We Need To Talk About Kevin
It came as a surprise to some when Lionel Shriver picked up the Orange Prize for We Need To Talk About Kevin. The literary merit of the novel had, after all, been somewhat overshadowed in the press coverage by all the talk of her breaking down taboos in her bitter, loveless depiction of motherhood. The quality of the actual writing got somewhat lost in the media hum.
To be fair the manner in which the novel was marketed actively courted such a response; inside the back cover there are even a series of questions specifically targeted at reading groups. It's an idea I don't think I've ever seen before, and one that will probably strike a lot of people as rather heavy-handed and, well, rather American.
But Shriver's book, more than most contemporary novels, seems to have been written to spark arguments, to create the kind of debate that reading groups thrive on, so perhaps it is appropriate.
We Need To Talk... describes the life of a boy who grows up to murder a number of his High School classmates in a premeditated massacre. His story is told in a series of letters written, after the event, by his mother Eva to his absent father Franklin. In these letters Eva describes her life before the birth of her son. The CEO of a successful travel guidebook company, she is an educated woman who is accustomed to her independence; when she eventually comes around to the idea of having a child, she views it as one more journey to be embarked upon, uncharted territory, something of an adventure. Eva is not a maternal type: she intellectualises everything, including her expectations of motherhood, and her feelings of disappointment and resentment following her son's birth come as little surprise.
Eva paints Franklin as her parental opposite. He throws himself into fatherhood with energy and utter devotion, doing all the things a good American dad is expected to do. But, almost from the moment of his birth Eva perceives that there is something wrong with Kevin, an absence of emotion, a lack of empathy.
In her eye's he is a malignant creature, always quietly plotting; and their relationship is one of constant conflict. As Kevin grows up things do not improve, he destroys things that are precious to her and develops some rather anti-social habits. And yet Franklin is always there to rationalise and defend his son's behaviour.
Where Shriver's novel succeeds, is in making you question exactly how revisionist Eva is being in her recollections. Kevin has committed unspeakable crimes, and though Eva is happy to confess to being a bad mother, she seems eager to establish that the trigger for Kevin's appalling actions lay within him from the start, like a bomb waiting to detonate.
On one level, many of the issues Shriver raises regarding motherhood are universal: she writes bitingly about the expectations of women who have children and the expectations that society places on these women. Some of Eva's worries will be familiar; she does not experience an immediate intense maternal bond and feels like a failure; and she feels intellectually stifled by life at home with young child. And Franklin too, who was more than happy to marry a cultured, passionate and sometimes volatile woman, seems to want her to morph into the perfect American Mommy the minute the child is born. But alongside Eva's justified anger and bafflement at her shift in status after she becomes a mother, there is also the sense that she too may be in some way emotionally lacking. Because, after all, this is not just a book about the paradoxes of modern motherhood, but also a narrative about that depressingly common American social phenomenon of the High School killing spree.
While Douglas Coupland's Hey Nostradamus! depicted a Columbine-inspired event from the inside, via the voice of Cheryl Amway, the teen victim of a cafeteria shooting, speaking from some point after her death, Shriver recalls the incident from Eva's more distanced perspective. Kevin did not just randomly gun down his schoolmates but purposefully picked them off with a cross bow – a deeply chilling, and disturbing scene – though an intentional dissimilarity from real life incidents takes an edge of its emotive impact.
In fact, Kevin's crime, when it is finally revealed in detail, bears as strong a resemblance to the finale of Steven King's Carrie as it does to anything in the headlines. Another critical divergence from genuine High School killings is the fact that Kevin did not end his life after he executed his classmates, and Eva is now able to pay regular visits to him in his upstate prison. There is much to engage with in Shriver's novel; it's very well written, her style accomplished and compelling – even if there is a whiff of Oprah's Book Club to her overall tone. For all Shriver's skill it's a difficult novel to like: her perceptive, sometimes even refreshing, examination of motherhood is completely undermined by Kevin's final crimes. It would have been a braver, more interesting, if thematically entirely different, novel had Shriver had steered clear of the headline-orientated denouement altogether. We Need To Talk About Kevin never attempts to provide easy answers to the many questions it raises, but it remains a persuasive, intriguing read, as equally repellent as it is enthralling.
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