What Do You Do When You Realize You’re Ruining the Earth?

“Thinking ecologically about global warming requires a kind of mental upgrade,” Timothy Morton, the environmental philosopher, has written, “to cope with something that is so big and so powerful that until now we had no real word for it.” In 2008, Morton tried to invent one: hyperobject. The term doesn’t necessarily connote a value judgment, that this enormous thing is good or bad, but simply that in its hugeness it is inescapable, like air. To wrap one’s mind around the idea of a hyperobject is to accept that we, humans, “can’t jump out of the universe.” And according to Morton, being able to acknowledge the scale of a phenomenon as all-encompassing as, say, climate change, to name it, might be the first step toward actually doing something about it.

Hyperobjects abound in our globalized world: the internet, fast fashion, microplastics—things that cannot easily be measured using a single metric. A character in Lydia Kiesling’s new novel, Mobility, tries to explain the concept and lands on this: “It’s something so big and sticky with so many parts that it can’t be seen, something that touches so many other things.” Something, another character offers, like the oil industry.

It’s 2014, and Bunny Glenn, Kiesling’s protagonist is building a career in that very industry, though not without some moral squeamishness. For her, the hyperobject is personal; she feels compelled to defend her involvement in a system that she knows is a major driver of climate change. “I work for the non-oil part of it, the part that is moving away from oil,” she rushes to clarify, stretching the truth.

Some readers might reflexively judge Bunny for her complicity; surely her choice to drive a Prius to work can’t offset the impact of her company’s decades of fossil-fuel exploration—what’s referred to as “upstream” in oil-industry parlance. But what about downstream, a category, Bunny knows, that includes “plastics and face lotion and basically everything you might ever buy in a supermarket or Target or Neiman Marcus or Walmart, everything they would stick in your arm in a hospital or use to listen to your heart”? Plenty of well-meaning people insist, like Bunny, that they’re trying to move away from oil. Virtually no one in the developed world, Kiesling reminds us, is not complicit in some way. Perhaps the line between culpability and innocence, this novel suggests, is blurrier than the average liberal reader might like to imagine.

That liberal reader might in fact be Kiesling’s target audience. This book is the first to be released under an imprint created by Crooked Media, the wildly popular Trump-era resistance-podcast franchise. (The publisher, Zando, also has an Atlantic line of books.) A tagline on the new imprint’s website—“Reading: it’s not just for tweets anymore”—doesn’t inspire much confidence. You’d be forgiven for wondering if Mobility is more political screed than art.

Kiesling, however, has pulled off a rare feat: a deeply serious, deeply political novel that is, quite often, fun to read. It’s a coming-of-age story full of delicious detail, keen satire, and complex humanity. It’s informative without being didactic, thoughtfully confronting subjects such as climate change and American imperialism and gender inequality and white flight without taking itself too seriously. 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.

And why not? “We need philosophy and art to help guide us, while the way we think about things gets upgraded,” Timothy Morton wrote in 2015. Perhaps the novel is as good a tool as any for helping us think about the ways a hyperobject such as the oil industry touches our lives and what we do—or don’t do—about it.

We first encounter Bunny as a bored American teenager in Baku, the oil-rich capital of Azerbaijan, where her father works for the U.S. embassy as a public-information officer, selling the idea of America. It’s the summer of 1998, and Bunny passes long, hot, lonely days fantasizing about boys, watching soap operas with the family’s kindly upstairs neighbor, reading and rereading a handful of English-language magazines and books; her British Cosmopolitan is “dog-eared to denote the women Bunny one day hoped to resemble and the products she one day hoped to buy.” Yet she’s generally uncurious about what is happening around her just then, keeping “the world of grown-ups, the world of work”—in her case, the world of the embassy—at an arm’s length. She knows enough, but not too much, and prefers it that way. “There had been a war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, Bunny knew,” Kiesling tells us. “It was sort of ongoing, she thought, and she tended not to listen when it was spoken of.”

Bunny’s also aware, in a hazy way, that “oil was the big thing about where they lived now”—the reason for so much Western interest in post-Soviet Azerbaijan. Exxon has sponsored the first-ever Azeri-English dictionary, “which sat in the middle of the Glenns’ embassy-assigned coffee table, mostly unconsulted by her, along with a photo book called Azerbaijan: Land of Fire, which carried the logos of Statoil and BP.” For her part, Bunny is more interested in reading articles such as “8 Ways to Heat Up the Summer.”

[Read: How Lydia Kiesling fled to write her next novel]

Introducing Bunny as an angsty teenager is an inspired move. The moody, self-centered fog of adolescence is, after all, a fitting proxy for the state of willful semi-ignorance that can become the default when contemplating the climate crisis. A majority of Americans see the warming world as a threat. But it’s tempting to throw up one’s hands and wonder, what can be done, really? Can’t the grown-ups solve the problem? It’s comforting, even in adulthood, to cling to innocence, to continue to make reckless choices and believe, on some level, that the fairy tales of glossy magazines may yet prove real.

Most of us grow up eventually though, or at least we like to think we do. In Bunny, Kiesling has drawn a character who seems stuck in that teenagerdom even as she ages. The novel follows her into the 21st century, as she stumbles into young adulthood. Desperate for a job, any job, at the depths of the recession in 2009, Bunny applies to a temp agency called ManPower and winds up in the all-female administrative pool of a hydrogeologic engineering firm. Before long she’s become the girl Friday for one of the company’s owners, who takes Bunny with him when he leaves to start a new, technology-focused wing of his father-in-law’s oil business. “At first most of it would probably be oil and gas tech, drilling,” he tells Bunny, promising that “over time, it would invest in other kinds of technology, renewables, batteries, clean energy.” Thus begins her career in the oil industry.

Bunny can’t help but be attracted to oil’s vaguely glamorous aura—in her childhood, in booming Baku, oil was sexy, exciting. Now, in Houston, it’s wealth and power and a means to affording the life she envisions for herself. Somehow, the moving away from oil part of the deal always remains just out of reach. Tellingly still going by her childhood nickname into her 30s, Bunny admires specialized knowledge and expertise but doesn’t always feel herself capable of possessing it—or maybe she just can’t be bothered. She reads books to learn more about the industry and takes a course called “Managing the Firm in the Global Economy,” but she still finds it “very confusing.” She’s not dumb, exactly, just more comfortable dwelling on the surface of things.

When her brother’s girlfriend, a Swedish socialist, laments that “oil companies and their friends in politics” are “the biggest obstacles” to meaningful climate action, Bunny doesn’t disagree, but she’s not willing to concede that her own actions may be part of the problem. “I get how these companies are looking out for themselves,” she replies, before abdicating responsibility. “I don’t know a lot about this stuff. I just think that we have this huge system that’s already in place. I don’t know; it’s like our dad … He didn’t always like whoever the president was, but he worked to do what he could at the job.”

What Bunny can do, she eventually decides, is devote herself to “the ‘women in energy’ stuff” that’s emerging in the 2010s, corporate America’s Lean In era. This “stuff” is ripe for parody, and some of the novel’s most enjoyable, and illuminating, provocations emerge when Kiesling sends Bunny to talks with names such as “Storytelling Oil and Gas,” where speakers celebrate “diversity” and promote networking opportunities “to bring together the amazing women of this industry, the women literally powering our world.” Bunny tells herself that this is progress.

Bunny’s father, for his part, resigns from a decades-long foreign-service career when Donald Trump becomes president. (Kiesling’s own father, John Brady Kiesling, is a former diplomat who resigned his post in the lead-up to the Iraq War; the protagonist of her first novel, The Golden State, is also a diplomat’s daughter.) But instead of quitting oil and gas, Bunny, like the industry itself—which insists on being called “energy” now—rebrands. She finally decides to use her real name, Elizabeth, when, in her late 30s, she takes on the title of “director of outreach and communications” at an “energy solutions” firm. Her new job is all about perfecting the appearance of things, telling the right story—including “commissioning, editing, and posting YouTube videos of oilfield workers and support staff lip-syncing to Pharrell’s ‘Happy’ and dancing at a project site.” Once again, it’s vibes over matter: Clap along if you feel like happiness is the truth!

Near the end of the novel, on a trip back to Baku, going through “the streets she had roamed as a teenager looking for tampons and perfume and listening to Dave Matthews,” Bunny, now Elizabeth, reflects on just how far she’s come. “In her small way Elizabeth had become knowledgeable,” Kiesling writes, “although the scale of the oil complex still escaped her. But now, rather than trying to understand the hyperobject, she let it wash over her, focused on her own projects.”

If Mobility is a morality tale about a person who chooses blindness over sight, what lesson should we take from it? What kind of future awaits us if we, like Bunny, choose to live in ignorance and then spin into a good story all that we can’t control? Widespread destruction, for one thing. In 2017, Bunny is out of town when Hurricane Harvey ravages Texas. But when the state floods again, just two years later, she can’t exempt herself from the fallout. Her late grandmother’s home in Beaumont, where her mother has been living, is destroyed, the family’s heirlooms and souvenirs and photos “lying in meaningless, miscegenated rubble.” Bunny weeps. Then she mines the tragedy for content, later telling the story onstage at an industry event to demonstrate her “personal stake in the energy transition.”

[Read: ‘Things don’t always change in a nice, gradual way’]

Bunny maintains her faith that there is nothing, still, that a neat narrative can’t fix. “Her mother had hated this house anyway,” she thinks. “They would have to see this as a blessing.” She eventually migrates to Portland, Oregon, where, “if you had money, the charming old houses could be retrofitted tastefully” to withstand longer smoky seasons, wetter winters, hotter summers. Laid off after she has her only child, Bunny begins “applying her fluency to securing the house, thinking about their individual energy future,” her gaze firmly averted from the hyperobject.

But the point of Morton’s concept of the hyperobject is to label an ungovernable, overwhelming reality, and in doing so tame it enough to look it squarely in the eye. If we don’t, Kiesling suggests, we are part of the problem, whether or not we’ve devoted our careers to oil production. Bunny, with her stories and her privilege, can’t avoid the dangers of the world she’s helped create forever—and neither, this novel implies, will anyone else.

In a final, brief section set in 2051, as Bunny awaits the birth of her first grandchild, we get an unsettling glimpse of what that world might look like. Kiesling doesn’t offer reassurance, or absolution. We are left, instead, with a deep sense of foreboding. Ignoring the hyperobject is no longer an option.