Fulfillment is the ‘stone cold fox of a second novel’ (Pandora Sykes) from Lee Cole, set in Kentucky, following two very different half-brothers.
Here, author Lee Cole shares a list of books that inspired him, alongside music featured in the novel ‘playing on car radios and barroom speakers and diner jukeboxes.’
White Noise, Don DeLillo
I first read White Noise in a college course on postmodernism, but on the day we were supposed to discuss the book, my professor burned his mouth on a microwaveable Hot Pocket and was unable to speak properly, which has always struck me as both very DeLillo and very po-mo. His incredible passages on the strange beauty of supermarkets were on my mind as I wrote about the equally strange and overwhelming world of a shipping warehouse.
Seven Plays, Sam Shepard
I took the epigraph for the novel from True West, which appears in this volume. It’s a book I love and have read time and again, and True West, a play about brothers who resent each other in various ways, surely influenced the writing of Fulfillment. All the plays collected here have a surreal, mordant sense of humour, and at the same time, a kind of mythic undercurrent, and I admire this capacity to be so funny and so deadly serious at once.
Big World, Mary Miller
There are few writers depicting a version of the American South that I recognise. They’re writing about an idealised South, or a South that’s long gone. The great pleasure of reading Mary Miller’s work, for me, is the shock of recognition—at scenes or bits of dialogue that feel so familiar and so true to my own experience. The stories in this collection take place in motels and fast food dining rooms; the characters yearn to escape their circumstances, but because they can’t, they escape in other ways—through tabloids, drugs, and entertainment. This is the South that’s familiar to me.
Going to Meet the Man, James Baldwin
Any novel about brothers will probably owe something to the quintessential short story about brothers, Baldwin’s ‘Sonny’s Blues,’ which appears in this collection. All the stories are incredible, but ‘Sonny’s Blues’ captures so well the way that resentment and jealousy between family members can be convolved inextricably with love and duty. I love it because it treats family obligation as something complex and mysterious and not easily dismissed.
The End of Vandalism, Tom Drury
If asked to name my favourite writer, I’m liable to give a different answer depending on my mood. But Tom Drury would come up often, I think. Vincent Canby said of Federico Fellini that his best work makes us “more humane, less stuffy, more appreciative of the profound importance of attitudes that in other circumstances would seem merely eccentric if not lunatic.” This is how I feel about Tom Drury’s work, especially this first novel, which focuses with clear-eyed tenderness on a single county in Iowa and its small-town inhabitants. It’s such a funny book, and the last quarter is an emotional gut-punch.
Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class, Barbara Ehrenreich
I read a lot of Ehrenreich as I wrote Fulfillment, so it was hard to pick a single book that influenced my thinking. But as I shaped the character of Joel, a Marxist and “cultural critic,” I thought a lot about Ehrenreich’s views on the precarity of the American middle-class, and those like Joel, who leave one class for another and come to fear or resent where they came from. Additionally, I just find her work to be so lucid and her arguments so convincing. She was a fierce, uncompromising thinker whose integrity I admire.
Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, Anne Case and Angus Deaton
I recommend this book to anyone who can stomach it. It’s a breathtaking, clinical, and completely harrowing account of a uniquely American crisis: the astounding increase in deaths from opioid overdose, suicide, and liver disease among those without college degrees, mainly in rural areas. It’s one of Joel’s academic focuses in the novel, but it’s never far from my mind when I write about Kentucky or the South.
Lee Cole’s Fulfillment Playlist
I’ve always felt that writers who avoid mentioning music (or brand names, or books, or films) because it risks ‘dating’ the material are committing a greater sin by leaving it out. Music, especially, is such a vital part of life’s texture. The songs gathered here are all those mentioned in the novel, playing on car radios and barroom speakers and diner jukeboxes. But they also remind me of my various moods as I wrote the book, and the way the songs wove themselves into my understanding of the characters. Alice, who dreams of a pastoral life, loves 70s folk, represented here by The Roches and Carole King. Emmett, eager to romanticize his blue-collar work, is drawn to Springsteen. Joel’s disenchantment and caustic humor pairs well with Lou Reed and Bowie. And Kentucky, a character in its own right, has Bill Monroe and Loretta Lynn to speak for it. And this is why references to music can be so powerful — not simply to create atmosphere or ground the material in a time and place, but because they express some piece of the longings, disappointments, and joys of the characters.
A stunning, timely novel which effortlessly blends the intimate and the wide-screen, from ‘a hugely gifted writer’ (Ann Patchett).
Lee Cole was born and grew up in rural Kentucky. A recent graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he now lives in New York. His first novel, Groundskeeping, was called 'an extraordinary debut’ (Ann Patchett) from 'an exciting new voice' (Washington Post).
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