Questioning Who’s Allowed to Dream in “Fulfillment” https://ift.tt/sdywWgT
Lee Cole’s sophomore novel, Fulfillment,drops readers directly into the political, class, and economic divides wrenching America apart, unspooled through a story about two half-brothers from a family with deep roots in Kentucky. While the novel has been out for a year now — June marks its paperback release — its incisive, humanizing commentary on the country’s current state of affairs remains just as relevant.
The book shifts between three perspectives throughout: Emmett, the younger brother working at Tempo, a thinly veiled stand-in for an Amazon warehouse, while aspiring towards becoming a screenwriter; Joel, his older brother, who has found success as a New York-based professor and writer after publishing a book on “rural despair” in the American South; and Alice, Joel’s wife, who finds herself unhappy in her marriage and yearning after her dream of farming after dropping out of her environmental ethics-focused philosophy PhD. The brothers have not seen each other in years, but are once again in close proximity after Emmett moves nearer to home for his new job at Tempo and Joel takes a lectureship at Murray State for the fall semester, bringing Alice along with him to stay in Paducah, Kentucky, with his and Emmett’s Trump-supporting, gun-owning mother, Kathy, in her prefab “Dream Home.”
As the three grapple with the question of how to find happiness and purpose, their lives intersect in messy, complicated ways that bring up old wounds and deep-set insecurities to the surface. Alice and Emmett, sensing something of a dreamer in each other, fall into an affair. Joel, meanwhile, is grappling with a secret of his own. Disillusioned with his life and more broadly the state of our capitalist society, and reeling from the suicide of the father he never had much of a relationship with, he has begun taking an antidepressant — the very medication he lambasted in his book as a moneymaker for pharmaceutical companies, not a real solution.
The question of what dreams you can have, and who is allowed to have them, constantly circles. Is Emmett, for instance, naive to think he can make it as a screenwriter? His older brother, the published author, seems to think so. Or maybe what Joel is trying to tell Emmett is that what’s been sold to him as “dreams” can be disorientingly flimsy once occupied. It may sound idyllic to leave behind academia to till the fields of her very own farm, but Alice is still up against her same self, the same questions, whether she is a farmer or a PhD student. But if following the path towards our dreams can leave us stumbling and uncertain like Joel, what then is the path that will lead us to fulfillment? Do the liberal elite step further away from that when they start dealing more in the realm of ideas, as opposed to engaging with the world as it exists right around them, as Alice worries it may? Shortly before she leaves her PhD program, she wonders, “We’ve spoiled and pillaged the only world we have. […] How do I bring myself to write a dissertation on it? How much will that help anything?”
While these questions ring true, Cole at times fails to do the same for the characters on the page. They can at times feel like mere symbols placed just to illustrate a certain angle of the American story. Emmett’s coworker at Tempo, Kaleb, who attempts to loop him into a pill-skimming scheme, does not emerge as much more than a trope. He has a prison record, a penchant towards grotesquerie, a passion for watching UFC fights on pay-per-view, and an ex-girlfriend who stabbed him in the back with a steak knife. Same goes for the alt-right conspiracy theorist Joel meets at a conference in Memphis, who speculates about the JFK assassination and Epstein and watches the Home Shopping Network. And if we are failing to grasp the humanity underneath the surface of the images people can project, and that we in turn can project onto them, does not that undermine the very possibility of the fulfillment all of these characters are after? Relationships, it seems, are the closest they get to it, and yet, for all of them, their dreams keep getting in the way.
FICTION Fulfillment By Lee Cole Knopf Publishing Group Published June 17, 2025 Paperback published June 26, 2026
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