Lee Cole is an author who was born and grew up in rural Kentucky, and his novel Groundskeeping features an aspiring author named Owen Callahan who was born and grew up in Kentucky…hmm. I would not be surprised to learn that a boatload of the thoughts and feelings in the novel are drawn directly from his life experience, whether or not the events and people are.
Owen graduated from college and then drifted for awhile, holding odd jobs until he had to go back to Kentucky to live of his grandfather’s house with Pop, his elderly grandfather, and his uncle, a truly dislikable character with a disability (the nature of which isn’t quite clear to me). Owen gets a job as a groundskeeper at the local college and signs up for a writing course. The job suits him well: “That was the good thing about menial work–it was basic enough that you could think about whatever you wanted.”
Living in a house with his grandfather and uncle is challenging for Owen, who is having enough trouble being back in a small rural town.Although he is well aware of the hold Kentucky has on him, he doesn’t quite fit in. “I’ve wanted to be a coastal elite my whole life…I’d spent too much of my life with people from Kentucky, whose failures and crutches and small joys were predictable, precisely because they were mine as well.”
Owen meets Alma, a published author who is living at the college as part of being awarded a fellowship. The book follows their relationship and Owen’s search for a direction in life during the months before the 2016 election. Owen isn’t comfortable living with two Trump lovers, and is focused mostly on Alma: “I felt the competing desires, as I often did when meeting someone new, to know everything at once and to save it all for later.” For her part, Alma is less than confident about her own path “ If I don’t have people around me, telling me what I am, I start to feel like an imposter, she said. I start to feel like I don’t even exist.”
Owen’s life isn’t totally stable (“ I had student loans, two maxed-out credit cards”) and Alma, raised in privilege, is particularly dismayed when he tells her how he had lived in his car for awhile.
They spend a lot of time together, even visiting Thomas Merton’s grave, where the contrast between the upheaval around the election and the peaceful setting is crystal clear: “Outside, the whole shitty slow-motion apocalypse of late capitalism was unfolding, but here, within the stone walls, there was peace and quiet.” The story unfolds at a leisurely pace, following their relationship to an uncertain conclusion: “We were just two little people who’d tried to love each other in the middle of a mess.”
Overall, I couldn’t decide if it was just good or if I loved it. I admit that written dialogue WITHOUT quotation marks isn’t my favorite style, but I adjusted to it, and was really involved in finding out what was ahead for Owen, geographically as well as romantically and with his longed-for writing career. Beautifully written and I’m still thinking about the characters days later, so clearly it was effective! I look forward to more from Cole. Five stars and thanks to Knopf Doubleday and NetGalley for providing a copy in exchange for this honest review.