This Week in Books: A Novel That Sees Through Self-Delusion
Lydia Kiesling’s new novel explores the line between culpability and innocence when it comes to climate change.
by Gal Beckerman
Aug 18, 2023
3 minutes
Updated at 2:36 p.m. ET on August 18, 2023.
This is an edition of the revamped Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
Lydia Kiesling’s new novel, , is about a woman who spends her life trying 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 this week on the book, Kiesling’s portrait of a compromised Everywoman trying to square herself morally with what she brought to mind for me, and not just because of Bunny’s name, were two other archetypal characters from American fiction: Babbitt and Rabbit.
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