The Golden State anchors Daphne’s journey in the visceral and material realities of motherhood. She’s on her own with Honey, rendered so realistically by Kiesling that her 'puppy smell' almost wafts off the page ... The novel features multiple hilarious and gruelling scenes of Daphne’s attempts to eat in small-town restaurants with her sixteen-month-old, which result, time and again, in stained shirts, squawking disruption, and complicated diaper changes on dirty bathroom floors ... Kiesling repudiates the classic American literary idea of the West as untrammelled wilderness or open space available for the taking, and Daphne’s relative ease of movement in the present is set against her husband’s restricted mobility across international lines. The novel beautifully depicts the golden light of California, the smell of the fescue grasses, the thinness of the air, and the way that Daphne and Honey often feel overwhelmed by the scale of the spaces they find themselves in ... The novel is not treacly about motherhood, love, or domesticity. Daphne often finds herself at the edge of some very wild territories, as when wrangling the tantruming Honey ... Many novels have decided that it would be easier to just turn away from this kind of wildness, instead of running full tilt toward it.
The first few pages of Lydia Kiesling’s new novel, The Golden State, are not very good, are in fact very nearly bad ... Soon after, the real voice of the book—dry, observant, self-aware, smart without being showy—begins to emerge. The novel’s mood doesn’t so much shift—the early pages were too confused and logorrheic to have one—as settle. In addition to her husband’s absence, Daphne has suffered other losses, including the death of both her parents; she is lonely, touchingly so. She is also intellectually curious, sensitive, and consistently interesting in her thoughts. The book reflects her voice; it is gently sad but warm and frequently funny too ... The Golden State bears some resemblance to a flaneur novel. But if it is a flaneur novel, it represents a step forward for the genre. The roving male protagonist who observes the world around him from a position of detachment has been replaced by a narrator who combines an abstract intellectual interest in politics and class and national identity with insights into her own relationships and emotional life. Daphne is especially acute about parenting a small child ... Which brings me back to why I am so frustrated by the novel’s opening pages. It would be a shame if readers were to put this one down too soon. After ten or fifteen pages, The Golden State becomes what it should have been all along: an excellent, accomplished, original novel, one of the best I’ve read in a while.
As in life, her baby is always present and always needy. While babies can be boring, the book never is. I found it thrilling, actually, to increasingly feel the burden of Honey. I began to dread her cries ... But even as I delighted at the way Kiesling built suspense out of early motherhood, I became angry that I hadn’t encountered this in literature before ... What Kiesling syntactically accomplishes is an exquisite look at the gulf between the narrow repetitive toil of motherhood and the sprawling intelligence of the mother that makes baby care so maddening ... By telling the story of a new mother, someone who might surmount the odds and take a nap but will never achieve a year of rest and relaxation, The Golden State reveals the limitations of the dream of an end to responsibilities. We may all be Bartlebys, preferring not to, but we’re stuck here, caught in the sluggish machinery of late capitalism and its 'godawful bureaucratic clusterfuck.'
The harried run-on sentences of the writing simulate what Daphne calls her 'mother machine brain,' which, cyborg-like, is forever calculating risks and formulating duties ('diaper jammies milk story teeth bed'). Seeking serenity, she attends the local church but spends the service chasing her daughter through the aisles and hissing apologies ... The depictions are remarkably faithful, like a trompe l’oeil painting of a single parent’s mental state. Less persuasive are the plot lines that Ms. Kiesling strings together late in the book about a bizarre group of secessionists and an elderly stranger waylaid on a road trip. These stories need development, but as in life, it’s the baby who gets all the attention.
The overwhelming love and loathsome, crushing boredom of mothering a young child arrive in profound, convincing and equal measure ... Kiesling’s debut novel risks being categorized—mistakenly—as chick or women’s lit. Instead, read it as a buddy adventure story—albeit, Daphne’s sidekick can’t talk yet and throws blueberries. Themes beyond the maternal emerge: avoidance of work and family responsibilities disguised as travel; class and cultural schisms evident in an Islamophobic, bigotry-laden secessionist movement, ancestry and progeny stitched into identity, aging and ideas of home. Ultimately, Golden State not only puts fathomless familial love on display, but also unleashes the power of fiction to provoke empathy, shame, fear, imagination, memories, despair and joy ... it’s likely the last pages will translate into lingering consideration of the book’s major themes: Above all others, the glorious, haunting, flawed, uncontrolled, cascading love between people of all ages.
Kiesling’s first novel encapsulates the intense and often conflicting feelings of early parenthood: frustration, tenderness, isolation. By playing with punctuation and sentence structure, Kiesling immerses the reader in the fragile headspace of the anxious new mother. With a style reminiscent of Claire Vaye Watkins and Sarah Stonich, The Golden State sparks the lovely, lonely feelings inside us all.
Lydia Kiesling’s fiction debut is a road trip novel with a twist bringing with it all the basics of road fiction ... Instead of the usual soul-seeking inner dialogues or buddy conversations one finds in road novels, Kiesling portrays the frazzled and fractured thought processes of a stressed out single mother with her first child using run-on sentences, repetition of words, and omission of punctuation—all of which works to bring the reader in to Daphne’s state of mind ... This novel is an equally frustrating and beautiful read.
Kiesling writes in a stream of consciousness style with run on sentences that at first jars, but soon lulls the reader into the melody of Daphne's anxious and intelligent mind. The juxtaposition between Daphne's narration and the dialogue in the novel is awkward at times, with the transition between the two sometimes feeling clumsy ... The novel balances a realistic depiction of the boredom and loneliness Daphne feels, whilst gently building to a narrative arch that takes the reader through the crisis of her sudden road trip, to her eventual return to her ordinary life. For a book in which not much happens, The Golden State is packed with insight and questions. It ruminates on age, on class and culture, on the concept of 'home', on the place of language in our identities, the way that isolation can create ignorance, and most importantly, on the value of human relationships in all the forms they take.
... a novel so dialed into its own rhetorical structure and method of execution, so confident in its delivery, that anyone who is writing fiction today would do well to study its pacing, prose, and the way Kiesling gives no quarter to Daphne Nilsen’s sense of psychic safety—the sign of a writer willing to go well beyond the threshold needed to create moving and vulnerable fiction ... Kiesling has said in interviews that she wanted to write a novel about bureaucracy. This book takes that on in two ways: with Engin, sitting and waiting for the proper paperwork/interview/next step from the US government, and in the small descriptions of Daphne’s work life. The former is daunting for its rubber-stamp slowness and Stephen Millerian-Trumpian racism, while the latter is aggravating for its absolute low-stakes drama ... Anyone who has ever put a one-year-old down for a nap or nighttime will identify with how funny the book is, and also how parents overestimate their goodwill ... So much of the book is taken up with Daphne’s bearing water for those alive and dead that, in the end, when she finally divests herself of the unnecessary load, we can only hope that the next stage of her journey is more comfortable and compassionate than what we’ve experienced with her.
I was initially drawn to The Golden State because it was billed as a compelling portrait of modern parenting in a complicated world, but it’s Kiesling’s feast of form that makes a familiar topic fresh ... I’ve seen other writers capture the emotional or physical experience of parenting in astute and illuminating ways, but rarely one who has captured it at the structural level of the sentence in quite the same way ... The Golden State is a compelling story and a brutally unromantic portrait of modern motherhood, but it’s also glowing at the sentence level in its intention ... Lydia Kiesling is accomplishing a treatment of motherhood that lives in and through language, elevating a moment in a mother’s life from the banal to the beautiful.
Kiesling depicts parenting in the digital age with humor and brutal honesty and offers insights into language, academics, and even the United Nations. But perhaps best of all is her thought-provoking portrait of a pioneer community in decline as anger and obsession fray bonds between neighbors, family, and fellow citizens.
Kiesling offers a painfully honest portrait of motherhood and offers glimpses of a California that few ever see—or even know exists ... One of the only authors who comes to mind is Lydia Davis. Kiesling is similarly honest about this strange, disorienting time, but, where Davis is a master of microfiction, Kiesling covers this territory in exhaustive—and, frankly, exhausting—detail. On the one hand, this feels like a public service; on the other hand, anyone who has lived through this experience might not want to revisit it ... This plot shift feels quite timely, but it also feels like it belongs to another book. Kiesling is a talented author, though, with a unique voice. She’s very smart, very funny, and wonderfully empathetic. A technically uneven novel from a skilled and promising writer.
