Nostalgia permeates The Golden State in ways both personal and political. ‘Nostalgia is a big part of American politics right now,’ Kiesling tells me, ‘a very misplaced nostalgia.’ At the same time as Daphne reminisces about happier times with her husband, now far away in Istanbul, a small fringe group who want to secede from California and create their own mostly rural state (‘taken straight from various political currents that are happening in California right now,’ Kiesling explains) take a series of increasingly extreme measures to make themselves heard. ‘We’ve lived here all our lives and this was just a paradise’, a member of the group says during a hearing at the tiny town’s courthouse. The rose-tinted glasses are certainly off for Daphne’s rides through the landscapes of the oft-mythologised Wild West. ‘Maybe the malaise, all the rotting homes and sagging enterprise, are punishment for taking the land,’ Daphne thinks. ‘Maybe nothing good is ever happening on this land again for anybody.’
Daphne’s enforced separation from her husband Engin is due to an unlawful confiscation of his green card at the US border, followed by drawn-out and confusing attempts to navigate the appeals process of a seemingly impenetrable bureaucracy. ‘We’ve both just given up on it ever being resolved, which is probably what the Department of Homeland Security is hoping for,’ Daphne thinks. ‘A general degradation of morale resulting in one fewer green card.’
‘It’s this weird mix of bureaucratic ineptitude and malevolence’, Kiesling says of American immigration policy. ‘It makes for a hugely dangerous combination. In the novel it creates a situation that’s frustrating and awful, but it’s not as purely violent as what we’re seeing right now in the news. But I have the sense that what we see now happening at the border is the same…it’s malevolence and ineptitude. It’s just fuelled a hundred-fold by the people that Trump surrounds himself with. I think all the tools were there for our immigration policy to be horrible and for American sentiment to be easily co-opted in this way. It seems now that the muzzle is off in terms of how people are treated at our borders. And that’s been really awful to see.’
‘It’s this weird mix of bureaucratic ineptitude and malevolence…It makes for a hugely dangerous combination.’
Kiesling wrote The Golden State while the Obama administration was in office, but its themes of dying small towns and punitive immigration systems feel particularly relevant in America’s current political climate. I asked Kiesling if the change in administration has affected perceptions of some of the themes of the novel. ‘I wish that I didn’t feel it was so on the nose in some respects,’ she says. ‘But you know, we all have different things that shape the way we think about politics, and one of mine is that I lived and worked in a very conservative area in 2009 to 2010. This was at a point in time in American politics where there was something called the Tea Party. They were ultra-right wing, very similar to the MAGA people you see now. They hated Obama so much. I worked in this office where I would get these God-awful email forwards that were incredibly nativist, Islamophobic and xenophobic. There are people who have read my book who think I’m painting too ham-fisted a picture of what the views in some places are, but you know, when you get those email forwards…there’s nothing nuanced about them. They’re real. So yeah, that’s just a current that I have been aware of for some time.’
While writing the novel, Kiesling also worked as the editor of arts and culture website The Millions. I ask how her work as an editor informed or impacted her own writing. ‘I think if I was editing fiction that would have been very disorienting,’ Kiesling says. ‘But the issue was less one of how craft or voice can invade your life, but how emails can invade your life. I found I could do non-fiction writing at home, but to write the novel, because it was so different, I had to go to a different location. I would go to a coffee shop. If I started answering any emails or doing administrative work it was so easy to let that take away the best, most productive time of day. I found the best way to do it was just get there, immediately turn off the internet on the computer, and ideally leave my phone at home for a couple of hours. I’m no longer the editor at The Millions – I’m now a contributing editor, so they keep me on the masthead but I don’t actually have to do anything – and once I stopped, the psychic weight of not having to deal with the inbox was significant.’
