Of the handful of qualities that humans share, one of the biggest is the desire for contentment. Lee Cole's Fulfillment, his winningly brittle follow-up to Groundskeeping, his first novel, explores the ways in which members of a Kentucky family seek satisfaction. Of the two half brothers, Joel, the older one, would seem to have found it. He's a published author living in New York and married to Alice. Emmett has returned to Kentucky after a stint as a line cook in New Orleans to work at a fulfillment warehouse. Unlike wealthy Joel, Emmett went into overdraft "just a week earlier buying Goobers and a pack of cigarettes." He's also a would-be screenwriter, toiling away on "an evolving, never-ending autobiographical work."
As the novel begins, Joel and Alice have moved in with the brothers' mother, owner of Bibles and a shed full of guns, for Joel's visiting professorship. Soon, Emmett realizes Alice and Joel's marriage is unhappy. He begins a clandestine affair with Alice. Add a grandmother who claims "men in the woods" watch her sleep, a stranger who calls Joel with messages like "You're a fraud," and a warehouse colleague who tries to recruit Emmett into a side hustle involving stolen drugs, and the result is a perceptive portrait of sibling rivalry and the perpetual battle between desire and attainability. "You have to reach for the impossible thing sometimes, not because it's realistic, but because it will save your life," Alice tells Emmett. The risks inherent in that quest form the moral complexity of this worthy sophomore novel. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer