I don’t actually know Lydia Kiesling personally (I follow her on twitter), but I sort of feel like I do. I’m a little creeped out sometimes by the resemblances between us. When her first book, Golden State, came out, several people recommended it to me, saying that it almost sounded like I had written it. Kiesling was a Comp Lit major at Hamilton College and got a graduate degree in Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago; we’re the same age; and we’ve lived in a lot of the same cities. I don’t remember if the protagonist of Golden State is working on a PhD or has dropped out of her program, but her husband is in Turkey, and she has an existential crisis and hits the road with their toddler. At the time, I also had a toddler, and was very much missing Turkey, and reading the book was uncannily like encountering my own inner monologue. So much so that I sort of felt like I couldn’t even tell you if the book was good or not (it did seem a bit uneven, in that parts seem to come out of nowhere, but… in a fun way?).
Mobility does not hit quite as close to home, but there’s still quite a bit of overlap with my life. Most obviously, the protagonist and I are almost exactly the same age, and thus share many specific cultural references (Groupon!!), and have both lived in a few different countries. There’s a lot in here that I identify very strongly with (especially the sense of connection to a place that is also in many ways quite foreign to you), but it’s also quite intentionally about someone who is not quite like me (or, I suspect, like Kiesling), someone who is a little less educated, a little more complacent, and rather more focused on her appearance. I’m not entirely sure that it’s a faithful portrayal of what it’s like to be such a person (at times it seemed a little cliche? But maybe that’s what it’s like when you work hard at being skinny?), but I did appreciate the way the novel had a somewhat ambivalent attitude towards its main star — it’s a tough thing to pull off.
The book is really aiming to be a work of social realism, capturing the dizzying changes of the last twenty years, and the complex entanglements of oil companies, politicians, journalists, and academic institutions, that have been the major players in these processes. And it’s interested in thinking about what those bigger changes mean for individual people; how they are shaping the experiences of individual people. As I thought about it later, it occurred to me that the most profound example of this might actually be the main character’s sex life — if you ask yourself, why doesn’t she have better sex? You find yourself reaching for cultural explanations, rather than individual ones.
The novel is doing a lot of different things at once, which sometimes throws you a little bit, but I also like that about it — it’s ambitious, and wants to think about the connections between disparate things. And maybe more important, it’s an enjoyable and absorbing read!
Kasia Reads 