The unusually wide-angle perspective may owe something to the fact that the main character, slightly older than the Bildungsroman norm, has a lot of experiential miles behind him. Owen Callhan is 28, a University of Kentucky graduate from a blue-collar background recently emerged from a period of drug abuse, unemployment and homelessness to reluctantly move into the basement of his grandfather’s “cracker box house” in Louisville. He’s taken a groundskeeping job at nearby Ashby College so he can take a writing workshop; employees are allowed one free class. Cole expertly sets up Owen’s central dilemma — and love interest — on the first page: “When I’m home, in Kentucky, all I want is to leave. When I’m away, I’m homesick for a place that never was. This is what I told Alma the night we met.”
Alma Hadzic, 26, is the daughter of educated, affluent Bosnian immigrants, refugees from the 1990s civil war who made good again in America; she’s a Princeton graduate and holds a prestigious visiting writer fellowship at Ashby. They meet at a graduate student party in a house decorated by “someone with an overdeveloped sense of irony and curation, who also happened to be broke.” (Cole has a sharp eye for the way physical surroundings reflect their inhabitants’ characters and circumstances.) Owen plays up his redneck background to intrigue Alma, but we quickly realize that he’s deeply ambivalent about it: embarrassed by his relatives’ lack of education and polish, but contemptuous of more fortunate people’s blinkered perspective and assumptions of superiority.
It takes longer to see Alma’s vulnerabilities, slowly revealed while the two dance around each other as “friends.” She’s intrigued by Owen but “with” Casey, a fellow student in the writing workshop. Casey was instrumental in getting Alma’s poems slated for publication by a small press, a validation that she needs. “If I don’t have people around me, telling me what I am, I start to feel like an imposter,” she tells Owen. “My parents wanted me to be exceptional.” Alma’s feelings differ from Owen’s “desire to both honor and criticize, to be of a place, and to merely be in it, as a visitor,” but the emotional fallout is similar. They both stand outside situations, watching and weighing, and their recognition of this essential loneliness in each other eventually gets them into bed together.
This, of course, resolves nothing. In the tense months following Donald Trump’s election, visits to their respective parents underscore their different backgrounds. Owen is as appalled as Alma by his mother’s and stepfather’s support for Trump and insistence that evolution is “just a theory,” but he’s also put off by her parents mouthing “the expected liberal talking points and platitudes.” Because he knows his mother and stepfather are kind, caring people, convictions he abhors are hard to dismiss: “It was easy to be angry, but to hold this anger and this love at the same time — this fission in my heart — that was the unending task, the difficult work.” He has a similar problem on the groundskeeping crew when he learns that Rando, an older co-worker he likes, also voted for Trump, because “I’ve always voted for the anti-establishment candidate.” Alma, whose knowledge of loss and displacement comes from her parents’ memories rather than lived experience, can’t hide her shock at some of the seamier aspects of Owen’s past, and professional developments that would land them in different cities complicate their relationship.
Given a novel so satisfyingly rich in themes and details, a review can only touch briefly on some of its many virtues. Among them are a tender portrait of Owen’s unfailingly supportive grandfather Pop, an exemplar of working-class honor and stoicism, and a painfully shaded one of his uncle Cort, a 52-year-old failure who voices a string of racist and sexist opinions, but in one heartbreaking moment asks, “Do you think I wanted to live this life?” Cole writes about lives damaged beyond repair and the accommodations people make to endure them with sensitivity and understanding, qualities he shares with his protagonist. Owen is entirely believable as a developing writer, jotting down his recollections and observations as the building blocks of his project to become an artist and a better human being. Alma is depicted with equal subtlety and generosity; their relationship drives the plot and brings the novel to a fitting conclusion. “Groundskeeping” is very fine work indeed from an exciting new voice.
Wendy Smith is the author of “Real Life Drama: The Group Theatre and America, 1931-1940.”
Groundskeeping
By Lee Cole
Knopf. 336 pp. $28
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