Groundskeeping: A Read with Jenna Pick: A novel

Written by Lee Cole

Narrated by Michael Crouch

A TODAY SHOW #ReadWithJenna BOOK CLUB PICK • An indelible love story about two very different people navigating the entanglements of class and identity and coming of age in an America coming apart at the seams—this is "an extraordinary debut about the ties that bind families together and tear them apart across generations" (Ann Patchett, best-selling author of The Dutch House).

In the run-up to the 2016 election, Owen Callahan, an aspiring writer, moves back to Kentucky to live with his Trump-supporting uncle and grandfather. Eager to clean up his act after wasting time and potential in his early twenties, he takes a job as a groundskeeper at a small local college, in exchange for which he is permitted to take a writing course.

Here he meets Alma Hazdic, a writer in residence who seems to have everything that Owen lacks—a prestigious position, an Ivy League education, success as a writer. They begin a secret relationship, and as they grow closer, Alma—who comes from a liberal family of Bosnian immigrants—struggles to understand Owen’s fraught relationship with family and home. 

Exquisitely written; expertly crafted; dazzling in its precision, restraint, and depth of feeling, Groundskeeping is a novel of haunting power and grace from a prodigiously gifted young writer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
• Release date: Mar 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9780593552018

Reviews for Groundskeeping

[jghewson · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Highly recommended for literary fiction readers; beautifully written, wise and insightful, great narrative. One of those books you don't want to end!

[ccayne_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

There is a lot in this book - dreams not realized, class, ambition, family, work, place, creating an adult life. Cole portrayed each of these facets well. I wonder how much of the story is Cole's life and in the end, does it matter. The relationship between Owen and Alma was very real as were all his relationships. I also liked Owen's background of working so many jobs while all the time trying to see himself as a writer . As I write this, I realize I should give it five stars.

[shazjhb · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Just my type of book. Set in Kentucky. Interesting people including the main character and a great support caste. Book about writers.

[narshkite · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A beautifully written and very modern love story (which is not to say a romance) between two people who identify themselves by their craft, writing. Alma identifies that way because academic accomplishment is the pathway to love in her progressive upper middle-class Serbian immigrant family. She writes therefore she is. Owen identifies as a writer because otherwise despite his degree he is a groundskeeper, a minimum wage job, less economically successful than his fundamentalist, uneducated redneck family members whom he wishes to be superior to (for good reason.) Owen has aspirations and talent but no ability to rub elbows with the "right" people. Alma, Princeton educated, published (short stories) and recipient of residencies and fellowships knows how to interact with the "East Coast elites" (that phrase is used in the book to express the fear of Owen's parents that he will wander off into the heathen intelligentsia) but is kind of stuck in finishing her novel and in figuring out how to find a stable life as a literary darling whose only skill is teaching when the US no longer values higher education in the liberal arts. The central relationship also bows under the weight of the roadblocks to love that come in the form of dueling professional ambitions and from the art and craft of writing itself (is everything that happens in a relationship fair fodder for literary treatment?)

This is also a love (or really a love/hate) story between a man and his home state of Kentucky. That part of the story provides a framework to look at different kinds of Americans. Alma's DC suburb dwelling family prizes knowledge and intelligence, sometimes at the cost of offering unconditional love. Owen's deeply rural family thrives on willful ignorance, sort of hating the fact that Owen thinks about things rather than just forming opinions or simply doing. They don't understand his objection to a life of going to church and watching old movies. They think they are nice. They choose not to see that their blindered world view and support of a loathsome administration that grinds groups (Black people, immigrants, etc.) under their bootheels to appease the other ignorant people who are not nice but who vote is destroying everything good.

I enjoyed this quiet, smart, beautifully crafted novel. I found myself savoring the language, rereading passages that seemed to break more than a few rules in a way I imagine is uncomfortable for an Iowa Writers' Program guy.

[mzonderm · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Owen is stuck between his humble beginnings, as he sees them, in rural Kentucky, his string of menial jobs, and his sense of himself as a writer living a cerebral life. He's convinced that his girlfriend looks down on him for coming from a blue-collar background, and he can't blame her, as he himself continuously sneers at his parents for their unenlightened political viewpoints and small-town perspectives.

I'm not sure what book Lee Cole thought he was writing here. Possibly a book about a struggling writer. Possibly a book of class differences in romantic relationships. Possibly a book about someone who rejects his conservative upbringing in favor of his current liberal outlook. Unfortunatley, the book ultimately doesn't succeed in being any of those. Instead, it's a mash of unrealized characters who spend a lot of time in unfulfilling conflict with themselves and each other, and it all just seemed pointless and pretentious.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for this review.

[nancyadair-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I am a child of the suburbs. My husband’s career took us into the inner city and middling-sized towns and small towns and resort towns. Once, I told a teenager at a resort town that it was a beautiful place to grow up. He scowled. I discovered his graduating class was 23 students. Ouch. Another small town had an annual ‘pumpkin roll;’ the road on the hill into downtown was lined with bales of hay, and people rolled their pumpkins down the hill.

So, when the main character in Groundskeeping told about the annual Halloween event of soaking a bale of hay in kerosene, lighting it on fire, and rolling it down the hill into downtown, I perfectly understood his hometown.

“I’ve always had the same predicament. 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.” These were Owen’s first words to Alma when they met at a party. She tells him she is from “a country that no longer exists,” her Muslin family refugees from Bosnia.

Alma is a visiting writer on fellowship at Ashby College. She went to an ivy league school. Her family is well off. After college, Own had faltered, became addicted to opioids, and recovered, and now is working at the college so he could take one free writing class a semester. Owen is a groundskeeper living with his elderly grandfather, who watches John Wayne movies, and his disabled, disgruntled, Trumpite uncle. His parents are divorced, his mother a evangelical Christian married to a Trump voter and his father caring for a wife dying of cancer. Owen longs to escapee the Bible Belt and everything it stands for.

They could not be more different. They become lovers. But life is not a novel or a movie. Sometimes there is no happily ever after. Not when it’s a choice between love and career.

I wasn’t sure how I would respond to a novel about young people finding themselves. I am over forty years beyond that age. But the fine writing and characterization was captivating, the sense of place and time is vivid. Owen’s story is about turning out different from your family, escaping the fate of your peers. Alma’s family history is filled with horror and tragedy, and finding the American Dream.

Author Lee Cole captures America in the age of Trump, opioid addiction, and anti-immigrant sentiment.

The morning after the election that brought Trump into office, Rodin’s The Thinker was found spray painted with swastikas. Owen thinks, “from here on out. We would be crass and ugly, and nothing would be hidden.” His coworker Rando announces that he has “always voted for the anti-establishment candidate…Anybody who’s gonna shake the system up.” He believes that the votes aren’t even counted, that “its all decided behind closed doors by the big banks and the one-percenters.”

Owen’s hometown peers have crashed and burned into addiction, jail, and early death. He takes Alma to Cracker Barrel, explaining its country food and farm decor’s familiarity to working class people, noting that the waitress “had the look of someone on the precipice of ruin.” Visiting Owen’s mom, Alma must contend with the penchant for pork, the separate bedrooms for her and Owen, his mom’s preference for his last girlfriend who she is still in contact with, and her rejection of evolution. Later, Alma muses,” why would an intelligent designer make a universe that resulted in all this? In genocide and capitalism and Taco Bell?”

The question is if their love affair can span their differences, and if their careers are more important. Cole makes us care about these characters.

I received a free egalley from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

[pgchuis · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I received a copy of this novel from the publisher via NetGalley.

This was a novel about writers and writing, and it all became a bit circular at the end. I didn't warm to either Owen or Alma particularly, and since I felt their relationship was doomed, the ending confused me. This was also a novel focusing on the class systems in the US, and at times it felt slightly tick-box: there were Trump voters, evolution deniers, racism, Confederate flags. Alma's fear of Owen's past addiction issues on the other hand felt very authentic.