I can’t really discuss One of the Good Guys without major spoilers. So be aware–this review includes spoilers.
This part is not a spoiler. One of the Good Guys includes shifting perspectives among three principal characters: Cole, who has moved to a remote cabin during a contentious divorce; Mel, his soon-to-be ex-wife who seems filled with hostility toward him; and Lennie, an artist who lives near Cole and his new digs. Two young women activists who are walking along the English coast to call attention to the need for safety for women in patriarchal society, disappear after an uncomfortable encounter with Cole. Lennie finds their abandoned tent.
I admire Hall’s efforts to deconstruct the “nice guy” and illustrate that this persona is just as complicit in toxic masculinity. Mel’s perspective, which follows Cole’s in the narrative, is clearly designed to show just how terrible Cole is in their marriage (and in his romantic past, as we later learn). But here’s the thing: Cole comes off pretty awful in the chapters in which he is the narrator, so it’s not a surprise at all when Mel recounts just how much he controlled and terrorized her in the marriage all under the guise of being a “good guy.” He has an incredible inferiority complex and comes off as completely self-aggrandizing. His character reminds me of an SNL skit that aired just after the first Trump election where Beck Bennett is trying to hit on Cecily Strong in a bar while wearing a “The Future Is Female” shirt and spouting gender equality catchphrases. Like the Bennett character eventually spouts sexually explicit coarseness when Strong’s character rejects him, Cole reverts to passive-aggressive control when Mel wants to focus on her career and is less than excited about putting her body through IVF.
The worst part of this book, however, the part that really upsets me, is the ending. Cole is blamed for the women’s disappearance because he yelled at them to not sit on the cliff due the dangerous erosion. They had filmed him with their phones. He is eventually arrested after the police find a hair from one of the women in his house.
But the women who disappeared? It’s all fake, orchestrated by Lennie as an art installation and by Mel as a way to punish Cole for his manipulation. The women are safe, and Lennie compiles all the film, social media discourse, and other artifacts to create an exhibit about women reclaiming the narrative: “we believe fully in what we’ve done. We believe it was necessary. In a world where over a hundred women a day are murdered by someone they know, we knew we had to make a stand” (255).
So in a world where women are routinely discouraged from coming forward, are accused of lying, are accused to entrapping men, the answer is… to do just that? By making a martyr of Cole, a not-nice guy and predator who has become a victim because of the pursuit and arrest under false circumstances? Gross. This ending makes me sick.