I like to think that I select the books I read very carefully, because reading is a significant time and sometimes emotional investment. Normally, I spend dozens of minutes strolling through the shelves at the library and sampling potential candidates, a process that I’ve yet to refine for speed but does ensure that I end up with interesting novels. This time however, I was in a little bit of a rush due to an appointment afterwards, and I walked out unsure of the quality of my selections.

Perhaps because of this uncertainty, I almost stopped reading Mobility a quarter of the way through, as I gathered from its language use that this book isn’t typically aimed at the seventeen year old boy. But I’m glad I didn’t stop reading, if not only owing to the sunk-cost fallacy, because this novel turned out to be a fascinating and highly perceptive look at the state of affairs regarding the energy industry, and what working for it entails.

We are introduced to our protagonist, Elizabeth “Bunny” Glenn, and follow her story starting from her teenage years in 1998 all the way past adulthood. The tagline of the cover surmises how her life will play out:

Bunny Glenn believes in climate change.

But she also likes to get paid.

Is this not all too real for all of us right now? We are standing in the face of an impending global apocalypse, and yet we still continue to carry out our lives with a sense of normalcy and complacency. Kiesling at once calls us out for this while also acknowledging that it is unrealistic to expect anything else of us:

You can’t make everything about society dependent on fossil fields and then require that making the good choice comes with a penalty of living like an ascetic…

It seems that we as a society are in a toxic relationship with oil, a sleazy, greasy, yet undeniably alluring bastard, one who seemingly seeps into everything around you and wants you to believe that you couldn't live without it. Everyone knows this at the back of their minds, and what this novel is so great at capturing is the burden of such knowledge against the futility of trying to make a difference for the common individual.

As more awareness spreads regarding the climate crisis, oil and gas corporations have taken measures to present themselves as green. Kiesling is not afraid to have her characters expose their motivations as purely mercenary. After all, they need to ease shareholder concerns and cement themselves as indispensable leaders of the transition. Moreover, she does not follow the PR games that these corporations play–how could an oil and gas giant ever be carbon neutral, no matter how many “carbon offsets” they buy? As always, they are much more worried about the sustainability of the corporation rather than the sustainability of the planet.

Bunny lands a job at an oil company, an employment arc action packed with administrative ladder climbing, talking heads at big hotel conferences, and networking social hours–all the usual absurdities in corporate life one partakes in. Naturally Bunny is not happy at her job; she is in that state where when you get asked why you do your job you spew out a paraphrased version of your company’s mission statement, when really the only thing keeping you going is the thought of the chance at a miniscule pay raise at the end of the year, but of course you could never admit this because if you did someone even more disingenuous would move up in your place. It’s too early for me to have experienced this firsthand, but I can just imagine the angst of keeping up that facade.

I thought this was a very good novel. Normally I don’t like stories that come too close to home–I prefer fiction to be self-contained in an ambiguous timeline that could have happened years ago or just yesterday, but this book is an obvious exception. Still, it’s always so unexpected to read casual mentions of hurricane Harvey and the pandemic and the war in Ukraine as if they were assumed background knowledge in a fictional world. Adding even more to this proximity is the consistent stream of political overtones, a kind of antithesis to the Brechtian emphasis on distancing, but this is understandably unavoidable when one of the main topics is about climate change.