The latest novel from western Kentucky native Lee Cole follows a pair of half-brothers who return to their hometown of Paducah at vastly different points in their life. One, lost after some creative failures, finds a job in the anonymous maelstrom of a bustling package handling facility. The other, a newly married academic, comes home to teach a course at Murray State University on rural despair in America.
“Fulfillment” spirals out from their homecoming, tracing a tale of indecision, class and privilege in the modern American South.
Cole – a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop now living in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – grew up in Paducah. “Fulfillment” is his second novel, coming after his critically acclaimed debut work “Groundskeeping,” which received positive notices from the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Southern Review of Books upon its release in 2022.
“Fulfillment” hits bookstore shelves on June 17. It’s available through major retailers, including Bookshop.org.
Cole spoke with WKMS News Director Derek Operle ahead of its release:
Derek Operle: “Let's start with what the seed of the story is, which is that a person who's had maybe some creative failures in their life moves back to Kentucky and, at the same time, their brother moves back to Kentucky to teach a course at Murray State University about rural despair and late capitalism. And from then, the book just kind of spirals outward as your characters search for meaning in the work that they do and in the lives of their family and their friends and [they] try to grapple with where we are in America right now. And all of it against the backdrop of western and central Kentucky, where your roots are, Lee. Talk to me about where you were starting from with ‘Fulfillment.’”
Lee Cole: “There were, I guess, a couple of germs or seeds for the story. One was that I [worked] nights as a package handler at a warehouse for three years, and I always thought it was a really interesting and sort of surreal setting. When I was there, I was like, ‘You know this would make a good setting for something.’ But I couldn't quite figure out how to make it interesting to a reader. Because the work itself was quite boring. It was literally just putting packages onto a conveyor belt … So I think I kind of had those notes and those memories from that job, and would think about them now and then, and try to think about a way to tell a story involving that. But it took a while for me to kind of get there.
And then the other thing that I think was kind of a seed for the story was this question that Joel, the academic brother, sort of asks his class at one point, which is, ‘How do we know that we want what we think we want?’ And, for some reason, this question just sort of arose in my own life, kind of post COVID. And I think it's a question that a lot of people were asking because that sort of world historical crisis recalibrated all of our brains and made us reevaluate our lives and think about our relationships and our jobs and everything that we had sort of taken for granted, and to sort of step back and say, ‘Is this the life that I want? Am I fulfilled in this life?’ And I think that all of the characters are sort of grappling with that question. They have these ideals or these fantasies of what the good life looks like for them, but they're not quite sure how to get there, and they're not sure if they can trust what they want. They're not sure if they can trust their desire to lead them to a place where they're actually going to be happy.
And, of course, these questions of getting what we want and fulfillment are sort of wrapped up in consumerism and sort of the avalanche of stuff that's coming into the shipping warehouse where Emmett works in the book. So I guess that was kind of how the theme sort of started to weave together. And I guess ultimately the way I found a route to sort of write about the shipping warehouse is by introducing a betrayal between the brothers, and by introducing this kind of crime subplot that was going on at the warehouse as well that involves stealing, stealing packages that were coming through.”
DO: “That was the element that, for me, was new in the context of your work. So you've only written the one novel, ‘Groundskeeping,’ which came out a couple years ago [and] was all set against the backdrop of a college town and a romance set in Louisville. So the [crime subplot] seemed to be kind of a new direction for me, and obviously added an element of tension to the book that I think really carries you through the middle. You've set both of your novels in Kentucky. Obviously, you're from the western part of the state. What’s your relationship with the Commonwealth at this point in your life?”
LC: Yeah. I mean, it's sort of my default setting whenever I start something – for better or worse…it's been almost 10 years since I lived in Kentucky full time. And I'm starting to think about other settings that might be interesting to me, but I think for me, personally, it takes a lot for me to feel a kind of sense of ownership about a place or a setting, to feel comfortable enough to write about it.
I spent two years in Houston, Texas, and I feel like I was just starting to kind of figure out the ins and outs of that place, of that setting by the time I left. And even now, I don't know if I feel comfortable enough writing about that place. Because, to my mind, there are writers who have spent their whole lives there. They know it. It's in their hearts. There are people who can write about Houston better than me, probably, but I don't know. I think that's tricky because outsider perspectives are also interesting. You don't have to be born and raised in a place and have lived there all your life to be able to have an interesting perspective on it. There are plenty of great books about settings that were written by people who weren't from there, who are coming to those places with fresh eyes.
It gets kind of tricky thinking about, like, who has the right to write about a place, who has that sense of ownership. But for me, personally, I mean, I still go back to Kentucky all the time. My family is all still there. I enjoy going back. I, like my characters, sort of have disagreements and a different sort of values than some family members or people that are still in my hometown, but I don't think that I'm as tortured about those differences as some of the characters that I write. I think I've kind of ratcheted it up just for the sake of suspense and tension. And what's more interesting to me are these characters who really want to get out and are forced to stay, or who have gotten out and are now wondering what their life might have been like if they had stayed. These are all questions that I think – and it's not just Kentucky – people who come from small towns and in rural places are all sort of grappling with. So I think that's a negotiation that a lot of people in rural places or small towns are making. It's certainly something that I thought a lot about growing up and leaving Kentucky, and it's something that I'm interested in when I'm writing about characters who are from Kentucky, too.”
DO: “People that are familiar with western Kentucky that read your book, they'll obviously recognize some landmarks – some disguised and and some actual. You'll see Starnes Bar-B-Q, right across from Noble Park [in Paducah], but you'll also have what I'm pretty sure is a thinly veiled Silver Bullet [reference] in a sequence where people are singing karaoke in a bar. And, if you've been in that bar in downtown Paducah late at night, that is the scene. Talk to me about the sensation of writing about your hometown and these local landmarks like that. And how do you decide what to do with that?”
LC: “I don't know that I have a kind of standard that I go by for determining, like, when to fictionalize and when not to. I think it tends to be a situation where maybe I need a setting to do more than the actual place can do, or to have more possibilities in the actual place. So in the case of the Silver Bullet…it's an interesting place. I use some anecdotes from my own experiences there and, also, you know, just other stories I'd heard. I'm happy to take those details, if I have them, if I have that kind of raw material of real life. But also if I need any setting to have something more specific that the real life version doesn't have, then I'm also happy to fictionalize it. That's the beauty of fiction, though, is you can take the kind of raw materials of life, and then fictionalize them and add in other details, until you have something that sort of suits your purposes as a writer.”
DO: “I would tend to agree. I feel like there's two oppositional words that both start with V that are like the opposite pursuits of the things you could pursue when writing about a place. Verisimilitude, like are you trying to simulate? Are you trying to exactly state, literally, what is in a place? Or, a word that's become now omnipresent in all cultural criticism: vibes.”
LC: “I agree. And I think too the attempt to simulate too exactly can come across as over-researched or if your fidelity to the way things actually are is too great then it can feel like you're trying to prove something in the writing.”
DO: “This is your second novel, and I'm going to assume from the fact that it's about to come out, that you've had it written for a while now. What's next, Lee?”
LC: I'm working on another project now, and have been for a while, that is sort of in a similar vein. It's also set in Kentucky, but it involves a few more ‘genre elements,’ maybe would be the way to put it. I have been more interested lately in reading crime fiction and sort of mystery and suspense books. I've been reading a lot of Patricia Highsmith, and those have just been really enjoyable to me lately. And so that's sort of the kind of writing that I've gravitated towards. And I think that makes sense for me, in some ways, because I've always sort of loved Alfred Hitchcock and crime movies and noir.
So that's sort of the direction that I'm going in with this new project: sort of noir-ish but also trying to do a similar kind of surrealism or absurd kind of humor that I was going for with ‘Fulfillment.’ I am sort of actively thinking about where I could set something that feels new to me. In ‘Fulfillment,’ I sort of branched out to set large sections of the book in LA and in New York, and that felt really refreshing to me. I was happy to stretch my legs and feel like I could write about a different place. So, yeah, I'm thinking about that, but I imagine Kentucky will always play a part, if not literally, then figuratively, in anything that I'm writing.”
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
