This Week in Books: A Novel That Sees Through Self-Delusion

Updated at 2:36 p.m. ET on August 18, 2023.

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Lydia Kiesling’s new novel, Mobility, is about a woman who spends her life trying not to see the harm her work is doing to the Earth. The main character, Bunny Glenn, has fallen almost unwittingly into a career in the oil industry. And, as Amy Weiss-Meyer wrote in her essay this week on the book, Kiesling’s portrait of a compromised Everywoman trying to square herself morally with what she does for a living seems meant to make us readers squirm. What Mobility brought to mind for me, and not just because of Bunny’s name, were two other archetypal characters from American fiction: Babbitt and Rabbit.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:

Novels that try to reflect society back to itself are a staple of American fiction—they present us with characters who are meant to force a kind of reckoning. Think of George F. Babbitt from Sinclair Lewis’s 1922 blockbuster novel, Babbitt. He’s a small-town businessman in his mid-40s who has acquired the trappings of the American dream—a family, a community, a Buick. But we follow him through a crisis of conscience after he meets some bohemians, starts flirting with socialism, and is forced to see how far he has strayed from his youthful idealism. By the end of the book, Babbitt is back to his conventional life, but we are meant to understand it as a conformist nightmare. His conservatism is a kind of stasis.

Rabbit, Run, John Updike’s 1960 novel that introduced Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, also follows what we’d now call a midlife crisis. Whereas Babbitt is trying to recapture the desire he once had to improve society, to devote himself to something greater, Rabbit is attempting to feel anything at all: As the Cold War uniformity of the 1950s nears its peak, culture and religion fail to provide him with sustenance.  He turns to sex to save himself, or at least to return some vitality to his life. He flails. Updike’s portrait of Rabbit points to an entire country of unmoored men.

Add Bunny now to this American gallery. Her dilemma is different from Babbitt’s and Rabbit’s, but, as an avatar of conformity and its discontents, she is their descendent. What she tries and then fails to struggle against is the knowledge that she is contributing to an evil, namely the quick degradation of the environment. She does what we all do, to some extent: She finds ways to justify the harm by framing it differently. In her essay, Weiss-Meyer lists the methods Bunny employs to do this while avoiding self-awareness: joining groups that purport to empower women in the industry, going to talks with names such as “Storytelling Oil and Gas” that try to spin a better narrative about fossil fuels. And, as Weiss-Meyer writes, “Bunny tells herself that this is progress.”

Fiction can capture self-deception so well because an omniscient narrator, like the one in Mobility, shows us both a character’s actions in the world and how she is making them palatable and acceptable to herself. Readers can recognize the discrepancies even when a character like Bunny—or Babbitt or Rabbit—can’t. And the hope, surely, of a writer like Kiesling is that we might then wonder how our own stories delude us, how they might keep us from facing up to all we don’t want to see.

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

What to Read

Ninth Street Women, by Mary Gabriel

Through riveting and braided profiles of Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler, Gabriel illustrates in this groundbreaking group biography how New York City supplanted Paris as the modern art capital of the world in the 1940s and ’50s. In doing so, Gabriel canonizes the women of abstract expressionism, one of the most significant visual movements of mid-century America. Its (mostly male) practitioners came from a generation that was marked by the Great Depression and war, and the style they chose was a form of resistance and rebirth. For “AbEx” women, painting was additionally about living life differently while rejecting misogynistic ideals and pressures. Gabriel’s portrait of a few blocks around Washington Square Park, a “critically important stretch of pavement,” recontextualizes these women’s formidable vision and reaffirms that their legacy remains central to contemporary art. — Farah Abdessamad

From our list: Six books that will change how you look at art

Out Next Week

📚 Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith, by John Szwed

Your Weekend Read

We Reached the Glacier Just as It Collapsed

Out on the bow of the R/V Nathaniel B. Palmer, the air is dense and almost warm. We have punched through miles of Antarctic ice floes to reach the Amundsen Sea’s foggy interior. I want to honor the remaining distance between us and Thwaites Glacier’s calving front—this place that many scientists suggest could make a catastrophic impact on global sea levels but that no one, as of this moment in February of 2019, had ever before visited by ship—and yet I don’t really know what to do except stand here. Just off the port side: a half-flipped iceberg in the shape of a pyramid. It looks like a ruin, something time has partially undone—what rested below the water line waxed away by the heat of the sea, the once-sunk ice smooth as glass.

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This article originally misidentified the author of Babbitt.