More than anything else — themes, characters, setting, or even plot — effective fiction is accomplished most immediately at the level of the sentence. Great prose can engage and compel a reader, the necessary first step to the exploration of any of those elements which operate on a larger scale. If the line level is not as often discussed, it is only because it is harder to recognize, diagnose, and evaluate than the other primary components of fiction. In his debut novel, Groundskeeping, Lee Cole opts to play it safe at the sentence, largely avoiding any sort of dynamic risk-taking in a prioritization of clear, straightforward storytelling. While he is certainly successful there, the byproduct is a book that, while replete with big ideas and a well-developed conception, offers little to challenge, enthrall, or excite at the base unit of fiction.
Groundskeeping is the story of Owen, a level-headed and somewhat idealistic conventional first-person narrator who, as a restless 28-year old, finds himself at a crossroads. After losing his forestry job in Colorado, Owen returns to Kentucky where his kindly grandfather,Pop and freeloading Uncle Cort live on the outskirts of Louisville. With his parents, divorced in western Kentucky, mildly apoplectic about his future, Owen lands a job as a titular groundskeeper for Ashby College, a stand-in for any number of the small liberal arts schools dotting the country. Soon after moving, he enrolls in a writing workshop and meets the mysterious and alluring Alma at a party, thus setting in motion the plot lines. Cogent and promising as this premise is, however, it is never quite fully realized due to Cole’s timidity at the sentence level.
The strongest portions of Groundskeeping are the depictions of the physical world. Cole relies on his considerable skill with detail and ability to portray middle America, and his small Kentucky college and Owen’s home life feel real and rich. It is a part of the country and culture infrequently explored in fiction, and there is a refreshing honesty and sensibility found in Cole’s comfort with that part of the world. Owen’s budding relationship with Alma, too, is at its best in-scene, when Cole moves away from explanation and towards rendition:
“Our cars were parked in opposite directions, and we stood for a minute, trying to figure out how to part ways gracefully. Swift clouds passed over the moon. I could almost discern the scent of her shampoo where her head had rested against my shoulder— apricot or peach I should go, I said. I have to be up early … We exchanged numbers and she walked away, waving behind her as if she knew, without having to look, that I’d be watching her.
She reached her car — an old beater Honda — and I saw the taillights blink as she pressed the key fob. I turned and began the long journey home.”
There are nice scenic moments such as this throughout, even if one can’t help but wonder if Cole isn’t relying on his small details to do a bit more work than they’re able in charging his scenes with emotional depth and resonance. Even in the most intimate moments, Owen’s interiority is remarkably opaque for a first-person narrator, a result of Groundskeeping’s line-level limitations.
This is a novel more ambitious in design, perhaps, than execution; Cole works towards topicality in juxtaposing the denizens of rural Kentucky with the academic set of a liberal arts college. And so while issues such as Trump, racial and economic inequalities, and American “exceptionalism” are intentionally present, the book never ventures too far into true social critique. Lines of dialogue such as Owen’s “Kentucky is America … If you write about one, you’re writing about the other,” are about as stirring and biting as Cole allows his hero to get.
When Owen argues with Cort about his uncle’s posting a Make America Great Again sign in his bedroom window, or discusses his workshop’s curriculum with his nuanced and sophisticated landscaping coworker James, we are given glimpses into the cultural critique Groundskeeping might have been. But even the best of these moments — James is a successful secondary character who is able to effectively act on the plot while challenging his traditional archetypes — are often short and somewhat malnourished, while many of them fall flat and clichéd. Cole seems reluctant to truly explore the themes of racial and social inequality that abound in a narrative set in Kentucky during the Trump years and peopled by characters of radically different socio-economic backgrounds. Instead, the book merely raises the subject from time to time, paints in stark relief the good — our suitably liberal and progressive protagonist and his friends — from the bad — his MAGA’d, exploitative uncle or the racists at the local bar — and moves on, back to the slow-burning love story between Owen and Alma. This seems to be more a product of the line-to-line conventionality than anything, but is nonetheless something of a letdown for a book with a great deal of potential in its premise.
For its qualified successes in structure and conceit, on the sentence level Groundskeeping is a disappointment. This is a perfectly harmless and eminently consumable book, qualities that will be more than enough for many readers — and clearly intended by author and editor. It has the sanitized, polished, readily accessible feel of an MFA thesis-turned debut novel, one that could be held up as exemplar par excellence of the 21st-century novel’s most risk-averse and marketable iteration. The human experience is not so much explored and exposed as it is distilled and neatly packaged, a somewhat predictable bildungsroman-cum-love story narrated at an easy pace designed to ensure maximum sales and minimum verisimilitude. Cole seems preoccupied with never leaving a reader behind, writing perhaps with those first-year workshop dicta about always advancing the plot and never straying the course tacked to the wall above his desk. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that the biggest risk taken in Groundskeeping is an omission of quotation marks. For a narrator who, early on, highlights a brief discussion of point of view in his writing workshop, Cole’s protagonist seems to have especially little awareness of or appetite for the opportunities available to a skilled writer at the line level. By pursuing so risk-averse an approach at the sentence level, Groundskeeping suffers from a loss of verisimilitude, that essential quality of fiction that can be best achieved line-to-line. The authentic depiction of characters’ inner lives, and thus the most accurate portrayal of the human experience, is greatly hampered by an approach that prioritizes helping the reader along every step of the way, that places readability above authenticity.
Groundskeeping will divide reactions to it sharply between the reader who enjoys an easy, effortless experience and those who crave a work of more energy and audacity. Cole and Owen, in their author-narrator alliance to conform to every whim and need of the audience, rely heavily on exposition and straight backstory in establishing tension and conflict, be it in narration or dialogue. When Owen’s mother calls to check in on him, we are treated to entire paragraphs explaining her situation in adequate detail, a turning-to-the-reader bout of telling over showing that is a defining feature of the excessively readable novel. Cole then moves to dialogue to lay down some friction:
“She sighed a third time. My son is twenty-eight, she said.
What about it?
I became a mother at twenty-eight. I had you that year.
I know.
We’d already bought a house and been married five years.
Okay.
And here you are homeless.
I’m not homeless.
You would be, she said, if not for your grandfather. You’d be on the streets.
I doubt that.
Well, what do you plan to do?
I don’t know.
That’s your answer?
It’s not an answer.
Exactly, she said. That’s exactly the problem.”
It is impossible to read a section like this one — of which Groundskeeping is inexhaustibly, unerringly made — without seeing just how little Cole is willing to risk in his debut, just how heavily he is determined to bang his book’s propulsive forces over the heads of his readers. To be sure, for many this will be not a shortcoming but a success, but for others, this whitewashed, paint-by-numbers type of novel-making offers little originality and much fatigue.
This type of bloodless narration is unfortunately endemic to moments between Owen and Alma even as their relationship progresses. Because Owen infrequently sees her — she is the visiting writer for the college, romantically involved with Casey, a grad student, and thus portrayed as in something of a different social station — the reader is constantly treated to a neat recounting of what’s being going on since we last spoke, accompanied by Owen’s internal speech and thoughts — all just as clear and as flavorful as water:
“I wanted to ask if she’d gone to Schadenfreude with Casey, if it had been Casey beside her on a stool at Wanda’s Café, sharing a milkshake, but she didn’t know that I knew him, and it wasn’t really my business. Nothing about her life was really my business.
I did go to a party on Friday with the guy I’m seeing, she said. That was fun, I guess. You might know him actually — Casey Arnett? He takes some English-slash-writing classes for fun — like you.
No, I said, before I could really think through whether I wanted to lie. I mean, the name sounds vaguely familiar, but no.”
Throughout, the relationships between Owen and his family, his love interest, coworkers, classmates, or self are never given the sharpened edge of compelling fictive character dynamics. Owen is a fine protagonist, and Alma a well-rounded love interest with depth of her own, but we are kept too far from them in narration and prose. The utter conviction to conventionality found on the sentence level is at once Groundskeeping’s most defining feature and its fundamental handicap. The book’s most compelling elements, especially the fully realized place and ambitious conception, never have a chance to flourish or succeed in a work so incessantly concerned with readability. To be sure, many will enjoy this book and happily seek out an easy, straightforward love story updated to Kentucky in the Time of Trump. But there is no substitute for rich, fearless prose and risk-taking at the line level, and Cole’s debut demonstrates this ironclad rule in spades. Ultimately, while Groundskeeping does achieve its overarching goal — this book is certainly an easy one to read — by the end there perhaps is more lost than gained in the attempt.
[Published by A. A. Knopf on March 8, 2022, 336 pages, $28.00]