~ The Golden State, by Lydia Kiesling ~
Motherhood is tough when money is tight, when the parent is effectively single and has little family support. Yet, as most mothers know, there are private pleasures in a baby’s unique, special smile at its mother that somehow make up for all the exhaustion and lack of freedom.
Daphne is in this situation, and Lydia Kiesling’s remarkable debut The Golden State is a wonderful encapsulation of all these simultaneous states of being: the longing for a moment to oneself, the desperate guilty hope that the baby will sleep an extra hour, the thrill of having the baby beamingly respond to you and you only, the pride of watching a toddler use a spoon or walk unaided.
The novel starts calmly, but within two pages Daphne recalls the start of the day:
The morning was not worse than most mornings. The alarm went off at six and I hit snooze six times at 6:10 6:19 6:28 6:37 6:46. Honey called from her crib like a marooned sailor and I guiltily left her there to take a shower after calculating the numbers of days without, four, too many. Then half-dressed and still dripping I pulled her wailing from the crib and wiped her tears changed her diaper replaced her jammies gave her kisses carried her to the kitchen. […] I had to rush her through breakfast, and lately she hates to be rushed, hates to have things cleared away before she is ready, so when I took the oatmeal away she screamed and stiffened and threw her body back against my arms, a great dramatic backward swan dive with no regard for whatever might lie behind. [..]
And then I tugged the onesie over her head looked at the time put my own head in my hands and sobbed.
A lot of parents will viscerally empathize.
Daphne’s Turkish husband Engin, Honey’s father, is stuck in Turkey because an INS agent illegally pressured him to turn in his green card. She is overwhelmed, and abruptly walks out on her job to head to the mobile home she has inherited. The long drive with a sixteen-month-old toddler strapped into a carseat is exhausting, but they finally make it to Altavista, a small remote town in eastern California.
Things are calmer once they arrive, but there is also a sudden lack of routine and many hours to fill with a baby. There are still many worries: the large ones — money, does she still have a job, the non-progress of Engin’s INS application, the two study-abroad students who died in an accident — and the quotidian — is she giving Honey a balanced diet? can she get wifi to talk to Engin?
Kiesling writes evocatively of the surroundings:
The pavement is so hard, the land is so flat, the air so thin, and the sun so strong even on the downhill slope to evening that your destination, visible though it may be, comes to feel like a mirage.
Every paragraph involving Honey becomes a panicky flow of words, also very evocative:
My steak comes and I cut up little pieces for Honey that she mostly doesn’t eat preferring the soup and the bread and soon I have demolished my portion and Honey is tired of sitting and being a good girl and is now agitated, troubled by some unknown thing that makes her scramble to vacate the high chair so I pick her up and she stands on my knees, pulling up on my shirt with stew hands and starting to bleat, our window of relatively civilized fine dining dying without ceremony in the air-conditioned chill of the cinder-block.
Slowly they settle into a routine, and make a new friend: Alice, a 92-year-old lady who is driving alone to see a place that meant a lot to her late husband. Daphne offers to drive her, setting in motion the final section of the novel.
Kiesling’s Daphne is a pleasingly tart but ultimately kind observer of life: of the academic hierarchy in her university (is a Princeton PhD without publications above or below a non-PhD with lots of papers?), of the busywork involved in setting up a conference, of the kneejerk conservatives around Altavista (very different from her Bay Area roots), of the endless calculations that are part of living on the edge of financial stability, of her Turkish in-laws.
Ever so subtly, Honey matures over the course of the novel, and this is beautifully done, little changes that suddenly add up to the big change from baby to toddler. Daphne too, gains in confidence, finds calm without losing her intrinsic good-heartedness and interest in other people.
An excellent, original novel about motherhood and the larger world.
Thank you for recommending this book! It was a terrific read, and although one cannot help feeling Daphne to be just a tad Bridget-Jonesy, she is nevertheless a likable protagonist, not withstanding her bursting into tears regularly and frequently.
The little snippets about language and linguistics, about Turkish grammer, and meanings of words and the way Daphne loves words and plays with them in her mind, are a big part of what makes this novel so charming. The novel also reflects on what it means to be cosmopolitan, the struggles of being in a cross-national, cross-cultural relationship.
Kiesling’s observations about parenting a toddler and parent-toddler interaction were just brilliant indeed, nuanced, subtle, detailed, all showing and no telling.
The friendship with the ‘crone’, Alice, was also beautifully paced.
Regretfully, the novel just stopped midway, with no attempt at a conclusion. Just as Daphne is rather irresponsible about her duties to her institute, so too is the author rather irresponsible about finishing her narrative satisfactorily.
That said, it was an excellent read from start to end, reflective, humorous, good tempered, thoughtful, with tremendous awareness and depth concealed behind the fluster of do-gooding and good-intentions-paving-the-way-to-hell which is the default mindset of Daphne. Her neuroticism is fun, but the lack of commas, which is intended to reflect the state of her mind and also drive the pace of the narrative, does get a little wearing though, especially in those passages where meaning is obscured.
I didn’t see her as neurotic; just exhausted and overwhelmed. The helter-skelter comma-less paragraphs did get tiring to read, but they were specifically for the sections about childcare, and they did produce a sense of the endless series of tasks involved, I thought. I liked the way the comma-less paragraphs became sparser through the course of the book, as Honey grew older and Daphne became more experienced.
Yes, it was rather startling when the book ended. Will she write a sequel, I wonder?