Eva Khatchadourian is Kevin’s mother and Franklin’s wife. Aged 16, Kevin slaughters nine people in the gym at his high school. Also his father and sister. Eva is left behind to face the law suit, the police, the battery of psychiatrists and child experts and media pundits, who all seem intent on finding out what she did wrong as blame is essential: ‘Blame confers an awesome power, and it’s simplifying…to culprits most of all.’
She writes a series of letters to her dead husband, reviewing her own mothering (scrupulously honestly and with a bitter wit that is both shocking and true), and the growing up of Kevin. With excruciating clarity, she describes her own ambivalence to Kevin before he was even born. She falls into motherhood for want of something better to do in her late thirties for want of something better to do after she notices that when she and her childless friends get together, their family conversations all revolve round elderly parents rather than an up and coming generation. Plus Franklin is keen to have children.
Of the night when Kevin was conceived, she remarks: ‘we might as well have left the door unlocked.’
A stranger has been invited in and there is no way of knowing what he/she will be like or what damage may be done.
Many aspects of the book will be familiar to mothers, harsh judgement and expectation being but two of them. Pregnant, Eva is public property, subjected to the scrutiny and criticism of others. America is ‘composed of’200 million meddlers, any one of whose prerogative it is to object should you ever be in the mood for a jelly donut and not a full meal with whole grains and leafy vegetables that covers all five food groups.’
Franklin is particularly painful to live with at this time: he has expectations of what she should
be like as a mother and sulks and disapproves when she fails him. She discovers very quickly the lie that ‘we are pregnant’ is – she’s pregnant, and the changes which follow will be to her life, not her husband’s. His disapproval continues and grows stronger after Kevin is born and begins to grow up. He is set on living the American Dream and no problems with his son will stop him. He refuses utterly to concede that there is anything wrong and suggests that Eva is the one who needs help. But his attitudes are mirrored by society.
In court, her mothering is under close examination and it is soon clear that she is in a no win situation: going off to work (which she did for a short time) was a failure in parenting which might have damaged her son; staying at home (as she does later) to look after him, proves that the responsibility for the way he turns out is hers and hers alone.
A little self-indulgent Eva might be, a little resentful, but there is nothing in her attitudes that cannot be found in millions of women whose children do not turn out to be spree killers. And of course if Eva had been granted any of the pleasures of motherhood, her normal ambivalences about being Mum might well have disappeared. But she gets nothing form Kevin. From the beginning, he is a difficult baby – won’t feed, won’t sleep, is unresponsive to her.
His war with his mother (for war it is) involves playing Mum and Dad off one another – Franklin ALWAYS sides with Kevin against Eva, in spite of mounting evidence that something is far wrong: they cannot keep a nanny or a babysitter; he is still wearing nappies at six (until Eva snaps and commits her one identifiable sin against the child); there are incidents of cruelty at nursery school, more serious ones at primary school, worst of all at High school – Kevin’s maturing only means more sophisticated malice towards anyone who crosses his path. He has a particular dislike of youngsters who are committed, ambitious, likeable, who enjoy life, an attitude which he disdains entirely. Kevin enjoys nothing, has no interests, has no aims and objectives, is chronically bored. The only thing which pleases him is getting away with things.
Eva, in her letters, makes a study of all the teen spree killers who make the headlines. Nothing about their lives seems to warrant their actions and she comes to see that attention and being special is what matters to them. In a culture ‘which does not discriminate between fame and infamy, the latter presents itself as more achievable’ .
And these children like to be notorious.
Shriver makes a subtle and convincing case for the idea that some kids are ’just mean’. Interspersed with the story of Kevin is the story of other families, none of which meet the romantic American ideal of family life. Eva’s own mother is agoraphobic, traumatised by the massacres which took place in her native land. Franklin’s parents are gadget obsessed and completely ignorant of emotional issues. Her friends have oddities in their home lives too – but not one produces a flat-eyed psychopath like Kevin whose teen years are a catalogue of horrors which include the blinding of his little sister and the tormenting of other kids and even teachers. But his actions are always covert and hard to prove although Eva’s insight into him is proof enough for her. Kevin actually relishes her knowledge of him.
The pleasures of this book are many: the prose is crisp and fluent, Eva’s dialogues with Kevin on her prison visits are electric, her insights on society and its unreasonable judgements of mothers, and its insistence on scapegoating, thought provoking. It is perhaps a stretch of credulity that when Kevin blinds his sister that Eva does not ensure her daughter’s safety in the future, but perhaps this is necessary to the plot if Eva is to see the tragedy through to the end.
All in all, it is not hard to see why ‘We Need To Talk About Kevin’ won the Orange Prize.
© Marion Arnott Reproduced with permission
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