Fulfillment - Lee Cole

 Fulfillment - Lee Cole

Pub. Date: June 17, 2025

She and he Read

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. 

He also read this and really liked it.

Thanks to #NetGalley and @aaknopf for the DRC. 

*****