In Lee Cole’s second novel, two half-brothers return to their mother’s home in nowheresville, Kentucky. Emmett has drifted into a job at a nearby massive warehousing and distribution centre called Tempo, a fictional stand-in for Amazon. Mass-produced goods arrive from far-flung places, only to be sent away somewhere else – a bit like Emmett himself, who has drifted around the US South, doing minimum-pay work and reading self-help guides on how to become a successful screenwriter. Joel, on the other hand, is living a budget version of Emmett’s dream; on the back of a successful academic work (Going South: The Descent of Rural America), he is taking a break from his university post in New York to teach for a semester back home.
The obvious pleasure in reading a novel is the suspense of what happens next. A less obvious pleasure is the unexpected rupture in the cause-and-effect chain of events: the moment when the novel provides a glimpse of a mysterious something, the numinous, beyond the realm of story. In the midst of a class on “Rural Despair and Late Capitalism”, Joel hears a sound at the classroom window: “It was a hummingbird floating there, near the tall, withered sunflowers. For a moment, however, he forgot what the bird was called. It was just this iridescent blur of life, wing-tips brushing the glass. His knees grew weak, and he gripped the edges of the lectern to steady himself. He was unable to speak, seized by something like panic. He lowered himself into a chair and clenched his fists to keep his hands from shaking. For a long moment, Joel sat like this, saying nothing.”
Such ruptures in the fabric of the narrative suggest that totalising ideologies – such as capitalism, with its marriage of supply and demand, desire and the satiation of desire – or Joel’s own rather complacent Marxism, are equally reductive. As Hamlet says, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy. How do we account for the significance of the hummingbird?
Joel teaches critical theory to college classes. He’s the sort of person who has actually read Foucault, Lacan and Deleuze; he’s familiar with the major and minor figures of the Frankfurt School. He’s erudite and well-meaning, a little stiff and often irritating. He is interested in puzzling contradictions that baffle leftists – such as why poor whites in the South fervently support Donald Trump even as he strips away their Medicare and provides tax breaks to billionaires.
The less theoretically minded Emmett inhabits this poor white culture that Joel, from his privileged position in academia, merely observes. Joel’s marriage is in trouble: his wife, Alice, increasingly disaffected with university life, has abandoned a PhD programme and wants to go off-grid and grow her own food. Emmett presents an attractive alternative to her cerebral husband – a Mellors, I guess, to his Sir Clifford Chatterley.
The plot unfolds as you might expect, and the novel has intelligent things to say about the difficulty of working out what it is we really want. In a terrific early scene, Emmett and Joel’s mother, Kathy, invites the extended family to a backyard barbecue. There’s Kathy’s brother Dale, who sells hot tubs; Dale’s wife Tonya (the couple both wear golfing apparel, though neither plays golf); deaf and half-senile Grandma Ruth; and Joel, Alice and Emmett. Dale’s job, he says with some satisfaction, is to convince people that despite economic uncertainty, they really need a hot tub. Grandma Ruth recounts a tragic story of someone’s daughter dying in a hot tub – “Why, anybody would pass out! All that steam. It’s like being boiled alive” – and Dale angrily responds: “Why do you always do this? Badmouthing my profession, my livelihood? Do you go around town telling people hot tubs are death traps?” “I don’t go anywhere, Ruth said. I gave my car away.”
Meanwhile, Tonya expresses interest in breeding Yorkipoos (“Lot of money in Yorkipoos,” says Dale). Joel disparages Emmett’s desire to become a screenwriter: “Emmett’s going to write a screenplay and sell it for a million dollars, Joel announced to the table.”
It’s like every fractious family gathering ever – awful to be there, fun to watch. But it’s also a clash of ideologies: Dale’s brash yet likeable capitalism collides with Joel’s Marxist leanings, which are in turn satirised when he equates creative success with financial value. Alice, infuriated by Joel’s condescension, takes Emmett’s side. It’s senile old Ruth who fares best here: “I gave my car away.”
The scene ends with the family in discord, and only Dale is still eating: “Untold riches, he said, cheeks full of pork. No greater treasure than family and friends.” Character, scene, comedy and social commentary are blended here with a lightness of touch worthy of Dickens.
The deftness and economy of such scenes demonstrate Cole’s mastery of the novelist’s tools, but beyond these set pieces are intimations of something more profound, borne by a messenger, perhaps a hummingbird, beating at a window to be let in.
Fulfillment, by Lee Cole (Allen and Unwin, $49.99 hb), is out now.
