THE GOLDEN STATE by Lydia Kiesling is a terrific, smart, short novel with wit, psychological depth, and a first-person narratrix in whose head one comes to enjoy being trapped.
Many of the reviews of this book describe it as a road-trip novel and lay weight on the interaction between Daphne, the narrator, and Honey, her just-pre-verbal toddler. These emphases might mislead the reader.
The novel is not a road-trip story where the characters light out to go from A to B and enjoy a series of picaresque or thrilling or bizarre encounters along the way. The novel begins with a series of stressors—marital, professional, maternal—coalescing into a crisis.
Like Dante, Daphne finds herself in the middle of the journey of her life alone in a dark wood, having wandered from the straight and true. Unlike Dante, she doesn't follow a guide through strange realms, she flees San Francisco to her grandparents' old house in rural California. There she sets up camp amid her late grandparents' and late parents' belongings and remains, alone with Honey, for most of the novel's ten days, venturing out occasionally and becoming acquainted and re-acquainted with a few locals and one significant traveler passing through.
Like any parent of a young child, Daphne's days are spent consumed with the trivia and drama of a new, rapidly evolving little human. Any parent will readily recognize Daphne's thoughts about Honey—for all their commonplace nature, Kiesling's articulation of them is acute, wise, and often very, very funny. But they are not the central concern of the book.
What is? Daphne's fugue. Separated from her husband by a bureaucratic nightmare, feeling oppressed by her job, and overwhelmed by parenthood, Daphne feels trapped and stuck, and the question of the novel is how she will go forward, for her status quo no longer works. In an amusing irony, while unilaterially withdrawing from her former life, Daphne becomes aware of and powerfully annoyed by a group of libertarianish California-secessionists.
That Daphne eventually comes to a sharp conflict with them in the book's dramatic climax isn't fundamental to the novel. The incidents and accidents of the plot are not really germane to her evolution. They are however, continually surprising and fresh. Just when you think you've got a handle on Kiesling's zigs, she throws in a zag, as welcome as it is entertaining.
Kiesling's protagonist is a stressed-out, rather depressed woman who retreats not only into the countryside but her own head, while reluctantly anchored to reality by the massive array of quotidian tasks needed to keep a toddler alive (and the utter fascination such tots' development exert on the parental brain, even if all you want is five freaking minutes of quiet solitude).
The plot and side characters don't drive the book, because of Kiesling's skill in tying us to Daphne and her frozen, anxious crisis—and her overthought, mordantly funny reactions to it. The real tension in the book lies in curiosity about what, exactly, will happens when the ice breaks.
In lively prose, Daphne's crystal-sharp (often self-lascerating) observations and utterly relatable travails carry you along compulsively. THE GOLDEN STATE is a quick, delightful read which shows a literary talent of uncommon generosity of feeling coming into her own. The extremely amusing flashbacks to Daphne at work with some eccentric coworkers suggest that Kiesling might well have an academic satire à la David Lodge or Kingsley Amis in her.
Keep an eye on Lydia Kiesling, and pick up THE GOLDEN STATE. It's an slight investment of time that repays greatly in enjoyment.
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The Smartest in the Room
I began following Lydia Kiesling, who's hilarious on Twitter, for reasons I can't recall but through Twitter, I discovered her mesmerizing debut novel, The Golden State, published in 2018.Peripatetic Daphne has had enough of her job but not enough to fully quit so with wistful cherub Honey in tow and her Turkish husband Engin, a 'White Turk' whose name means "vast" or "endless," stuck overseas because of our lack of clarity perhaps, in regard to immigration, takes to the road, searching ...Recently devoid of family, and in between smoking and changing diapers and planning naps, she takes stock of herself and is self aware enough to recognize she's falling apart; succumbing to expectations and responsibilities.She finds hope or at the very least, diversion, when she meets fellow wayward traveler, Alice; she too succumbing or perhaps submitting, to her advanced age.But this too is a salve and places Daphne in a position in which she's become comfortable - running.Kiesling gives Daphne a voice that's heartwarming, intelligent (at one time she was working on her P.H.D. but ran from that as well), frustrated and frightened of what's ahead. Although an infant, Honey's actions and Gerber baby intonations, become a fully formed character who cannot speak (yet knows how to flirt) but provides at times, if not levity and stability, at best a dose of reality that grounds and grinds.The Golden State is witty and deftly touches on subjects such as racism, secession, Islam and death with a road weary sense of aplomb. Daphne always appears to be the smartest in the room, yet it always appears she'd be happier somewhere else.
Top reviews from other countries
Lydia
Haven't finished it yet but it's a very good read.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 2, 2023Amazon Customer
Very current yet oddly distant pre pandemic world
Reviewed in Canada on December 11, 2020
