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List: A Novel
Vignettes of a middle-class American family told through lists, each reflecting their obsessions, their complaints, their desires, and their humanity.
A suburban family of four―a man, woman, boy, and girl―struggle through claustrophobic days crowded with home improvement projects, conflicts at work and school, a job loss, illnesses, separation, and the wearying confrontation with aging. The accoutrements of modern life―electronic devices and vehicles―have ceased to be tools that support them and have become instead the central fulcrums around which their lives wheel as they chase “cleanliness” and other high virtues of middle American life.
In Matthew Roberson’s hands, the family’s list-making transcends the simple goal of planning. Their lists reveal the aspirations and anxieties that lie beneath the superficial clatter of everyday activities. Fearing the aimless chaos of unplanned days, the family compulsively compiles lists as maps to steer them away from uncertainty and failure, and yet at what point does a list stop being a map and become the final destination? The family creates an illusory cloud of meaningful activity but cannot stave off the mortal entropies that mark the suburban middle class.
A suburban family of four―a man, woman, boy, and girl―struggle through claustrophobic days crowded with home improvement projects, conflicts at work and school, a job loss, illnesses, separation, and the wearying confrontation with aging. The accoutrements of modern life―electronic devices and vehicles―have ceased to be tools that support them and have become instead the central fulcrums around which their lives wheel as they chase “cleanliness” and other high virtues of middle American life.
In Matthew Roberson’s hands, the family’s list-making transcends the simple goal of planning. Their lists reveal the aspirations and anxieties that lie beneath the superficial clatter of everyday activities. Fearing the aimless chaos of unplanned days, the family compulsively compiles lists as maps to steer them away from uncertainty and failure, and yet at what point does a list stop being a map and become the final destination? The family creates an illusory cloud of meaningful activity but cannot stave off the mortal entropies that mark the suburban middle class.
224 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 2014
1 person is currently reading
20 people want to read
About the author
Matthew Roberson
5 books24 followersMatthew Roberson is the author of four novels—1998.6, Impotent, List, and the recently published campus novel Interim. He also edited the collection Musing the Mosaic: Approaches to Ronald Sukenick. His short fiction has appeared in Fourteen Hills, Fiction International, Clackamas Literary Review, Western Humanities Review, Notre Dame Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and others. He lives and teaches in central Michigan.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
July 19, 2017
Matt Roberson writes sadness in a way that cuts into your heart, in a way that you thought only you felt but didn't tell anyone, in a place deep down inside of you where the secrets and fear reside.
Check out the first stop of Matt Roberson's virtual book tour at PhD in Creative Writing, a blog run by author Kelcey Parker. Links are still available after the tour.
Tuesday, read and excerpt + insights from List at Book Puke.
Wednesday, Matt's book stops over at [PANK]! This interview about the content of List is illuminating, especially the part about Book Club Picks.
Thursday, Matt creates a list of the lists in List. It's meta-listing and Words, Notes, & Fiction.
I share an essay about Generation X at The Next Best Book Club blog that compares the generation's characteristics to the lives of the characters in List. It was a lot of fun to compose!
Check out the first stop of Matt Roberson's virtual book tour at PhD in Creative Writing, a blog run by author Kelcey Parker. Links are still available after the tour.
Tuesday, read and excerpt + insights from List at Book Puke.
Wednesday, Matt's book stops over at [PANK]! This interview about the content of List is illuminating, especially the part about Book Club Picks.
Thursday, Matt creates a list of the lists in List. It's meta-listing and Words, Notes, & Fiction.
I share an essay about Generation X at The Next Best Book Club blog that compares the generation's characteristics to the lives of the characters in List. It was a lot of fun to compose!
April 10, 2014
I'm not a huge fan of postmodern fiction, but Matt Roberson is a genius storyteller, so I'm a huge fan of this book (as well as all of his writing).
The characters of List explode with realness, plunge into our sensibilities, insist we believe their lives. Roberson's talent for melancholy is astounding, and I found myself overwhelmed at how true to life these stories are.
The list-like writing style of List, which at first may seem haphazard or purely aesthetic, actually benefits the reader by pacing the stories to enhance suspense, grief, and resolution. Roberson times phrases, pinpoints language, and stresses syllables, all of which adds to the intensity of emotion and impact throughout the book.
In the end, I feel like my first phrase has become a lie. I thoroughly enjoy all of Matt Roberson's work, which, I suppose, makes me a fan of postmodern fiction after all.
Thanks, Matt.
The characters of List explode with realness, plunge into our sensibilities, insist we believe their lives. Roberson's talent for melancholy is astounding, and I found myself overwhelmed at how true to life these stories are.
The list-like writing style of List, which at first may seem haphazard or purely aesthetic, actually benefits the reader by pacing the stories to enhance suspense, grief, and resolution. Roberson times phrases, pinpoints language, and stresses syllables, all of which adds to the intensity of emotion and impact throughout the book.
In the end, I feel like my first phrase has become a lie. I thoroughly enjoy all of Matt Roberson's work, which, I suppose, makes me a fan of postmodern fiction after all.
Thanks, Matt.
July 16, 2017
Maybe we as creatures are hard-wired to mate for life, but we're not hard-wired for the institutionalization of that habit. Maybe the "to do" list is all part of being an advanced species that plans for the future, but itineraries strictly regimented by time of day are a relatively recent and jarring evolutionary leap for homo sapiens. There's plenty of debate about our narrative impulse, the purpose it serves for us as creatures, in particular the tendency we have these days to map a narrative arc onto our chaotic years.
We become habituated to these three organizational methods, but Matthew Roberson's novel "List" shows that they aren't always compatible—and that dissonance between these systems have major consequences in an individual's psyche and the dynamic of a family. The list itself, a basic representation of our myriad attempts to organize our lives and civilizations, works insidiously like a narrative virus, contaminating both the narrators' ways of viewing the world and the novel's linearity, fracturing or atomizing the traditional plot arc into a series of discrete fragments that cannot cohere into a meaningful story because the narrators have been betrayed by faulty ideas about life and art (by which I mean mostly sitcoms).
After getting yelled at for four hours reffing hockey games, I came back at midnight to my crappy basement apartment just wanting to crash with a beer and plug in to some entertainment only to find that my cat had vomited everywhere, including right where I was hoping to sit on the couch. I cleaned it up, unpacked my ref gear, answered an unexpectedly urgent email, and was finally pouring a well-deserved nightcap. I tried to turn off a light switch with the same hand that was holding the glass, only to spill a few drops on the floor. I went back for a paper towel—busting my knuckle on the edge of my sharpest knife, which was protruding from the knife block. Blood everywhere. At such moments of despair, I forget that I don't have to hunt my food, don't have to worry a simple infection will kill me, don't have to feed like so many organisms do on decay. Life seems an absurd series of obstacles. "List" adds kids, marriage, and employment to the mix, making us question what all this evolution and technology is really good for. As a house painter of many years, I particularly enjoyed the opening chapters, in which the husband is lured to hardware stores and the mindlessness of deceptively complicated (and sometimes toxic) home improvement tasks like a domestic nepenthe.
We become habituated to these three organizational methods, but Matthew Roberson's novel "List" shows that they aren't always compatible—and that dissonance between these systems have major consequences in an individual's psyche and the dynamic of a family. The list itself, a basic representation of our myriad attempts to organize our lives and civilizations, works insidiously like a narrative virus, contaminating both the narrators' ways of viewing the world and the novel's linearity, fracturing or atomizing the traditional plot arc into a series of discrete fragments that cannot cohere into a meaningful story because the narrators have been betrayed by faulty ideas about life and art (by which I mean mostly sitcoms).
After getting yelled at for four hours reffing hockey games, I came back at midnight to my crappy basement apartment just wanting to crash with a beer and plug in to some entertainment only to find that my cat had vomited everywhere, including right where I was hoping to sit on the couch. I cleaned it up, unpacked my ref gear, answered an unexpectedly urgent email, and was finally pouring a well-deserved nightcap. I tried to turn off a light switch with the same hand that was holding the glass, only to spill a few drops on the floor. I went back for a paper towel—busting my knuckle on the edge of my sharpest knife, which was protruding from the knife block. Blood everywhere. At such moments of despair, I forget that I don't have to hunt my food, don't have to worry a simple infection will kill me, don't have to feed like so many organisms do on decay. Life seems an absurd series of obstacles. "List" adds kids, marriage, and employment to the mix, making us question what all this evolution and technology is really good for. As a house painter of many years, I particularly enjoyed the opening chapters, in which the husband is lured to hardware stores and the mindlessness of deceptively complicated (and sometimes toxic) home improvement tasks like a domestic nepenthe.
April 14, 2019
A great novel. I was fortunate to read it in manuscript form, and when I reread it after it was published, I was pleasantly surprised, again, at the combination of melancholy and hilarity. Roberson is the master of the Midwestern Domestic. Perhaps he invented the form?
I love the voice of this novel that is simultaneously satirical and sympathetic.
Highly recommended!
I love the voice of this novel that is simultaneously satirical and sympathetic.
Highly recommended!
March 22, 2018
well written look at luxury of glass half full in white america
March 29, 2016
There may well be a story here but it's not well-defined. Maybe this is a look forward to where are Twitter-verse of short, pointed statements is leading, but I, for one, hope not. The lack of definition is found in the lack of connection between all the little declarative sentences that try to pass for actual writing. There is no flow, no continuity. It may be a style, but it's not for me. It's also, at least in the beginning, very tedious. And whiny. Our main characters - the man and the woman (which is so very creative it truly takes away any sense of connection to them) - are married, they have two kids, they own a house, they both have jobs, and yet they seem to expect to have their days full of themselves. And the pages are stuffed with them complaining of all manner of little things that make up a day when you're married, have kids, jobs, a house … Again, this may well be a symptom of today's immediate gratification lifestyle. Jump toward the things you think you want with little or no thought and them be dissatisfied once you have them - which, I suppose, is trying to be the theme here, but it simply comes off as tedious. The only thing more tedious that I can image would be its actually writing. Full of hilarity (as a back cover blurb states)? I don't think so. Humility? Nope. Comic, haunting, addictive? No, no, and no. Contemporary sadness? Only that I spent the time I did with this.
January 7, 2015
One of those books where you read a sentence and think, "Wow, I've felt that before, but I've never been able to verbalize it." It's a kind of heavy, melancholy book, but it's beautifully written. One of the blurbs on the back says that "Roberson demonstrates once again that he is a master of contemporary sadness," and I'm inclined to agree. A lovely collection of stories that I'm sure I'll be revisiting in the future.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews