Lee Cole’s sophomore effort is in many ways a companion to his debut novel, Groundskeeping, which explored the class divisions that came to a head in 2016, especially in the American South. His second novel, Fulfillment, also finds its footing in Kentucky—with two brothers on very different paths. Joel is an academic living in New York City, a socialist who’s made a name in his circle by writing about the idealogical bankruptcy of the South that he came from, while his half-brother Emmett has been drifting between cities and odd jobs, settling in the town he grew up in to work in a global corporation’s warehouse, while he works on his screenplay.
The brothers have a strained relationship, each one sees in the other the person that they were not able to become: Emmett laments his brother’s uppity attitude but yearns for his artist’s credentials, while Joel envies Emmett’s social ease and proletariat bona fides. When Joel and his wife Alice return home to Kentucky to stay with Emmett and Joel’s ultra-conservative mother, the brothers are forced to contend with their mutual dislike. As Emmett grows close to Alice, amidst the crumbling of her and Joel’s marriage, tensions in the house grow.
Cole explores how class and privilege infect all relationships, whether familial, friendly, or romantic, and how each of his characters situates themselves in this complicated landscape of late capitalism. Each character spends much of the novel concerned with how the others are perceiving them and their choices, certain that the source of their discontent lies outside of themselves. Like Groundskeeping, this is a very character-driven novel that grounds itself in specificity of experience.
Cole has carved out a unique place for himself as a chronicler of the intersections between capitalism and art in the modern South, where divisions have been deepened by political extremism, rising economic inequality, and the echo-chamber of social media. Fulfillment is a fascinating explication of how these divisions can weave themselves into the interpersonal in myriad ways, disassembling marriages and families alike. With spare but intentional prose, Cole conjures a Kentucky that has produced two vastly different brothers with a shared yearning for purpose and belonging.