Reading Groundskeeping

the American writer

I had real trouble with Wifi in my Airbnb and I started inhaling books again, instead of clicking restlessly around the Internet. And I read when I have Wifi, just not the way I used to.

I finished Lee Cole’s Groundskeeping: it is a debut novel about a working class man who works as a groundskeeper at a small liberal arts college in his native Kentucky in order to take a writing workshop class. He falls in love with the writer in residence, an Ivy Educated prodigy and dark haired beauty who at 26, is already an acclaimed author. He and she have an academic year love affair. The protagonist Owen, has been living in his grandfather’s basement with a reclusive MAGA uncle and Pops, who is obsessed with John Wayne Westerns.

It is well written, finely observed, the first novel of the fractured post-Trump world. Cole seems to have gone to the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Much respect for the writer he became.

Coles has escaped the MFA style and found his own voice and vision as a writer and it is unsentimental about the widening gap between his literary ambitions and the world his talent opens up to him and the world of his parents and grandfather. The descriptions of Kentucky’s natural beauty are heartbreaking. The portraits of the people the protagonist loves but cannot be with are equally vivid and precise.

My only reservation about this novel is that IS really a product of the “write what you know” ethos of writing programs. To follow these instructions, writers have to accept that the only way to create a literary perspective is to undertake a complex and well crafted rendering of the experiences of being a writer. Writers start to write about being in MFA programs or working in the American Academy of Berlin or Rome as the writer in residence. Gary Shteyngart didn’t begin his career in this way, but his novels have increasingly come up against the limits of his experience as a successful writer.

The one American novel I read recently that actually takes on this writers writing about writing workshops in a brutally acerbic way is Jean Hanff Korelitz’s The Plot. It opens with a mediocre writer, teaching writing as a small New England college and trying to write at a pay to play fake writer’s residency, where he gets free room and board in return for imparting his wisdom to aspiring writers. It contains some of the most well crafted renderings of the tragicomic futility of teaching writing. It is a plot driven suspense novel as the title portends: the protagonist is not only a mediocre writer, he is a bad reader.

In Groundskeeping, there are many scenes where people read: but there are few scenes of people struggling with words: they struggle with who can write about what. I don’t want to take anything away from this debut novel and I’ve never been in a writer’s workshop so what do I know?

Maybe an entire world is contained in observed details and a moment, right after the 2016 elections can be captured in sorghum syrup, Confederate flags, flea market finds, MSNBC as background noise in the girlfriend’s family’s suburban home. Maybe that is enough for us, sleepwalking angrily into the future together as a broken country. Maybe writers should only write about writing classes and in them find the universe in the head of pin. Groundskeeping doesn’t do a bad job of rendering a stillness at the heart of a suffering, fragmented country, that on some basic level, we love.