Before we begin the review, the author’s copyright company is called ‘God’s Favourite Ltd’ and that’s the funniest shit that I’ve ever seen.

I originally picked up The List because I’d become lowkey obsessed with — not anti-#MeToo but — post-#MeToo books after reading I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai. While these books aren’t critical of the principle of of standing up publicly against sexualized violence, they are critical of the form that standing up takes — twitter mobs. They feature a broadly feminist woman who unexpectedly finds herself the main character of twitter due to a romantic relationship with a man accused of sexual harassment which leads her to question the validity of Internet mobs as a social response.

I was entranced; however, primarily by The List’s disproportionately low Goodreads score. The various dynamics of review scores mean that scores tend to be inflated, with mediocre books easily hitting 3.6-3.8 stars. The List has obtained a measly 3.11 (which actually dropped from 3.15 in the time I’ve had it shelved). This indicates one of two things: either it’s an uncomfortably nuanced look at a morally complex issue that fails to provide a sufficiently clear resolution or it’s racist in ways that even the Goodreads readership can’t forgive. The score isn’t about quality, it’s about how easy the optics of the book are to defend. And the optics of The List are not easy to defend.

I’ll admit though, I was surprised to see the scores concentrated around three stars, with the reviews citing good ideas that failed to really come together. There’s hope for Goodreads yet. There were, of course, also a bunch of one and two star reviews calling it ‘apologist trash’ so I can continue to smugly make my original point, something I’d been thinking about since before I even finished the book.

I don’t think The List is apologist trash. It is trying so very hard not to be. Michael believes himself to be falsely accused of abuse, but the book makes sure we know that he knows most of the other men on the list are guilty. Michael has no real problem with the principle behind the list. We’re shown that he knows he has treated the women in his life badly and has been a shitty boyfriend.

The final twist is even ‘women don’t make false accusations of abuse, men do.’

This book is desperate to let us know that it is about online toxicity, not about callouts being an inherently bad thing.

I don’t think that’s a bad point to make. Social ostracization resulting from bad faith accusations are demonstrably a problem in progressive spaces. In the six days it took me to read this book, my online town square (the eternally disreputable tumblr.com) saw two different callouts falsely accusing two different trans women of pedophilia. Callouts are a manifestation of social power and as such they work best on those with the least systemic power and poorly on those with the most. Give me half an hour on twitter and I could turn up dozens of small creatives, overwhelmingly queer, trans, and racialized, chased off the platform, but Harvey Weinstein is kind of the only super high profile man to receive actually permanent consequences, and only due to a pattern of unambiguously predatory behaviour stretching back decades.

As effective as callouts feel, they overwhelmingly target low profile vulnerable people and are ineffective at dealing with high profile, popular predators that actually make industries unsafe for women and marginalized people. I don’t think The List is wrong for wanting to explore that.

I also don’t think The List is effective at exploring that.

It was never going to succeed at what it wants to do because a culture of sexualized violence is a systemic problem and callouts and whisper networks are systemic level solutions. A fiction novel is about individuals — characters and their problems — and that lens is mutually exclusive with the systemic one.

The cold hard truth is that it doesn’t really matter if innocent guys get their shit ruined by something like the list so long as it generally increases the hostility of the industry to sexual predators. We can debate the effectiveness of that last part, but the fact that there will be exceptions isn’t important. Just like the fact that some women will navigate hostile industries without ever experiencing impropriety does not mean that those industries are safe for all women.

An individual lens can be interesting and valuable but it’s never going to be able to address systemic problems and systemic solutions.

An informative comparison here is Know My Name by Chanel Miller. Miller was sexually assaulted while unconscious by Stanford student Brock Turner, who, although he was convicted of the assault, was sentenced to six months in county jail (of which he served only three). Know My Name covers Miller’s experience both of the assault and of the convoluted and disappointing judicial procedure that followed. Miller is a great evocative writer and her memoir shines not just in how she illustrates her own experience and recovery, but also in how it explores the ways in which the systemic response to sexualized violence — hospitals, schools, the justice system — failed Miller and women like her. She clearly and effectively shows how these things are interlinked — good luck feeling in control of your like when your case is continuously rescheduled with no notice for over a year, good luck feeling empowered in your experience and emotions when the length and breadth of your testimony is controlled by a hostile defence attorney. Know My Name is as much and as effectively about the justice system as it is about Miller as an individual. It works because it understands the relationship between a systemic problem and an individual experience.

The List was never going to be able to achieve something like this, and I think it speaks to Miller’s talent as a writer that she is able to combine the two lenses so effectively. By contrast, The List feels shallow in the way that it prioritizes individual experience, especially the experience of men. Its development of Ola as a journalist who reported on sexual violence doesn’t feel developed enough to balance that out. I think if it had been less determined to engage primarily with the idea of the list (in the vein of Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams) it would have been received a lot better. That’s not to say that it couldn’t have succeeded in being political in any way (Queenie engages directly with sexism, racism, and sexual politics), but rather that such a firm focus required a more deft touch.

The List shines on the individual level. I think the characters are great. Uncharacteristically, since I’m a heartless bitch who hates romance, I was actually persuaded by the chemistry between Michael and Ola; I was cheering for them right until the end of the book. It’s clear why they like each other in spite of their bad behaviour and poor communication. I liked Michael’s crew. Again, it’s easy to see how charismatic and likeable guys like Amani remain popular in spite of their pattern of mistreating women. Team Kwabz all day though we love a respectful king. I also liked Ola’s friends, especially Ruth. I have criticism for how the characters fit into the narrative, but I like them so much as illustrations of Michael and Ola’s lives that I don’t even care. The novel’s true stroke of comedic genius is Frankie, whose multitudes contain both the inept ignorance of certain white feminists and the crocodile-like drive to succeed that kept an online publication independent well into 2018.

I do think The List is missing a trick. The accusations of it being ‘apologist trash’ come from the book’s often myopic focus on Michael’s emotions. Personally, I don’t think that undermines The List’s point, but it will be unwelcome for a lot of readers. The repercussions of the list on Michael’s career and emotional state are much more immediate to the story than the realization of how many women have been hurt

(despite The List’s attempt to address this through Celie)

. This could be averted by more of a critical focus on those emotions.

Being accused of being an abuser is viscerally upsetting to Michael and the other men. Knowing that people think badly of you sucks, especially when they’re objectively wrong about it. But, not to get too real, I was bullied as a kid, so the fact that people will hate you for no particular reason and you just kinda have to deal with that was something I learned when I was like eight.

The fact that people would think Micheal is an abuser is so disturbing to him that it drives him to attempt suicide.

It reminded me of an argument I hard in a video essay (by F.D. Signifier?) that the reason white people tend to see being accused of racism as worse than being racist is because an accusation of racism is something that a white person has no access too. It is acutely threatening to white supremacy because it is controlled exclusively by people of colour. I think an accusation of sexualized violence works analogously.

The fact that Michael can’t conclusively disprove the allegations is disturbing to him in part because it attacks patriarchal privilege in a way that privilege cannot respond to. I wish The List had dug a little deeper into this kind of problem. I think it would have felt a lot less accommodating to men’s feelings if it had done a little more to critically address why a man might feel this way. Even emotions like hurt and sadness are affected by societal inequality. Instead, it feels like the author’s obvious affection for her characters has kept her from pressing them too hard.

As I read The List, I kept coming back to the idea that it needed to do more somehow. The post-#MeToo genre has always been kind of unsatisfying to me because while it offers a reasonable critique of the movement (twitter mobs are not restorative justice), it feels like it constantly misses the mark on actually addressing the issues it raises. A hand-wringing Do Better PSA, no matter how well-delivered, is never going to make people be nicer on twitter. Hate mobs are a dynamic of the space, just like sexual assault is a dynamic of patriarchal society. And just like sexual assault, this isn’t going to be solved by enough people going ‘it’s me, hi, I’m the problem it’s me.’ The failing of the post-#MeToo novel is that even though it feels like a lot has changed, I don’t think much really has. A lot of the abusers targeted by the campaign have returned to their careers, or discovered the lucrative industry of pandering to reactionaries. We haven’t really seen much in the way of legislative change and I think last year’s trial of Amber Heard shows that changes in public opinion were more ephemeral than one might hope. Post-#MeToo books are unsatisfying because they feel like a criticism of a strawman. It would suck if a nationally famous closeted footballer committed suicide after his reputation was ruined by a twitter mob but like… would that actually happen in real life? Aren’t we just making up a guy to get mad at? Twitter is shit, but now that Elon Musk has flushed the website down the toilet of irrelevancy it’s becoming obvious that our problems are grounded in corporate control of media outlets. You know, structural things. Hand-wringing over people being mean online feels increasingly shallow.

Contrarian as I am, I’m loath to agree with the Goodreads commentariat, but I find myself falling into a pretty similar place. The List  has a lot of good ideas but ultimately fails to come together because it is attempting to discuss systemic interventions through an individual lens. The disconnect comes across as poorly thought out and under developed. My recommendation: read Know My Name, or Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo unless you’re specifically interested in post-#MeToo literature. 

Genuinely fuck this. You can write about evil and morally bad characters without making them all severely insufferable. I wasn’t rooting for anyone or any thing other than the percentage bar to continue creeping further towards 100%. The cultural pieces were touched on and then fully abandoned instead of properly delved into and considered- do the characters even care about their own ethnicities? Or are they just using them for instagram followers… Does the author even care about their ethnicities? She certainly didn’t honor them or hold any sort of cultural context within the story she chose to write. 

Do you want to know what happens in this book? Read the synopsis and then the final 10% for the lack of resolution or accountability from every single person involved in this shit show. Nothing else happens other than one self-righteous fight and one bit of drama at an event. the ONLY bit of additional drama that occurs at the single defined event of the entire book. 

If you want fanfiction of AD and Clay from Love Is Blind: here it is. The “I can fix him” and the “She’ll stand by me no matter what harm I do to her” thinking they can successfully have a marriage between them. 

This book was entirely one-note and the ending wasn’t the end of anything or an ending marked by change or growth or accountability or even fucking acknowledgment of inciting events. The plot holes were jarring and entirely unforgivable and every side character was interchangeable with eachother. Petty points off for the chapter titles being huge spoilers as well. 

The only compliment I can give is that it was an accurate representation of a shithead man but I already knew PLENTY about that from dropping my own last year. Beat for beat they had similar thoughts and excuses. The audiobook narrator did well wresting and differentiating all of the different one note characters and their accents. The content was truly enraging but her job was very well done.  

In the Q&A between the voice actor/narrator and the author I found the jokes about cancelling *them* over tiny things to be wildly tone deaf. Do you truly think a self deprecating joke about your own work is equivalent to date rape/kidnapping/assault/ coercion/etc etc etc etc listed in your own fucking book? Now who’s trivializing things? The lack of proper content warnings is abhorrent considering the thing I’ve chosen to spoiler over below. 

Maybe it’s cold but the only thing I was rooting for was

for michael’s suicide attempt to have been successful. It really would’ve saved everyone the hassle of knowing him and dealing with his bullshit. He couldn’t even off himself correctly and then couldn’t even take accountability for the fact that he even attempted it??? Mans can dodge every single thing in his life including cars I guess. I wanted to hit him again hearing that. 

Also why the fuck did he wake up with a feeding tube. That makes no sense. the science in this book sucked shit too but now I truly am being petty.