Fulfillment

by Lee Cole

From the acclaimed author of Groundskeeping comes a searing family drama set in Kentucky where the homecoming of two half-brothers—successful Joel with his restless wife Alice, and struggling Emmett—ignites a clash of ambitions and desires, exposing raw truths about class, privilege, and happiness in the American South.

Fulfillment tells the story of two half brothers—Joel, a successful academic and author, whose marriage is in deep trouble, and his younger sibling Emmett, paralyzed by indecision and working on a factory assembly line—who find themselves at their family home in Kentucky and upend each other’s lives in devasting ways.

Between them is Alice, Joel's wife, a wry, passionate young woman who is being slowly asphyxiated by domestic tedium, and whose longing collides with Emmett’s hunger for connection and desire to escape a sense of burgeoning failure and shame. As the chemistry between them escalates, the family is plunged into a violent crucible, each character brought to a precipice of immutable catastrophe.

Incisive, poignant, gorgeously written, Lee Cole has written a haunting novel about class, privilege, brotherhood, and the American South, a book that asks whether people can change, and at what cost, and what it takes to build a life of fulfillment and meaning.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Family, Contemporary, Audiobook, Adult Fiction

336 pages, Hardcover

Published June 17, 2025

About the author

From Dustcover:
Lee Cole was born and grew up in rural Kentucky. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he lives in New York.

Reviews

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Two half brothers in their 30’s return to their mother’s home in Kentucky.
Emmet is s college dropout with dreams of being a screenwriter who got a job at a packing warehouse and Joel has written a book and is a professor who came home with his free spirited wife Alice…for a teaching job at a local college.
These three are unhappy with their lives but don’t know how to change their circumstances.
The story is gritty, truthful, and messy.
It’s about the South, brotherhood, and class.

It was a good read.

Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf for the Arc in exchange for my honest review!

Available now

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this book a massive improvement from Lee Cole’s first novel, Groundskeeping. In Fulfillment, we follow two half-brothers who come from working-class Kentucky. Joel, the elder of the two, has gone onto publish his writing and work as a professor – but his marriage with his wife, Alice, is on the rocks. Emmett, on the other hand, comes back to their Kentucky home feeling like he hasn’t achieved much, even though he aspires to work as a screenwriter. The siblings’ reunion sparks tension from resentments both old and new.

One element I appreciated about this book was the overall astute characterization and solid scene-writing. Joel, Emmett, and Alice all felt distinct and three-dimensional enough for me to feel invested in their relationships. Each of the scenes in this novel also kept my attention and the writing engaged me and made me want to read more. I was moved by the conflict in Emmett and Joel’s relationship as well as Alice’s search for herself. Emmett’s coming-of-age also tugged at my heartstrings; by the end of the book I found myself caring about both him and Alice (Joel, on the other hand… meh)

I liked that Cole included themes about class and the perils of AI too (one small plot point related to AI legit freaked me out when I was reading this before bed). There were times in the first 65% of the book that the storytelling and writing still felt a bit constrained to me, the characters three-dimensional but still lacking that extra oomph. Still, I give this book four stars based on the investment I felt in Emmett and Alice by the end of the novel. Family can be tough and nuanced and I appreciate Cole for highlighting that in this novel.

[Ari Levine · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5, rounded up. Cole's debut novel, Groundskeeping was one of my favorite discoveries of 2022, about a callow, un-self-aware late-20-something guy's development from college groundskeeper into an emerging writer.

In Fulfillment, he returns to his native terrain of Kentucky, and again collides educated coastal elites with rural, working-class white people, whom he renders with genuine empathy and zero condescension. The MFA-program quality of the prose is uniformly high throughout, polished to a New Yorker story sheen, and the plot chugs forward with propulsive force.

Cole deftly braids three narrative threads, as his focus shifts amongst the main characters in a classic love triangle: itinerant cultural-studies PhD Joel, his deeply dissatisfied wife Alice, and his aimless half-brother Emmett. Self-satisfied and sanctimonious Joel moves from New York back to his hometown in small-town Kentucky for a year's lectureship, and back into the modular home of his long-suffering mother Kathy, taking Alice with him as she figures out what to do with her life after impulsively marrying Joel and abandoning graduate school. Drifting back homeward after a long series of low-wage jobs in the service industry, Emmett finds back-breaking work unloading shipping containers at an Amazon-like warehouse (a fulfillment center).

It should come as no surprise that none of these three main characters is feeling remotely fulfilled with their lives, emotionally, intellectually, or spiritually. Or even knows how that would be possible.

And all of them have different variants of the malaise of late capitalism, and Cole describes them with brutal, unsparing honesty. I didn’t care that these were not likeable or relatable characters, and I was impressed with how Cole deftly peeled back their layers of psychic damage and generational trauma through well-told flashbacks. But many of his socio-political observations (about online Viagra mills, Fox News, and corporate onboarding) felt trite and forced, preaching to an already-converted audience of leftish coastal literary-fiction readers.

Alice is too young to be plausibly referencing mid-1980s Springsteen in her love-notes to Emmett, but the emotional spareness and honesty of Cole’s kitchen-sink realism echoes Bruce’s classic song “Highway Patrolman” from Nebraska (“Man turns his back on his family/ Well he just ain't no good”).

It's not a spoiler to mention that Alice's affair with Emmett is the mainspring of the plot (it's right there on the jacket flap copy). And in its violent intensity, the brotherly rivalry reaches Sam Shepard proportions (True West is the touchstone here and a quotation from the play serves as the novel’s epigraph).

There are breathtaking moments and beautifully-drawn scenes throughout, and Cole is an impressive prose stylist, but he was swinging for the fences here, and doesn’t always connect.

[Dona's Books · Rating 1 out of 5]

Pre-Read Notes:

I really like stories about siblings. I know how tempestuous such connections can be. Good writers often bring out both the searing and the sweet nuances of sibling relationships. I'm hoping for a lot here!

"Starting again, something new. When it’s still an idea. Before you’ve fucked it up." p60

Final Review

(thoughts & recs) Well I didn't like this book and it wasn't because of the writing, which is gorgeous. It is very political, which isn't necessarily bad, but it's also dogmatic and didactic which I loathe. I stuck in there to see if the story would have some growth in store for the characters. *edit Yeah, it wasn't bad in that regard, I'll give it that.

This is essentially a story about people seeing past their differences to move forward with their lives less burdened than before. But I also think it makes a political statement between the lines. It's a clever book, and it did make me think about things. But I don't like didactic books, where I feel like the author or narrator is overly biased on some polemic issue or political ideology.

A Few Things:

✔️ The details are gorgeous. There's a scene where two characters smoke together in order to just collect themselves and connect with each other. The scene took me immediately back to my cigarette smoking days, when that ten or twelve minutes with that other person felt completely insulated, as if it was just the two of us off on the moon. Wonderful nostalgia, without being sticky.

✔️ "You don’t even live here , Emmett said. You don’t even live in the South. He knew this was the weakest point in Joel’s intellectual fortifications. He was an outsider. He had gone away by choice and come back to tell the others how miserable their lives were. This was the worst thing you could be in the South. An intellectual carpetbagger." p60 The dialog is natural but there is so much of it, and there are no quotation marks, not nearly enough dialog tags. I'm usually a fan of experimental elements, like the dialog structure, here, and nonlinear timeline, but I honestly think these elements were distracting from the real material at hand. And it makes the dialog, which props up this whole book, vague and convoluted.

✔️ I like the ending, even if it is a little predictable. The character development here is surprisingly nuanced and appreciable, except that unfortunately every female character is flat, used as a prop.

Notes:

1. content notes: politics, cheating, open door sex scenes, alcohol consumption, guns, sibling rivalry, divorce

Thank you to the author Lee Cole, publishers Alfred A. Knopf, and NetGalley for an accessible digital arc of FULFILLMENT. All views are mine.

[Kate O'Shea · Rating 2 out of 5]

Emmett works in a fulfilment centre for a large company. He has lived away from his family home in Kentucky for a long time. His half brother, Joel, is a writer and lecturer, married to Alice. They live in New York but are back at the family home when Emmett arrives. As Alice becomes closer to Emmett the lives of the entire family are changed.

I'm afraid this novel wasn't for me. The characters of Emmett, Joel and Alice are all pretty unlikeable. Emmett has big dreams, Alice wants to buy a farm and Joel just wants Alice to love him again. Actually Emmett's dreams are wholly unrealistic, Joel wants love but does nothing to help himself and Alice, having married quickly, is regretting it and wants to blow up her life.

I found all the characters self-serving and quite irritating. The action that does occur is slow and repetitive. I simply couldn't get interested in anything about the plot or the people.

Not for me I'm afraid

Thankyou to Netgalley and Faber & Faber for the advance review copy.

[*TUDOR^QUEEN* · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an interesting piece of fiction set mainly in Kentucky at the modest family home of a mother of two young adult men. Kathy's oldest son Joel is a teacher and writer and is regarded as the successful son, while half-brother Emmett is struggling to find himself, working in a warehouse situation while holding secret ambitions of being a screenwriter. While Emmett is single, Joel is married to Alice. Joel and Alice married after knowing each other for only months, and now the relationship is already in a state of stagnation. Both sons are visiting their mom, which leads to a simmering and dangerous situation: Alice and Emmett become attracted to each other.

Part of the allure of this book for me was the small-town life, with the mom smoking Misty cigarettes on her back porch and Grandma Ruth reusing coffee grounds to save money. I also enjoyed the occasional trips to New York City, LA, and the scandalous, illicit moments between Alice and Emmett. This is a story about three young adults finding themselves professionally and personally, navigating what life has to offer.

Thank you to the publisher Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor who provided an advance reader copy via NetGalley.

[reading is my hustle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lee Cole's writing is informed by his upbringing in the south & if you haven't listened to him interviewed i recommend doing so. he writes about identity, displacement, homesickness, & how hard it can be to return home. he explores these themes in this nuanced portrayal of two half-brothers living very different lives. one is a successful academic & the other a college dropout who longs for a creative life. Fulfillment is the cousin to cole's first novel Groundskeeping though the characters are more jaded in 2020 than in 2016. they're unhappy and searching for something better. cole's use of sense of place is hugely affecting. it's such a complex construct & his ability to tie it to the volatility & divisions in current american politics is exquisite.

[Matthew Harby Conforti · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5/ I loved Lee Cole's debut Groundskeeping and thought this was a positive evolution in his work. He has carved out a corner in the world of family dramas. I appreciate the ways he explores class, family, modern American culture, and the insider-outsider homecoming. Cole writes from the heart about what it feels like to be from a place, in this case, Southwestern Kentucky, and the dissonant comfort and suffocation that comes from going back to that place once you've left. I loved that this novel explored the relationship between brothers especially. Lee is a great observer of our modern times, a sort of writer-anthropologist; here he nails each character and creates intriguing dynamics and tension throughout the story.

[Tim Blewden · Rating 5 out of 5]

Up there with one of my favourite reads this year! Something about this book just spoke to me and I couldn’t put it down! So well written, with such unique characters and interesting dialogue. Highly recommend!!

[Bill Silva · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sibling rivalry and the havoc and destruction it can wreak is a tale as old as time (looking at you, Cain and Abel)—it’s unfortunate that Cole doesn’t do much to make this story new (and that’s despite the obtrusive socio-political-economic gloss that lies over the novel…this dysfunctional family dynamic can’t be blamed on right-wing conspiracy thinking or the excesses of late-stage capitalism).

It’s also a problem that ten pages into the novel, the reader knows exactly where it’s going and where it will end up (despite a side plot or two that don’t really pan out).

Cole is great at delineating his three main characters (the side characters not so much—they are almost cartoonish); despite their faults and imperfections (no heroes here), they are sympathetically rendered. But their actions, and especially their interactions, which are key to the story, don’t strike me as authentic or convincing—this plot, I just don’t buy it.

I read Cole’s first novel, Groundskeeping, which is very similar (dare I say too similar?) in its themes and characters and setting. The writing in both is quite good…these are very readable novels, interesting and thoughtful, full of ideas and often beautiful description, and Cole deserves praise for expanding the geographical/class/ideological reach of much of today’s literary fiction. But now that his rural Kentucky bona fides are secure, time to move on, I think. I’ll read whatever he writes next…but I hope it isn’t Round Three in this “write what you know” epic.

[Trin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really liked Cole's debut novel, Groundskeeping. This, his sophomore effort, had many of the same qualities, but just didn't hit as hard. Cole's greatest strength, I think, is dialogue, running the gamut from cute banter to the ramblings of annoying blowhards; the main trio of characters and the narrative surrounding both them and all the excellent yapping, however, just didn't pop. The points Cole is making about capitalism and the South's place in American society and politics felt obvious and at times overstated, and the conclusion wrapped too neatly. I still enjoyed reading this, and will read from Cole again, but this is sadly not as fulfilling (sorry) a novel as I would have liked.

[Holly R W]

DNF at 140 pages.

I thought Cole's writing was good, but disliked the slow- moving plot. It centers around Garrett, who returns home to Kentucky to work on the loading dock at an Amazon-like business. He aspires to be a screen-writer. Garrett's half-brother Joel also returns to Kentucky, bringing his wife Alice. He is the successful brother, a college professor with a superior attitude. However, Joel's marriage is in trouble.
I liked the set-up, but not where the story led.

Garrett and Alice wind up having an affair.

[Emma · Rating 3 out of 5]

After a very promising start, this turned frustratingly average.

It's clear Lee Cole knows how to write a novel, and perhaps I should've read Groundskeeping first. But the characters here were all so...meh, leaving you with no one to root for. Emmett was dull, Joel was infuriating, and Alice was irritating.

I wouldn't discount reading another novel from Lee Cole, but this one ultimately let me down sadly.

[Sammi Cheung · Rating 4 out of 5]

clever writing with lots of witty lines. i don’t personally care about fox news watchers and pretentious philosophy academics, so i wasn’t invested at all in the characters, but they were written interestingly enough that i never got bored. solid pacing, satisfying read

[totesintobooks · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’ll be honest, this book was quite a struggle to get through at times. Not because it’s badly written (it’s actually very well done), but because I found most of the characters rather unlikeable and the whole atmosphere felt so American that it was hard for me to properly relate. Still, I can appreciate what Lee Cole was trying to do here — exploring the messiness of class, family, and that search for meaning in modern life.

I did understand Emmett’s and Alice’s struggles, though of course the cheating part was just wrong. You can really feel how trapped they both are, not just by circumstance but by this quiet sense of disappointment in themselves and the world around them. Their small-town life and the weight of unfulfilled potential really hit me.

Joel, on the other hand, tested my patience. He’s so consumed by his writing that he’s completely detached from what’s happening around him. It’s like he can only process his life through words rather than actually living it. His “success” doesn’t make him a better person either — if anything, it just amplifies his self-absorption. He isn’t self-aware at all until Alice calls him out, and honestly, that scene felt so deserved. I do get that he’s under pressure to achieve more, to prove himself, but still — the world doesn’t revolve around him.

What I did think was really well done was the portrayal of Joel and Emmett’s half-brother relationship. The sibling rivalry runs deep, but Cole captures it with such subtlety. Through the past anecdotes and small memories sprinkled throughout, you get this real sense that there’s love there, buried under layers of resentment and misunderstanding. They’re bound by shared history, yet divided by class, opportunity and personality and that tension feels painfully real.

I felt genuinely sad for Alice, because she seems to want more from life but doesn’t quite know how to get it. I wanted both her and Emmett to find some sense of fulfilment, even if it wasn’t the grand, life-changing kind. Just something small and honest.

To be fair, Joel does have some character development at the end, so I’ll give him that. It’s subtle, but it’s there — a glimmer of self-awareness, a bit of humility. It doesn’t fix everything, but it feels like progress.

Overall, Fulfillment is a thoughtful, if sometimes heavy, look at family, class, and the meaning (or lack thereof) of success. It’s uncomfortable in places, but maybe that’s the point — it’s meant to hold up a mirror to a world that keeps promising fulfilment but rarely delivers it.

[Lexy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fulfillment, Lee Cole’s sophomore novel, follows Emmett, as he stumbles through life, working at an order fulfillment center, living in small town Kentucky, and dreaming of (but not actually pursuing) becoming a screenwriter. Through Emmett’s story, Cole explores themes about capitalism, sibling rivalry, the South, American politics, small towns, and what it means to be successful and, more importantly, fulfilled.

Emmett exemplifies the stereotypical failed-to-launch millennial, and when his successful author/professor brother Joel returns home to Kentucky with his wife Alice, Emmett’s old resentments about his brother’s success are brought to the forefront. We see old family dramas play out, but we also learn that Joel’s life may not be all it’s cracked up to be.

Emmett, Joel, and Alice all struggle to find purpose in their lives, and Alice and Emmett are drawn to each other as they shrink next to Joel’s success. Readers who need likeable characters may struggle to find one to root for in this book, but the characters all felt authentic. Side characters added dark humor (Kathy, the men’s Fox News watching mom; Kaleb, Emmett’s shady co-worker; and Fuzzy, a childhood friend/drug dealer, were my favorites), and small details about the characters’ speech patterns, mannerisms, and homes really brought them to life.

While I sometimes felt that the social and political commentary in Fulfillment was a little heavy handed, I do think Cole wove together the deeper themes nicely. Readers who enjoy slower, introspective, character-driven stories with sharp social insight will like this one.

Thanks to Knopf for providing me with a review copy of the book.

3.5 stars, rounded up

[Krissy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to Netgalley, Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor for providing an eARC in exchange for an honest review

We follow 2 half brothers, Emmett and Joel as they return home to Kentucky at the same time. Joel is a published author, a college professor, and has a lovely wife Alice. He is back home to do a guest lecture spot for a semester at a small college. Emmett is back home after failing and being broke and is working in the warehouse of a massive fulfillment center.

They both spiral in different ways over the next few months and at the center of both their lives and future is Alice who has been unhappy in her marriage with Joel and finds the attention she seeks in Emmett.

Despite this novel not having quotation marks, I adored this book. I could not put it down, and if life did not get in the way I would have read it in one sitting. The characters were so achingly human I could swear I was reading a memoir of real people. The characters dynamics and even the story arcs were so well written. I have absolutely nothing in common with any of the characters and yet they felt so relatable. Over all this story was *chef's kiss*

[Lisa Gilbert · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a family tale about two very different brothers, their dreams and aspirations, and the ways in which each of them tries to eclipse the other. As the title intimates, both brothers are unfulfilled in their lives and looking, sometimes in the wrong direction, for ways to find the peace and fulfillment they are seeking.

Beautifully written, compelling at times and thought-provoking, Fulfillment is a hard look at class, family dynamics and privilege.

Thank you, NetGalley and Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage and Anchor for the eARC.

[Ali Hunsaker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Damn you Lee Cole for writing books I like so much but can’t explain why!!! “I just finished this amazing book” “oh what’s it about?” “Ummm.. the quandaries and day to day monotonous life of a twenty something man in the American south?” Anyways, I didn’t like this quite one as much as Groundskeeping, but I just love the observant writing style, and the way we see multiple people’s points of views in such candid and genuine ways. We are all our own hero’s and our own villains at the end of the day.

[claire lanthier · Rating 4 out of 5]

really liked this. lee cole writes some of the best dialogue i’ve ever read and the role of place in the story is wonderful. made my american studies brain happy that one of the main characters was a cultural theory writer & professor bc his entire persona was so annoyingly accurate. sometimes the political message felt a bit too “duh” but i was mostly just enjoying the prose and feeling connected to this underlying dread and panic of “i’m not living an authentic life” that all of the characters struggled with

a favorite moment is when alice plays a roches record and drunkenly rants about how no one does harmonies like they did in hammond song anymore (truth)

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked the author's previous book, Groundskeeping (which I accidentally reposted), and I liked this one too, although not as much. The writing was still very good, but the characters weren't quite as interesting. Still, this was a sweet and melancholy portrayal of unfulfillment in rural America.

[Emily Laws · Rating 4 out of 5]

A random pull from a bookstore browse. Engaging, clever, unlikable-but-likeable characters. If you're a Sally Rooney fan, you'd like this. A deep look into America's white rural working-class vs educated coastal, and how the likes of late-stage capitalism, Fox News, and a life post-Covid has changed America.

[Camille McCarthy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A super well-written book commenting on modern times, juxtaposing two brothers, one of whom is an intellectual Marxist creating essays linking the Southern US culture and theory, the other of whom is a blue-collar worker at "Tempo" which is basically Amazon. I enjoyed it and the characters seemed realistic.

[Lynn Pratt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this book. A local author with a gift for creating characters. I recognize these people and places. I also connect with the situations these characters face. “How do we know we want what we think we want?”

[Gary Branson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyed this one for its character development and great setting. I’ve like both of Cole’s books and really look forward to the next. The characters, though flawed, and very well drawn.

[kate stajos · Rating 5 out of 5]

i too want to have a literary threesome with my other personalities

[Troy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was offered a preview copy of this novel through Netgalley because I’d read and reviewed this author’s debut novel, Groundskeeping. I’d loved Groundskeeping and felt a distinct draw to its protagonist and his small town. Unfortunately, Fulfillment left me less than fulfilled.

Cole knows his Kentucky setting well and I can smell the cigarette smoke dampening the musty carpet of his mom’s dream home and feel the thrum of the conveyor belts in “the hub”, a clear ode to an Amazon shipping hub. What is less successful are his characters, none of which I felt drawn to or even felt like rooting for. Joel, the older, scholarly brother has no redeeming qualities and his wife is both lost and self absorbed in her loneliness. The younger brother, Emmett, is both lost in his brother’s shadow and in his own indecision. Their mother Kathy is a Southern archetype and cliche.

Cole’s prose remains writing workshopped perfect and true, but one ends this novel asking “so what?” Was it worth my time for a dry synopsis of Trump-era Kentucky or the over-narrated descriptions of Millenials lacking direction? 3.5 stars. Cole has chops but this suffers as his sophomore slump.

[Jude (HeyJudeReads) Fricano · Rating 4 out of 5]

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️💫

“Living requires some distance from your life. A sense of humor. Of irony. If you can stand outside your life and laugh at it, you'll be okay. You see, I'd lost that. My sense of humor. That's what paranoia is. That's all it is. You lose your sense of ironic distance." Lee Cole, Fulfillment

After recently completing The Spectacle by Anna Barrington where I enjoyed all the art references, I was thrilled to find two art references in this story that truly made me happy. First were the prints that Joel owned of Thomas Cole's The Course of Empire from the New York Historical Society - these were central to my college American Studies classes and have seen several of the Hudson River school paintings in travels. Secondly, Alice owned a Caillebotte print of chrysanthemums - a few years back I attended a Caillebotte exhibit featuring my favorite of his, Paris Street; Rainy Day which was amazingly large in person and made me love it even more.

And even without those endearing art references, I thoroughly enjoyed this story of two half-brothers, Joel and Emmett and the push and pull of class, privilege and sibling rivalry. The setting in rural Kentucky enables us to see into the world of both academia and factory work that class within one family - and the struggle they face figuring out who they are as a family, and as individuals.

[Shereadbookblog · Rating 5 out of 5]

College professor Joel, who has written an academically successful book, is married to Alice, a woman tiring of domestic life and longing for something else. When he returns to his hometown in Kentucky for a visiting teaching job, he is reunited with his family including half brother, Emmett. Emmett has never quite gotten it together. A college dropout who aspires to being a screen writer, his present job, in a long list of them, is at an online store fulfillment center. As a relationship develops between Alice and Emmett, lives spiral out of control.

How do we find fulfillment in our lives? As each of the main characters in this well written, complex novel strives to find it, Cole paints a realistic picture of present day American rural south and our contemporary political culture. Family, guilt, class, longing, resentment, yearning….it is all here, along with insight into the different Americas that have been ripped apart by the politics of our times. As with his first novel, Groundskeeping, which I loved, dialog is written sans quotation marks.

Thanks to #NetGalley and @aaknopf for the DRC.

[Chr*s Browning · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read the bulk of Lee Cole's debut novel Groundskeeping in airports and on a plane home to Kentucky after a trip that left me with a desire only to return home and make the best of my life in the place where I was born. Three years and change on, I did end up moving away, not far though, only to Ohio, and Kentucky still rings true in my heart; learning that Cole's follow-up was set in Paducah, my girlfriend's hometown, convinced me to give him a second chance. I probably should have known better, because if there's one thing Cole's novels have it's a marginal setting in Kentucky that has no real bearing on the plot beyond being a place to house a MAGA family member strawman (an uncle last time, a mother this time), make some tossed-off references to places where Cole may have frequented growing up, and, ultimately, be a place to leave and not return. In Groundskeeping, the main character seemed bound for New York; here he ends up in LA. Cole is not beating the coastal liberal brainwashing allegations, and honestly he doesn't seem too interested in trying. In many ways, this feels like the same novel as his debut with a slight twist - instead of a manual laborer who's in a creative writing program, Cole neatly bifurcates his previous main character into two brothers: a dissatisifed college professor and a manual laborer who also writes creatively...screenplays this time, in a mostly pointless nod to True West. Going into this book and judging by the blurb and the epigraph, I was expecting more of a riff, a True Western Kentucky, but no, Cole has no real interest in Kentucky and not really any more than a passing interest in exploring the dynamic between the two brothers, who have similar personalities or are kept mostly apart by the book's adultery/love triange machinations, which follow expected patterns and are punctuated by truly terrible sex scenes. The impression I'm left with is, once again, a nothingburger, a conciously MFA novel about "family" and "relationships" (seemingly the only thing they can turn out besides YA writers), a flattened affect, a swing and a whiff, attempts at possible cultural criticism undone by (probably editorially mandated) fictionalization of the only things it criticizes (there are very obvious stand-ins for Amazon and hims, given different names which just feels strange when real places like Starnes Barbecue and an apartment complex 500 feet from my girlfriend's family home are explicitly named; then again, that's Cole's Kentucky gloss to sell the same plot in a new state). Don't bring KY into your LA/NY book if you're just going to set your important scenes elsewhere (the only chapter in which the book truly becomes interesting is set at a writers' conference in Memphis). Cole really is worse than a carpetbagger in that he doesn't even come back to the state outside of book talks; his last blurb had him living in New York - this one has the cover blurb listing him in Philly and the inside copy putting him in Houston, a good bit of obfuscation if intentional, but one doubts it. Quick internet research seems to find him moving around with the woman who inspired his debut and must be so lib-brained that she can't give him a single good note on his novels (ad-hominem parasociality argument yes, but since Goodreads is unregulated I can make it). Alas, I'll stlll probably read anything he publishes just so that I can write a rambling and unedited paragraph mocking it here - as the novel suggests, a man must ultimately follow his calling, and this is mine.