In Fulfillment (Knopf 2025), Lee Cole’s second novel, half-brothers Joel and Emmett find themselves together again in their family home in Paducah, Kentucky. You don’t have to have read Cole’s first novel, Groundskeeping, to easily jump into the western Kentucky world of Fulfillment.
The two half-brothers are living such different lives. Emmett is broke and working in an Amazon-reminiscent shipping factory, the latest in a string of short-lived blue-collar jobs, as he dreams about writing a screenplay. Joel is a cultural studies professor who wrote a book on “Despair and Late Capitalism” in the American South. He has now come home for a one-semester teaching position at a nearby university. Joel’s wife, Alice, dropped out of her environmental ethics-focused philosophy program and dreams of owning a plot of land to farm herself:
“It sounded hopelessly naïve to say it aloud, but she had the growing conviction that gathering herbs, picking fruit, and scattering grain for chickens would not simply be good for the planet. It would be good for her soul… Not research, not dabbling. Living the life.”
All three of these characters are working through their own respective disillusionments—with themselves and with each other—as they try to discover their own paths. Joel argues with their mother about politics while Fox News blares in the background (“There will be no Marx in this house,” their mother declares.) Emmett secretly views Joel as an “intellectual carpetbagger” for intellectualizing and capitalizing on the land of their upbringing, and wants to “make culture” with his screenplay (whereas “Joel had only ever been able to write about culture,” he thinks). Alice positively radiates discontentment with her marriage to Joel and his lack of support for her visions of possible futures.
The book’s narration moves between the three characters’ points of view, allowing the reader to see how they think and learn each of their secrets. And they all do have secrets—including a growing connection between Emmett and Alice that threatens to upend every aspect of the familial status quo.
“How do we know we want what we think we want?” is a philosophical question Joel poses to a roomful of graduate students. It is also a central question of the novel. When our expectations and hopes and wishes are so shaped by the places we come from, how can we ever truly know what we want from life? Is it possible to be an agent, or are we too buffeted by fate and place and genetics and politics to ever really make a choice for ourselves? Is a path a thing that can truly be charted, or is it just a thing we stumble upon?
And if we are helplessly caught in the fabric of our personal and collective histories, what does that mean about our relationships? When are we helping each other, and when are we getting in each other’s way? Emmett watches Alice dreaming of big change and thinks that “the current of convention was strong. One could only linger in the pools and eddies of eccentricity for a little while, or else become that rare thing—a true hermit.”
Lee Cole
Fulfillment is a meditation on these questions, and it is also a portrait of a particular place in a particular time. Cole’s prose is quick, witty, and full of clever observations, but it is also imbued with the compassion that comes from clearly seeing a place’s complexity. Moving deftly through the modern battlegrounds of class and politics, Fulfillment paints a picture of rural Kentucky through the eyes of people who have stayed, people who have left, and people who try to leave but keep coming back.
Lee Cole was born and grew up in rural Kentucky. A recent graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he now lives in Philadelphia
Leave a Reply