The Golden State by Lydia Kiesling
This is a great example of a book that probably accomplished exactly what it set out to do–it just isn’t a goal that holds much interest for me personally. The premise: Daphne, whose husband is stuck in Turkey due to Islamophobic immigration practices, impulsively decides to take her 16-month-old daughter Honey and drive north to the barely-still-there far-nothern-California town of Altavista, where she has inherited the mobile home once occupied by her grandparents.
The vast majority of the text is consumed by long, frantic sentences describing everything she does to care for this baby (with her worries about money, her missing husband, and her semi-abandoned job). While I recognize that this is a voice that is grossly under-represented in literary fiction (perhaps because it’s nearly impossible for someone in that place to get any writing done, and then there’s the filtering done by the publishing world that still doesn’t take the experiences of women seriously). It just doesn’t interest me very much. It is a widely shared human experience, perhaps, but not one that stands any chance of being universal. A word cloud for this book would prominently feature “diaper” and “string cheese” and it’s just not an existence I wanted to inhabit.
That being said, I have to give her credit for capturing the experience of frantic anxiety (whatever the source) and the dread of ignoring something you know you have to face at some point; the psychology is intense.
My main issue on the craft level is to do with the only thing that happens that you could really call a plot: Daphne’s chance meeting with a very old woman named Alice who has driven a long distance to Altavista by herself on a kind of pilgrimage to a camp in Oregon where her long-dead husband once worked. She rescues Daphne from a breakdown/panic, and Daphne takes her where she’s going–but it all feels a little deux-ex-macchina to me. Oh, the book needs a plot? Let’s put a woman–one who happens to understand Daphne’s speaking Turkish on the phone, in this tiny, white town–improbably in her path. And launch them on a little road trip together. It’s a little convenient for my taste. It sort of reminds me of my first-ever attempt at novel-writing (I was about 13).
In the end I think she nailed the task of psychic portraiture but didn’t quite make it all the way to fully realized novel. This being her first, I’m generally optimistic that she could develop.
Side note: I learned while creating this post that a book titled Golden State (note the absence of definite article), by Ben Winters, was published in January (Kiesling’s book having come out in September). The Winters book seems to be most prevalently described as post-apocalyptic detective fiction (?) but is also set in a politically disturbed California. Lydia, if you’re reading this (ha), you win.
Amy P. Knight 