From the very first page, this book draws you into its world with engaging prose, well-developed characters, and a compelling narrative. The author's storytelling is confident and immersive, weaving together themes that resonate long after the final chapter.

Enjoyable. And admirable too for its refusal - largely - of the grand gesture in favor of something more ordinary and oddly true.
It’s a modest novel, easily readable, not a ‘big’ book, although long. The characters are quotidian. But there’s warmth and subtlety here, and an incisiveness that belies the humdrum lives.
I was impressed.

3.5, rounded up. Cole's debut novel, [book:Groundskeeping|58395053] 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 <i>Fulfillment</i>, 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 <i>New Yorker</i> 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 <i>fulfillment</i> center). Many of his socio-political observations felt trite and forced, or preaching to the already-converted.

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.

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 <i>Nebraska</i> (“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 (<i>True West</i> is the touchstone here and a quotation from the play serves as the novel’s epigraph).

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

I loved Groundskeeping, and couldn’t wait for Lee Cole’s follow-up. Fulfillment is wonderful! With precise, lyrical prose, Cole explores the malaise so present today through the lens of Emmett Shaw, his brother Joel, and sister in law Alice. In post-pandemic Kentucky, these flawed characters fumble through their lives best as they can, for better or for worse. A beautiful, unforgettable book. So many thanks for NetGalley and Knopf for the opportunity to read and review this amazing eArc.

These three young adults are unhappy with their lives but don’t know how to change. They are powder kegs waiting to explode. As with his first novel, Groundskeeping, which I loved, dialog is written sans quotation marks.

For once in his life, he had been a part of something bigger than himself. from Fulfillment by Lee Cole

You reach your thirties and wonder, is this all there is? is this all I am? Do I settle for the life I was given, or do I look for a larger life, a life of meaning, for fulfillment? What is my purpose? Is it too late to change course?

Half brothers Emmett and Joel have completely different lives; Emmett is a college dropout working in a massive Kentucky warehouse sorting packages. Joel is married, a college professor and author, living in New York City. Emmett dreams of writing a screenplay. Joel is on antidepressants, and is alienated from his free spirited wife Alice who dreams of rural life with a garden. Joel is teaching near his hometown, and he and Alice are staying with his mother. Emmett visits on weekends.

These three young adults are unhappy with their lives but don’t know how to change. They are powder kegs waiting to explode.

Lee Cole’s stunning sophomore novel dissects a family in crisis, their bonds strained to the breaking point. It is about the American South, and class, brotherhood, and what really matters.

The path is messy and divisive, but each character undergoes an epiphany, finally taking control of their lives and finding fulfillment.

Gritty, truthful, inspirational.

Thanks to A. A. Knopf for a free book.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and highly recommend it. I am grateful to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with an advance copy.

"Fulfillment" by Lee Cole is a sharp and deeply felt novel that examines family, ambition, and the shifting landscape of the American South. With keen insight and elegant prose, Cole crafts a story that lingers, exploring class, privilege, and the search for purpose in an ever-changing world.

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.

After reading Lee Cole's Groundskeeping, I made sure to put this book on the top of my reading list. While some of the themes in this book are similar to those in Groundskeeping (rural, conservative Kentucky town with people struggling to get by), this book is heavier and a bit less optimistic. Fulfillment is about two half-brothers, Emmett and Joel. Emmett, who has trouble getting his life together, is constantly comparing himself to his brother Joel, who has published a novel about rural Kentucky life and has moved back to his family's home with his wife to teach at a local college. Both brothers slowly implode in this book, and harm their relationship with each other when Alice, Joel's wife, decides to have an affair with Emmitt. The best part of this book is not the emotional harm the brothers bring on each other, but the aftermath, when they have separated and have room to determine what they want.
Cole's writing, as in his book Groundskeeping, is beautiful, and makes us experience life in the deep, rural South. It is sometimes hard to sit by as the characters make bad decision after bad decision, but how they pick themselves up from those bad decisions is what makes this book memorable.
Thank you NetGalley for an ARC.

"Things could not simply move from one place to another. There were zigzags and mazes, gateways and scanners. Branches forked infinitely from the main route."
Possibly the most depressing book to ever make me feel hopeful about the human condition?
Joel and Emmet's all too common brotherly dysfunction boils to new heights when Emmet, a down-on-his-luck warehouse fulfillment worker, starts hopping into bed with Joel's wife Alice. Using their infidelity to peek around the doorframes of possible new lives, the slow downfall of late-stage capitalism colors their every decision, all while Joel struggles to determine whether he's going insane or is just succumbing to a depression brought about by his general dissatisfaction with the world.
Lee Cole gives us everything we deserve in this post-Hillbilly Elegy world. Between this and his electric first book, Groundskeeping, he observes a middle America stuck between two coastal identities, where the choice to stay is as much a statement as the choice to leave. Cole also continues to write so beautifully about the natural world, an achievement in a setting whether an Amazon-style warehouse is the central setting.

Possibly one of my favorites of the year. Great job in painting the scenary, and bringing the dread of a mundane job to life.
Dreams are just that, dreams.
The book is very depressing but it grabs you and keeps you for awhile.
Go play with puppies after you read it.

Hmmm....mixed feelings on this. It's nice to read a novel with an overt focus on the rural South and male despair, but I was left with a feeling that I didn't have a clear idea of what the book wanted to say about the people in it, or who it was addressed to.

Joel, the brother who's moved to New York City, is an arrogant professor. Alice, his wife, doesn't know why she married him and just wants to buy land and start a farm. Emmett is adrift and not very sharp, working at a cargo distribution center and attempting to be a screenwriter. Sure, it's "about" class and privilege, but it's mostly about this aimless and airless trio struggling to find any person or project to give their lives meaning.

The brothers' mother and grandmother (and various townspeople) are so stereotypical as to not even register as characters. I kept thinking about Patricia Lockwood's PRIESTDADDY, and how her portrayal of family members with differing political and religious beliefs were rendered with both warmth and idiosyncratic detail. (I also kept comparing the work scenes to Heike Geissler's Seasonal Associate, a book written by a woman who actually worked in an Amazon warehouse.)

The pity is doled out almost equally between the coastal elites, the Fox-newsed provincials, the prodigal son lazing between these two poles. If there's no center anymore (religion, marriage, family, ideology outside of textbooks), what is saving us from 300 pages of a humorless world that is grimly blah?

Well-written, but ultimately depressing and in a sad way, not very interesting. I did enjoy Groundskeeping and I did manage to relate to some of the characters, but not enough.

The second book by this new author. I loved his first book, Groundskeeping, which tells the story of a writer from rural Kentucky, torn between his nostalgic childhood and his new understanding of the world.
Fulfillment rips off the bandaid. There is no nostalgia about life in rural Kentucky. Emmitt works in a mundane job and dreams of being a writer of screenplays, but confronts reality at every step. His brother Joel has escaped and lives a meaningless life as a small time writer and philosophy professor in NYC. Both are miserable and make decisions that make life worse.
The book is mostly depressing, but is well written and thought provoking. I am looking forward to the third book.

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.

In full disclosure I received an electronic version of Lee Cole’s “Fulfillmen”t from the Alfred A. Knoph publishing company through Netgallery. I had read and gave Cole a four-star rating of his first book “Groundskeeping”.
Lee Cole has a great command of words and when you are reading his work you insert yourself in the story. Sometimes this is good, sometimes not, because Cole’s characters always seem conflicted and not particularly likeable. It is a timely book, especially toxic politics and class divide but in a gentle way, not like castor oil shoved down your throat. The book has some very funny sections that come throughout the entire read.
The main characters are half siblings, Joel the author and occasional college professor and Emmett the want to be screen writer and fulfillment center worker. The parts at the fulfillment center reminded me of those in the book “Nomadland” but not as harsh. There is also Alice Joel’s wife who dreams of living on a farm. Joel and Emmett become estranged and then come back together, sort of. The book really is about looking for that fulfillment of the book’s title.

this book was great! I love the themes of socioeconomics, class, privilege, and all the encompassing themes that surround that. It was very well written, and called out a lot of unjust things, which I love. It was very spot on and eye opening!

Thank you to NetGalley, to the author, and to the publisher for this complimentary ARC in exchange for my honest review!!!

This book's topic is much heavier than the romance stories I've been enjoying recently. However, it is a stunning work by a very talented author. The characters and plot aren't something you will fall in love with, but it will keep your interest. Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.

Near Paducah, Kentucky, in a vast distribution center for a global shipping giant, Emmett spends his days unloading boxes on an assembly line. He has returned home—again—after yet another six-month cycle of hope and failure, another job and dream that didn’t work out. This time, he starts off back with his mother in his childhood home, forced to confront not only his own disappointments but the presence of his brother, Joel, the golden child.

Joel, a successful author, views the world through the lens of leftist ideology and intellectual abstraction, retreating into research and philosophy as his personal life crumbles. His wife wonders if she can endure a man who seems more invested in his ideals than in their marriage.

Cole’s writing is stunning, sharp, and deeply observant, capturing the tensions between success and failure, ambition and stagnation, privilege and self-awareness. The characters, frustrating yet compelling, fumble for meaning with answers sitting right in front of them. They are cushioned by safety nets they barely acknowledge, making their struggles feel both tragic and maddening.

This novel isn’t easy—it doesn’t give you characters to love, only to understand. But it is an undeniable achievement in storytelling, and I was completely taken in. The ending? Absolutely perfect.
#KnopfPantheonVintage #Fulfillment #LeeCole