Groundskeeping

I recently finished an excellent novel by Lee Cole called Groundskeeping and was struck not only by the author’s voice but by the depiction of a time that I lived through and so viscerally experienced. The novel is about a young man, Owen, who takes a job as a groundskeeper at a small college to be able to take a course there for free. He wants to be a writer, is trying to right his life, and falls in love. In many ways, this is well-worn novelistic ground, but besides Cole’s excellent writing, what differentiates it is its setting—2016, a year seared into our national collective consciousness. 

When I started this book, I had a hard time comprehending that 2016 was, in fact, seven years ago. It felt unfathomable that so much time had passed since that election and all that came with it. I suppose part of that disbelief exists because we still seem to live in that time. We’re gearing up for another election with many of the same characters. The same issues still blare through our headphones and televisions. Few people have changed their minds. Most have simply grown angrier. 

I love history and novels (or films or television) that take place during a notable moment or era. Whether that be historical fiction or a film that was current when it came out but now serves as a monument to a time and place. I am particularly fond of the paranoid thrillers of the late sixties and early seventies. The post-Watergate mistrust of establishment mixed with some Vietnam-induced anxiety creates a potent cocktail. One of the things I love about those films is how they are both distinctly tied to a time and place and yet still feel current. They use the backdrop of their era to create a timeless narrative.

Those films, or the countless other times and places I’ve escaped to, happened before my time. They happened in a world that I could only ever read about. A world that history had judged and analyzed and (mostly) survived. Groundskeeping is one of the first novels I’ve read about a significant historical moment in which I was a witness.

Naturally, there have been many other pieces of fiction where I was alive during the events. I was alive during 9/11, for example, but I was a child. I lived it through the prism and safety of childhood. The 2016 election was not like that. I voted in it. I worried about it. I had interminable conversations about the participants and what was at stake. And I watched as the ground disappeared from under my feet. 

Cole manages to depict the tension and anxiety surrounding that time brilliantly. Owen lives in the basement of his grandfather’s house as he tries to get his life back on track. His grandfather is a widower whose fifty-one-year-old son, Cort, lives with him. Cort is a Trump supporter. So is one of Owen’s coworkers. So are Owen’s mother and stepfather. 

But his love interest, Alma, and another coworker and Owen himself are not Trump supporters. They detest him and all he stands for with a visceral hatred that bleeds through the page. 

These people must coexist and, for the most part, often ignore their political differences. Every conversation Owen has with his two coworkers who stand firmly on opposite sides of the political fence does not revolve around politics. They don’t universally despise each other. And the reader is the same. You roll through sections of the novel, forgetting about various people’s political leanings. At least you do right up until the election. 

This is what it was like. This was how it felt. It was an ever-present anxiety weighing on your every thought, but you still lived your life.

The novel does a beautiful job of depicting the social divide that exists in our nation. A campus was a logical place to set this conversation. There are the students, mostly liberal, and the workers, mostly conservative, and Owen straddles those two worlds. He eats reheated McDonald’s leftovers with his grandfather and uncle while they watch John Wayne films and avoid discussing politics, before he goes to a bar, where he basks in the irony and nostalgia of the left. 

But the novel does not succeed solely because it accurately depicts these two worlds and that time and place. You need more to make a great novel. You need a soul. And Groundskeeping dug into me more because of the portrait of Owen than the politics of 2016. 

Owen is in his late twenties after wasting years living a rudderless existence where he was a borderline addict. He’s not sober in the novel, but he is trying to exorcise his past and start fresh. Only he can’t. The person he was, left an indelible imprint on who he is, and the people in his life—Alma, his parents, his grandfather—cannot let that past go. It takes years to reshape who you are, but Owen longs to have it done in a swift stroke. 

I’ve been there. I was there at almost the same time Owen was. It took me a few more years to turn things around. I was still drinking in 2016, still stuck spinning my wheels, still pretending that things weren’t as bad as they seemed (though I don’t think even I believe that lie anymore). But when I finally did begin to turn that corner, as Owen does in this novel, I was afraid that I could never undo what I’d done. Owen shares this fear.

I can’t tell you how often I read a passage and felt the author was writing about me. When Alma, his accomplished girlfriend, tells him that all his years spent working bad jobs and struggling were just research for his future as a writer, he responds, “I didn’t feel like an undercover writer… I felt like a failure.” Lines and sentiments like that separate this novel from similar ones I’ve read. 

Cole rather brilliantly uses this character and this time to mirror one another. One of the primary issues that seems to dominate our current political discussion has to do with the past. It is about our national history and the way we tell our story. One side wishes that story to be one of triumph and unmitigated success. The other sees it as a horror story with closets full of skeletons we’d rather ignore. The truth is, both as individuals and as a nation, that we cannot escape our past. Just as Owen’s years spent living out of his car and struggling with addiction cannot be erased by getting a job and trying to become a writer. Our national scars cannot be erased with any one action. We cannot pretend they didn’t happen. I love how Cole folds those two narratives into one another and shines a light on our national conversation by using an individual. 

It’s a lovely novel full of heart and humor and compassion. It’s political because to write about 2016 and avoid politics would be disingenuous, but it does not force politics into every conversation or onto every page. It’s an accurate representation both of that time and of what it’s like to try to fix your life in your late twenties. It’s a brave novel from an exciting voice reminiscent of Sally Rooney or Ben Lerner, and I can’t wait to see what he writes next.