The F*ck It List By John Niven

Frank Brill is the retired editor of a small-town newspaper. It’s 2026 USA and President Donald J Trump has enjoyed two full terms in office. Now he's retired and playing golf, while his daughter, Ivanka, is President. The Trump years have changed the US immeasurably. It’s become a coarser, uglier, country. A place characterised by rampant nationalism and chauvinism. And Frank has suffered from this ugliness. His wife and son were slain in one of the increasingly commonplace mass shootings, which in a country over which the NRA holds sway, is a blight that will be never be tackled. His daughter’s death can be traced directly, albeit inadvertently, to a policy decision of Donal J Trump. 

Brill is no saint. He’s a man who's been married three times, each time cheating on, and trading in, his wife for a younger model. Only his last wife did he not discard, though he might have in time, instead, she dying alongside his son. So he’s a man wracked by guilt and remorse for his own failings and anger for those of others. 

When Frank is diagnosed with terminal cancer and given just months to live, he has one last roll of the dice. But whereas other people have a bucket list, Frank has a F*ck It list. This started as just ramblings, self-therapy to explore his anger. But slowly it’s coalesced into something far more concrete and he’s looked into how it would be achieved. In short, Frank has a list of people who he wishes to kill before his time has come to an end. Some of these are personal: people who’ve hurt friends and loved ones directly; others are more abstract: people who’ve hurt the country, and those he knows and loves one step removed.

I’m not giving much away in telling readers of this review that the person topping the list is Donald J Trump himself. While this isn’t explicitly spelled out in the publicity for this title, it’s implicitly hinted at. Fictionalised assassination attempts are nothing new, there have been numerous fictionalised accounts of the assassination of Hitler, and that of JFK, (the former take the form of what-if scenarios, while the latter posit a conspiracy rather than Lee Harvey Oswald). While fictionalised wish-fulfillment is rarer (to an extent Hitler assassination novels fit this category, though they tend to be more World War 2 alternative histories), it’s still not uncommon. For example, in 2014 Hillary Mantell said in an interview that she fantasised about murdering Margaret Thatcher in 1983 and wrote a short story about it. While my favourite book of 2019 was Kill Redacted by Anthony Good, which fictionalises the murder of a former Prime Minister, and while the individual isn’t named, it’s quite clearly supposed to be Tony Blair. 

The Fuck It List fits squarely into the wish-fulfillment category. The author, John Niven, makes no bones as to where his sympathies lie, and reading this novel you develop empathy for Frank Brill and what he is trying to do. All of which is quite problematic. To be clear, I have no liking for Trump and consider the current White House incumbent to be protofascist. I liked Frank, and reading this book you can’t help but cheer him on. And obviously, this is just a novel. But imagine if someone had written a novel fantasising about the assassination of Barack Obama? Or Hillary Clinton (not so far-fetched, seeing as the baying crowds chanted for her to be locked up). Would we be so sanguine then?

Of course, I loved Kill Redacted, that was my book of 2019, and as mentioned that fantasised about the assassination of Blair (though again, he was never named). I think the point is that this needs to be done carefully, and while The Fuck it List is a great book and brilliantly written, I did feel that Niven imbued it with just a little too much enthusiasm. In both Kill Redacted and The Fuck It List the protagonists are deeply flawed people, but in the latter, you can ignore this more. Frank Brill is a sh*t, but the novel moves at a clip to its denouement and he’s likeable despite his flaws. The protagonist of Kill Redacted, on the other hand, is a far more brittle and alienating figure. Thus, the reader of that novel is forced to confront what the protagonist is planning to do and its consequences.

The Fuck It List is a great book, as was Niven’s debut Kill Your Friends. Niven rights challenging and controversial stories and this is a novel that fits well in his canon of work. This is a very entertaining novel, but it’s not one without its flaws.

4 out of 5 stars