This fizzy, satisfying read has echoes of Jonathan Franzen

Times

3 days ago

The great Kurt Vonnegut once set out eight rules for writing stories, one of which was: 'Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.' In Fulfillment, the second novel by the American writer Lee Cole (the title retains the US spelling), the central question is: what exactly do we want?
In most stories, it's straightforward. A character wants something — love, riches, one ring to rule them all — then gets it or doesn't, with interruptions along the way. This is a fruitful if predictable path, but what might be more interesting is if the characters don't know what they want. It might be more realistic too: the psychologist Abraham Maslow said, 'It isn't normal to know what we want. It's a rare and difficult psychological achievement.' While that might not get you far when there's a queue behind you in Starbucks, it makes for a pretty satisfying novel.
Cole introduces us to Emmett Shaw and his half-brother Joel, who share a mother but are otherwise very different. Joel, 33, has a wife and a successful, fulfilled academic career, and has written a book with his 'smug-looking photo on the jacket'. Emmett is drifting at 28, and has 'never taken a job or made a commitment in his life that he couldn't walk away from at a moment's notice'. He thinks about becoming a screenwriter, although that seems more because he wants to find something to do rather than because he really wants to do it.
Emmett and Joel don't really stay in touch: their text messages are 'just a series of alternating Happy Birthday! messages, stretching back four years'. The plot gets moving when both brothers are back home in Kentucky with their mother. She's addicted to Fox News, which offers another form of fulfilment, by reliably telling her what she wants to hear. When she criticises Joel's electric car, he asks righteously, 'What's your vision of the future? Are we all driving Hummers to our jobs at the local coal mine?'
As for Emmett, he's deeper in the world of wanting than anyone. He's just got a job at a fulfilment centre for Tempo, a thinly disguised Amazon corporate behemoth. He's a tiny pixel in the superstructure of a modern tech industry that is built round not just delivering what we want — next day, same day, so we can move on to wanting the next thing — but also predicting what we want ('customers like you also bought this'). 'Our phones listen to us,' Joel's wife Alice says. 'They know what we want before we do.'
Emmett, with little to lose, gets involved with a colleague's plot to steal medication from shipments they are unpacking and sell them. But more significantly, he gets involved with Alice, who was never sure she wanted Joel in the first place, and is now sure she doesn't. What better way to fulfilment than to have an affair with your husband's half-brother, someone who is like him and not?
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Fulfillment seems to be aiming for somewhere between Nathan Hill's satire of modern mores (even the title has echoes of Wellness) and Jonathan Franzen's family turbulence. There's a desperate comedy to the characters' efforts to stave off boredom by any means — crime, sex, conspiracy theories — and a nice fizzy energy to the way even secondary characters are on the make, including the man who thinks being an Uber driver makes him an entrepreneur. Cole has an astute ear also for the verbal racket of modern life, from colleagues with sappy fridge-magnet-level mottos of advice ('Stay in the present') to the found poetry of medication side-effect warnings. 'Agitation, insomnia, sexual disappointment, sudden flatulence…'
From time to time, though, you can hear the clunk of the author pulling levers to advance the plot, as when Joel is mistaken for a much more popular author, or when Emmett decides to take a break from the family for a few days and suddenly Alice needs to go with him for spurious reasons. (The real reason being, Cole needs to get their affair to the next level.)
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The last 50 pages accelerate everything and wrap up all the plot points a bit too quickly. But that's not fatal: endings are hard, and in a way all these manipulations are an extension of the book's purpose. Why do we read if not to be taken for a ride by the author? Anyway, the scenes that result from these unlikely developments are funny and interesting, and the ending has a neatness that works, so we forgive them. Fulfillment is engaging, thoughtful and bang up-to-date.
Fulfillment by Lee Cole (Faber & Faber £18.99 336pp). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members