Review | Can you be a good citizen if you make the world worse?

Kiesling tidily gathers these “short-term” problems into Bunny’s life story, rendering them, through her perspective, urgent as well as “overwhelming and very boring.” The arc of “Mobility” is a brief segment of the history of global capitalism and climate change. As a child, Bunny sees the breakup of the Soviet Union and the scramble for oil in the Caspian Sea. From Baku, where her father is stationed as a diplomat, she witnesses the immediate effects of conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. She watches Russia annex Crimea, and “seagulls cleaned off with toothbrushes” after the Deepwater Horizon spill.

But of course, the Earth’s short-term problems are monumental in an individual human life. And as such, “Mobility” is really a bildungsroman, the story of a girl trying to keep up with sweeping changes. When we first meet Bunny, she is a bored teenager, barely tolerating the inconveniences of life overseas, only vaguely aware of the stakes of history happening around her.

Her inability to grasp the magnitude of reality continues into her adult life. She scrapes through college, gets dumped for her lack of ambition and works random jobs, unable to hold a steady sense of future rewards and consequences. She moves back to her childhood home in Texas and stumbles into a temp job at a geoengineering company, where she proofreads long reports that she can’t understand.

The geological scale of the novel, intensified by explanations about the state of the world that Kiesling works into dialogue between Bunny and others, is all the more overwhelming from Bunny’s narrow, earnest point of view. When she starts transitioning into the energy industry, she says to a pro-oil consultant, “I saw ‘An Inconvenient Truth,’” trying desperately to sound informed. “The earth is getting warmer. … It’s, like, a fact. Species are going extinct every minute?”

When she visits her brother and his girlfriend, Sofie, staunch socialists living in Europe, she feels suffocated by their moral code, struggling to enjoy the “infinitely kind water of the Aegean” over their grating admonishment of her decision to work at an oil company. The reader feels Bunny’s exhaustion and boredom watching Sofie fight with strangers about the evils of capitalism. “Sofie seemed to live so comfortably with darkness, Bunny thought. Bunny could not imagine living thus. Bunny liked to be optimistic.”

At its core, “Mobility” is about how political questions fit into a life. Adult Bunny is the average bland, liberal American woman: White, earnest, eager for material comfort. She doesn’t want to be a jerk, but she doesn’t want to have to think too hard about social or economic justice; she believes that Barack Obama is a “symbol of the victory of good over evil” and that the Occupy Wall Street protesters in Zuccotti Park “would be happier if they got jobs.” When Sofie asks her if she likes her work, she simply replies: “I like to get things done. I like to get paid. I like to get my moles removed.”

Like many, Bunny just wants to have a good time and not let the world’s problems harsh her vibe. She raises money for charities and takes care of her mother, Maryellen, encouraging her to become a certified Texas Master Gardener. Gardening plays an interesting role in the story, a quiet, powerful reprieve from — and counterpart to — how the global-scale energy business shapes the characters and events. Sofie, the book’s necessary but exhausting leftist, bonds with the borderline conservative Maryellen over this sincere attempt to “totally remake the earth,” or at least Maryellen’s humble patch of it.

Bunny is sympathetic as a 22-year-old administrative assistant trying to adult and maintain health insurance while fielding sermons from much older socialists; she is less sympathetic as a 36-year-old executive seeing herself as a diversity factor in male-dominated conference rooms and cheating on her fiancé with a rakish activist with whom she argues that the oil industry empowers women.

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. But Bunny and her mother continue to appreciate their patch of earth. On one excessively hot day, Maryellen pushes aside a shriveled fig plant to reveal a tiny green sprout. In Kiesling’s rendering of humanity and our planet, life simply goes on. And Bunny is still here, focusing on signs of life in her small garden rather than mass extinction, hopeful about the future.

Apoorva Tadepalli is a freelance writer based in New York.

Crooked Media Reads. 368 pp. $28