The year is 1998. The Soviet Union is dissolved, the Cold War is over, and Bunny Glenn is a lonely American teenager in Azerbaijan with her Foreign Service family. Through Bunny's eyes, we watch global interests flock to her backyard for Caspian oil and pipeline access, hearing rumbles of the buildup to the War on Terror. We follow Bunny from adolescence to middle age and a career in the oil industry, eventually returning to the scene of her youth, where slippery figures from the past reappear in an era of political and climate breakdown.
Kiesling leaves readers with a troubling awareness of the role we play in our ecological future, and a bleak sense that the new normal is like the old one: simultaneously overwhelming and underwhelming ... In Kiesling’s rendering of humanity and our planet, life simply goes on.
By embedding crucial context in naturalistic dialogue, Kiesling is able to establish the historical conjuncture in which her book is set without resorting to dull exposition. But this formal choice is more than just a canny bit of craft; it also hints at the novel’s true subject. Recognizing the epistemological impasse that Bunny runs up against in her quest to master the industry’s inner workings, Mobility is not really about oil qua oil, but the way it is narrativized—both for good and for ill ... [A] keen novel.
A deeply serious, deeply political novel that is, quite often, fun to read ... Kiesling is not in the business of preaching to the already converted—she’s here to hold up a mirror to her readers, and to make anyone who cracks this book open squirm a little.
