in its contours. We don’t need a verdict when the novel is finished; we ourselves have already been made to see the truth of our own position more clearly than any pronouncement of guilt-or-innocence could provide.
This isn’t to say that readers won’t squirm. Kiesling’s choice of a protagonist is awfully sly: Bunny is a college-educated, left-ish white woman, fond of cheap takeout and streamable content. She has been thoroughly inducted into a kind of pop-cultural awareness of the ills of climate change. Despite this, she falls quite willingly into a nice career in the oil and gas industry—or in her preferred phrasing, the energy sector.
This contradiction might seem to offer the reader a fun moral vantage point from which to look down on the woman. But any sense of superiority is doomed to evaporate as Kiesling limns the stages of Bunny’s life, daring us to view her at a critical remove. We see Bunny as a teenager, in a 1998 reeking of fruited body lotion and glossy-magazine perfume samples, ecstatically bored in her father’s foreign-service posting; as a recent college graduate circa 2008, inaugurating our now 15-year-strong tradition of lamenting the Great Recession’s impact on young folks’ prospects; as a woman in the dog days of her twenties, climbing slowly toward the high-seven-figure income which seems to be her birthright and without which life as a debt-ridden, status-conscious person appears actually unlivable; and finally, moving to join us in the present day, as a woman startled by herself the first time she uses “we” in reference to her company and yet benefitting from a campaign for “Women in Energy” which sends her to the kind of conferences that have artistically-sculpted butter-pads at the luncheon. The speaker onstage is heaping praise on the oil industry for its progressiveness; the speaker is Bunny. How did we get here? The fact that it has all been charted out for us, from first step to last, does not stop one’s head from spinning.
The tremendous precision with which Bunny’s surroundings and circumstances are drawn makes her decisions painfully easy to understand. Kiesling (who, full disclosure, was formerly editor of this publication) is capable of deploying whole rafts of insinuation in quick deft sentences: We learn that Bunny’s diplomat father “had gone to a private school that had been in a movie”—that’s all we’re told about his education and privilege, and all we really need to know. When someone sneers that the man is little more than a propagandist for U.S. business interests (a charge that dovetails with Bunny’s own path later in the book), she is enraged that anyone would question his moral uprightness: After all, he “had been in the Peace Corps in a village in Thailand. The 1970s. Old-school. He had washed himself in a bucket and helped people.” It’s a perfect snippet of the family stories that get passed down, the things children tell themselves about their parents.
Bunny is constantly having to defend the things she holds dear, whether it’s her parents or her career or Barack Obama or the world order in which she finds herself. All of her generally-lefty accusers are better-informed than she is and more eloquent. She is on the run. Over the course of the book, the reader senses her withdrawing from it all. At last Bunny reaches a point where she is, like her ludicrous Republican oilman employer in his glassy Houston-area office, insulated from outside noise.
But ultimate insulation comes via reaching all the way around to claim her critics’ position for her own. The campaign for more women in the energy industry, named Pink Petro, becomes a kind of trump card for Bunny. Wouldn’t we all like greater female representation in these spaces? Maybe women would somehow help to speed the transition to alternative forms of energy? And don’t we all believe with Bunny that “women should have educations and jobs and refrigerators to put their fucking food in and that they should be able to give birth in hospitals with incubators in the NICU,” a state of affairs made possible by cheap and plentiful energy?
Bunny is fully captured by the logic of her industry, but at least she finally has a solid place to argue from. By a concluding scene, everything—even Bunny’s child in utero—is used as a rhetorical prop for the petroleum industry. She comes to exemplify a central point of capitalist critique: that in its latter forms there is no exterior to the system, that it cannot be effectively resisted or seen beyond. One feels that Bunny would happily agree with that sentiment.
In his influential 2016 book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, Amitav Ghosh argues that the novel as historically conceived is ill-equipped to handle the climate crisis. In this telling, the tools of Austen and Stendhal and Flaubert are a poor match for our new era, with its weirdness and unpredictability. Mobility is a perfect novel to put this theory to the test. As its polyvalent title suggests, Mobility is both a classically-proportioned novel of social climbing, as well as a harsh interrogation of the logic of our petroleum society. It’s a powerful work of “climate fiction” not because it liberates itself from the historical burdens of novel (per Ghosh), but because it burrows more fully into its own formal tradition and finds a way through. We are helped to do the same, even as we leave the book’s protagonist to endure the future she has made for herself.
