How harshly do the sins of the son reflect upon the mother?
That’s the contentious question posed by Lionel Shriver’s seventh novel ‘We Need To Talk About Kevin,’ which takes the form of narrator Eva Khatchadourian’s letters to her ex-husband Franklin following a Columbine-style high school massacre perpetrated by their son.
The book has caused quite a stir stateside by dint of it’s undermining of conventional parental stereotypes – Eva is an ambitious and rigorously analytical character who decides to have a child largely out of restlessness rather than any great biological imperative. To her horror – and the reader’s – she finds herself not only failing to form a bond with Kevin, but growing to outright dislike the kid, a problem that only escalates as he gets older.
The novel’s premise is a potent one because it dares to breach a subject that is borderline taboo in societies where children are indulged rather than reared. It’s not that Eva is a bad mother per se, in fact she’s dutiful to the point of pathology, but she just doesn’t enjoy being around her son.
Clearly the author, whose sartorial sense and manner of speech are as precisely observed as her prose, has hit a nerve.
“Despite the fact that it hasn’t been very heavily promoted, the degree that it succeeded has been all word of mouth stuff,” she acknowledges. “There’s clearly some kind of a hunger out there.”
Does she get people thanking her for –
“Being more honest about motherhood? Yeah. Very grateful that somebody has tried to get across what it’s like to raise a child.”
Shriver herself decided at the age of eight that parenting wasn’t for her. Yet her insights into the minutiae of motherhood are pretty impressive.
“Well, I do have an imagination,” she says. “Or rather, I have vivid fears. Ultimately I was still trying to examine my own fears of a potential coldness in me, a selfishness that would exclude extending myself to particular children, because I think children are particular. As a child, I felt like a person with volition rather than a being that was being acted upon from without, and therefore my parents had to contend with me as a real person whom they have not always liked. In writing the book I started getting more sympathetic, less condemnatory, stopped looking at it from a child’s perspective. What I was afraid of for myself, if I were to become a mother, was just… having someone around the house I didn’t want there. A kid is a stranger in the house. You have to get to know him.”
Which may seem obvious, but it’s quite the wake-up call for those who assume having children will solve their own existential crises, or save their marriage.
“They don’t understand that it’s going to try the marriage,” Shriver observes. “I think people bring a completely different expectation to parenthood now. It’s not about your kid going to till your fields, it’s about them giving you a new sense of meaning, that they are going to fill out your life emotionally and reward you with their love, and your life is going to be richer, fuller and more exciting in those senses. And that’s actually expecting a fuck of a lot. And it doesn’t always come across.”
In Kevin’s case, that shock is compounded by his obnoxious nature.
“We’ve all been in the restaurant with this nyah-nyah kid, and you want to kill him,” Shriver says. “And his parents don’t do anything. And that’s where Eva and Franklin divide, because Franklin is completely indulgent and Eva is much more an old style disciplinarian.”
But more than that, as he grows older, Kevin becomes more sullen, disconnected, lacking in empathy and disdainful of humanity in general.
Was his psychological profile assembled from case studies of high school killers?
“Not really. That was just stuff I made up. As a construct, I liked it. And the whole concept of Kevin was really of someone who wasn’t, as you say, seething with fury, but who was just… bored. Bored to the point of disgust with everything. Essentially not interested in being here, and a little resentful of the fact that he was, because nothing about being alive interested him.”
Which is a hallmark of most male adolescents – at least until they become interested in sex, drugs or rock ‘n’ roll.
“You see it all the time, that feigned boredom, I’ve-seen-it-all-before, nothing impresses me, the physical lassitude, clothing dripping off them. What made it an interesting character to write is that it’s usually a phase that kids go through and come out the other side of, but I imparted it all the way back to infancy.”
It’s a chilling notion that, beyond all the sociological and nurture-versus-nature factors, there can be such a thing as a bona fide bad seed, irredeemable from birth.
“I read an interesting article in the New York Times about psychologists who worked with and have written about mass murderers,” Shriver says, “and there’s this movement arguing that we need to bring in ‘evil’ as a clinical diagnosis, that there are single cases they have contended with that so boggle the mind there’s no other word that will do. I’m of two minds about that impulse, but clearly there is this sub-category that they’ve been exposed to that is constantly upsetting them and they need a label for it in order to accommodate it, and probably in order to quarantine those experiences they’ve had from the rest of life because they’re so upsetting. I don’t think it’s necessarily the case in this book, but I guess ultimately I do believe that some people are born irredeemable.”
© Peter Murphy
Reproduced with permission
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
One of Ireland’s foremost music and pop culture writers, Peter Murphy (b. 1968, Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford) got a taste for journalism at the age of 17 when he won first place in an EU sponsored competition for young essayists. After ten days of being wined, dined and chauffeured around Europe on someone else’s tab, the only proviso being that he file a report at the end of it, he figured this was the way to live. But first, he had to get the rock ‘n’ roll bug out of his system, and spent most of the next decade playing drums with a succession of bands. He quit music to become a journalist in 1996, quickly establishing himself as a senior contributor to Hot Press. Since then he has written over 30 cover stories for the magazine, accumulating a portfolio of interviews that includes Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Nick Cave, Willie Nelson, Radiohead, Public Enemy, Shane MacGowan, George Clinton, Sonic Youth, Television, Henry Rollins, PJ Harvey, Richard Hell, David Johansen, Warren Zevon, Wim Wenders, Iain Banks, Will Self, William Gibson, Billy Bob Thornton, FW De Klerk and many others. His work has also appeared in the Bloodaxe Books anthology Dublines, the Sunday Independent (Ireland) plus international publications such as Rolling Stone (Australia) and Request (US). Miscellaneous assignments include writing the programme notes for jazz legend Miles Davis’ art exhibition hosted by the Davis Gallery in Dublin (2000), collaborations with cult author JT LeRoy for the American magazine Razor (2002), and co-producing Revelations, a two-hour radio documentary about The Frames (2003). He is frequently employed as a rent-a-mouth by the BBC and Irish national radio and television, is a contributor to the online archive Rocksbackpages.com and more recently gave a talk entitled Nocturnal Emissions at the ReJoyce symposium in the National College of Ireland, tracing the influence of James Joyce’s writings on Irish music. He has also been invited to contribute an essay to the liner notes of the 2004 remastered edition of Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music, and is currently writing his first novel.
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© 2005 Laura Hird All rights reserved.
Showing posts with label Kevin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kevin. Show all posts
Friday, May 9, 2008
Monday, October 03, 2005
We Need to Talk about Kevin
Have put up a post on The Middle Stage about Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin. It's a book I can’t recommend strongly enough.
Update: have cross-posted the full review. Here it is:
Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin is one of the most provocative books I’ve read in a long, long time (and when you’re reading books and writing about them for a living, you learn to be chary about sweeping statements like that one; the reviewer’s jargon is already full of stock phrases. But then cliché is sometimes the only recourse). This is a story told in the form of long confessional letters written by a woman, Eva Khatchadourian, to her (presumably estranged) husband Franklin, about their son Kevin who murdered nine people in his school gym a few days before his 16th birthday. Over the course of her letters Eva looks back at her peculiar, strained relationship with her son; but she begins her story with the time when she and Franklin, both in their late 30s, decided to have a child.
In a perfect world, the most important reason – perhaps the only reason - for a couple deciding to have children would be: both of them badly want to, and feel they are ready for it. In the real world, far too often too many other factors play the decisive role. This is especially true in more conservative societies where pressure from family elders is a continuous, intrusive presence – but it holds good everywhere. The reasons can be many. Perpetuating the species – or, less nobly, having children as a means of ensuring immortality for oneself. The knowledge that they’ll talk about us when we’ve passed on (whether they say good or bad things is another matter), the same way we talk about our parents. Simple curiosity about what it might be like to hear someone calling “Momm-MEEE?” from around the corner. The dark thought that if something were to happen to your partner, you’d at least have a tangible memento. Eva’s decision ultimately rests on a combination of these.
The first 60-70 pages give us some of the starkest, most daring writing on the nature of our closest relationships, the ones we take for granted. In her letters, Eva painstakingly dissects her feelings about parenthood. She wasn’t ready, she repeatedly claims:
“At last I should come clean. It is not true that I was ‘ambivalent’ about motherhood. You wanted to have a child. On balance, I did not. Added together, that seemed like ambivalence, but though we were a superlative couple we were not the same person. I never did get you to like eggplant.”
Her descriptions of pregnancy, of the child-bearing and delivering processes, are shockingly subversive, and shockingly honest.
“Crossing the threshold of motherhood, suddenly you become social property, the animate equivalent of a public park. That coy expression ‘you’re eating for two now, dear’ is all by way of goading that your very dinner is no longer a private affair…”
And later, comparing pregnancy to infestation, to “colonisation by stealth”, as depicted in horror films like Alien and Rosemary’s Baby:
“…the host is consumed or rent, reduced to husk or residue so that some nightmare creature may survive its shell…any woman whose teeth have rotted, whose bones have thinned, whose skin has stretched, knows the humbling price of a nine-month freeloader.”
If the gestation period was a nightmare, the actual labour is worse. Finally, however, Kevin deigns to come into the world, and Eva, having heard gush-stories from friends about how parents fall instantly, irrevocably, in love with their newborns, discovers that she feels nothing for him.
“I felt…absent. I kept scrabbling around in myself for this new indescribable emotion…but no matter how I rattled around, no matter what I moved out of the way, it wasn’t there. ‘He’s beautiful,’ I mumbled; I had reached for a line from TV.”
Here, Shriver’s book takes an interesting right turn. Kevin (at least in the account of him presented us by Eva) turns out to be the kind of child who would have both Damian (the kid in The Omen) and baby Hannibal Lecter bawling for their security blankets. Importantly, this is how he is right from the outset (which means it isn’t the result of his mother’s attitude towards him). He’s positively demoniac – frighteningly precocious and aware, yet uninterested in everything; completely bereft of attachments, yet with a fearsome propensity for malice. No babysitter can handle him for any length of time. Classmates and even teachers are frightened of him for reasons that can never be properly explained. He has the power of influencing people to do things that are bad for them. Eva can see this side of him; Franklin, who truly IS in love with his child, can not.
As the years pass, Eva repeatedly questions whether she’s been a good mother but wonders if she even had an option, given her son’s nature: “After having not a child but this particular one, I couldn’t see how anyone could claim to love children in the generic any more that anyone could credibly claim to love people in a sufficiently sweeping sense as to embrace Pol Pot, Don Rickles and an upstairs neighbour who does 2,000 jumping jacks at three in the morning.”
In a desperate attempt to “understand something about my soul”, Eva has another child, against Franklin’s wishes, and this one turns out to be an angelic girl who does indeed stir the mother inside her. Her soul is safe for the time being. But now Kevin has a potential victim right under his nose.
Here, portions of the book start to read like the scripts of those horror movies about malevolent children (albeit much better written). And yet, throughout the reading process, we must be aware that we can’t blindly trust Eva’s narrative. Though there’s nothing equivocal about Kevin’s final act of destruction, there is room for ambiguities in the details that accumulate over the years. Another option presents itself: could it be that Kevin, though undoubtedly a strange, emotionless child, was never as malicious in the early stages as his mother makes him out to be? Could the real evil have resulted from his upbringing, and is this what Eva is trying to conceal (even as she repeatedly apologises for the things she does feel responsible for)?
And by the time we reach the book’s end, there’s yet another option: could Kevin have become what he is because he carries his mother’s genes? Throughout the story we’ve been presented the picture of Kevin as his father’s son, while Eva clings to her darling daughter (when Franklin and Eva decide to separate, they joke darkly about there at least being no argument over custody). But is there a bond between Eva and her son that transcends these surface appearances? The final, chilling paragraphs certainly seem to suggest so.
We Need to Talk about Kevin raises so many issues – about the nature-nurture debate, about family units made up of very different individuals who have to find a way to coexist, about upper-class hypocrisies - that it’s impossible to mention all of them here. Ultimately I have to turn to another cliché, this time from the blurb-writer’s pantheon: consider yourselves grabbed by the shoulders and told “Read this!”
We Need to Talk about Kevin
Have put up a post on The Middle Stage about Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin. It's a book I can’t recommend strongly enough.
Update: have cross-posted the full review. Here it is:
Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin is one of the most provocative books I’ve read in a long, long time (and when you’re reading books and writing about them for a living, you learn to be chary about sweeping statements like that one; the reviewer’s jargon is already full of stock phrases. But then cliché is sometimes the only recourse). This is a story told in the form of long confessional letters written by a woman, Eva Khatchadourian, to her (presumably estranged) husband Franklin, about their son Kevin who murdered nine people in his school gym a few days before his 16th birthday. Over the course of her letters Eva looks back at her peculiar, strained relationship with her son; but she begins her story with the time when she and Franklin, both in their late 30s, decided to have a child.
In a perfect world, the most important reason – perhaps the only reason - for a couple deciding to have children would be: both of them badly want to, and feel they are ready for it. In the real world, far too often too many other factors play the decisive role. This is especially true in more conservative societies where pressure from family elders is a continuous, intrusive presence – but it holds good everywhere. The reasons can be many. Perpetuating the species – or, less nobly, having children as a means of ensuring immortality for oneself. The knowledge that they’ll talk about us when we’ve passed on (whether they say good or bad things is another matter), the same way we talk about our parents. Simple curiosity about what it might be like to hear someone calling “Momm-MEEE?” from around the corner. The dark thought that if something were to happen to your partner, you’d at least have a tangible memento. Eva’s decision ultimately rests on a combination of these.
The first 60-70 pages give us some of the starkest, most daring writing on the nature of our closest relationships, the ones we take for granted. In her letters, Eva painstakingly dissects her feelings about parenthood. She wasn’t ready, she repeatedly claims:
“At last I should come clean. It is not true that I was ‘ambivalent’ about motherhood. You wanted to have a child. On balance, I did not. Added together, that seemed like ambivalence, but though we were a superlative couple we were not the same person. I never did get you to like eggplant.”
Her descriptions of pregnancy, of the child-bearing and delivering processes, are shockingly subversive, and shockingly honest.
“Crossing the threshold of motherhood, suddenly you become social property, the animate equivalent of a public park. That coy expression ‘you’re eating for two now, dear’ is all by way of goading that your very dinner is no longer a private affair…”
And later, comparing pregnancy to infestation, to “colonisation by stealth”, as depicted in horror films like Alien and Rosemary’s Baby:
“…the host is consumed or rent, reduced to husk or residue so that some nightmare creature may survive its shell…any woman whose teeth have rotted, whose bones have thinned, whose skin has stretched, knows the humbling price of a nine-month freeloader.”
If the gestation period was a nightmare, the actual labour is worse. Finally, however, Kevin deigns to come into the world, and Eva, having heard gush-stories from friends about how parents fall instantly, irrevocably, in love with their newborns, discovers that she feels nothing for him.
“I felt…absent. I kept scrabbling around in myself for this new indescribable emotion…but no matter how I rattled around, no matter what I moved out of the way, it wasn’t there. ‘He’s beautiful,’ I mumbled; I had reached for a line from TV.”
Here, Shriver’s book takes an interesting right turn. Kevin (at least in the account of him presented us by Eva) turns out to be the kind of child who would have both Damian (the kid in The Omen) and baby Hannibal Lecter bawling for their security blankets. Importantly, this is how he is right from the outset (which means it isn’t the result of his mother’s attitude towards him). He’s positively demoniac – frighteningly precocious and aware, yet uninterested in everything; completely bereft of attachments, yet with a fearsome propensity for malice. No babysitter can handle him for any length of time. Classmates and even teachers are frightened of him for reasons that can never be properly explained. He has the power of influencing people to do things that are bad for them. Eva can see this side of him; Franklin, who truly IS in love with his child, can not.
As the years pass, Eva repeatedly questions whether she’s been a good mother but wonders if she even had an option, given her son’s nature: “After having not a child but this particular one, I couldn’t see how anyone could claim to love children in the generic any more that anyone could credibly claim to love people in a sufficiently sweeping sense as to embrace Pol Pot, Don Rickles and an upstairs neighbour who does 2,000 jumping jacks at three in the morning.”
In a desperate attempt to “understand something about my soul”, Eva has another child, against Franklin’s wishes, and this one turns out to be an angelic girl who does indeed stir the mother inside her. Her soul is safe for the time being. But now Kevin has a potential victim right under his nose.
Here, portions of the book start to read like the scripts of those horror movies about malevolent children (albeit much better written). And yet, throughout the reading process, we must be aware that we can’t blindly trust Eva’s narrative. Though there’s nothing equivocal about Kevin’s final act of destruction, there is room for ambiguities in the details that accumulate over the years. Another option presents itself: could it be that Kevin, though undoubtedly a strange, emotionless child, was never as malicious in the early stages as his mother makes him out to be? Could the real evil have resulted from his upbringing, and is this what Eva is trying to conceal (even as she repeatedly apologises for the things she does feel responsible for)?
And by the time we reach the book’s end, there’s yet another option: could Kevin have become what he is because he carries his mother’s genes? Throughout the story we’ve been presented the picture of Kevin as his father’s son, while Eva clings to her darling daughter (when Franklin and Eva decide to separate, they joke darkly about there at least being no argument over custody). But is there a bond between Eva and her son that transcends these surface appearances? The final, chilling paragraphs certainly seem to suggest so.
We Need to Talk about Kevin raises so many issues – about the nature-nurture debate, about family units made up of very different individuals who have to find a way to coexist, about upper-class hypocrisies - that it’s impossible to mention all of them here. Ultimately I have to turn to another cliché, this time from the blurb-writer’s pantheon: consider yourselves grabbed by the shoulders and told “Read this!”
Marion Arnott ~ Review of "Kevin etc"
This is an uncomfortable book in many ways, exposing as it does, mercilessly and incisively, myths of family life, motherhood, childhood, social stereotypes, and murder, unthinkable, vile murder.
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
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
Kids Eh ~ Who'd have them?
The school shootings that ran rampant through the 1990s had everyone shocked and in fear of sending their kids to school. Throughout the shootings, culminating in Columbine, one thing probably went through everyone’s minds: What were these kids’ parents like? It’s human nature to assume that children who go bad are helped along by cruel or indifferent parents. Why do we think this? Because if we let our minds consider the alternative, that some kids are just born bad, then we must be aware of the frightening fact that it could happen to us.
We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver explores this very idea through a source closer to the subject than any other—the mother of a boy who shot seven of his classmates during a rampage in the school gym.
Although the book is fictional, the subject matter is all too real, and this makes it an exceptionally chilling read.
Eva Khatchadourian explores her feeling about her son Kevin’s actions through a series of letters to her estranged husband, Franklin. Although this might seem like a limiting way to go about a book of this scope, it actually works quite well. Through Eva’s eyes, we watch the excruciating formative years of an evil child who convinces his gullible father that he’s a sweet boy, but whose mother knows better. Eva’s dislike of her cold little boy just fuels his cruel streak, slowly escalating his violent nature as he grows older.
The heartbreaking part of the novel comes when Eva and Franklin have a second child, the incredibly naïve and trusting Celia, who thinks her brother is the greatest person on earth. The foreshadowing of what happens to Celia, and to the entire family, is almost unbearable to read because Shriver does such an excellent job of painting a picture of a family whose members are far from perfect but who certainly don’t deserve what will happen to them. An air of bleak despair settles over the entire novel, reflecting Eva’s mood as she writes to her beloved Franklin.
If you plan to pick up this novel, be forewarned: it is not light, it will not give you faith in humanity and it will probably scare you more than any horror novel you’ve ever read. Why? Because what happened to Eva’s family could easily happen to any family in America. With her eye for detail and talent for creating a chilling, desperate atmosphere, Lionel Shriver has penned a novel that will stay with you long after you’ve read the last chapter.
We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver explores this very idea through a source closer to the subject than any other—the mother of a boy who shot seven of his classmates during a rampage in the school gym.
Although the book is fictional, the subject matter is all too real, and this makes it an exceptionally chilling read.
Eva Khatchadourian explores her feeling about her son Kevin’s actions through a series of letters to her estranged husband, Franklin. Although this might seem like a limiting way to go about a book of this scope, it actually works quite well. Through Eva’s eyes, we watch the excruciating formative years of an evil child who convinces his gullible father that he’s a sweet boy, but whose mother knows better. Eva’s dislike of her cold little boy just fuels his cruel streak, slowly escalating his violent nature as he grows older.
The heartbreaking part of the novel comes when Eva and Franklin have a second child, the incredibly naïve and trusting Celia, who thinks her brother is the greatest person on earth. The foreshadowing of what happens to Celia, and to the entire family, is almost unbearable to read because Shriver does such an excellent job of painting a picture of a family whose members are far from perfect but who certainly don’t deserve what will happen to them. An air of bleak despair settles over the entire novel, reflecting Eva’s mood as she writes to her beloved Franklin.
If you plan to pick up this novel, be forewarned: it is not light, it will not give you faith in humanity and it will probably scare you more than any horror novel you’ve ever read. Why? Because what happened to Eva’s family could easily happen to any family in America. With her eye for detail and talent for creating a chilling, desperate atmosphere, Lionel Shriver has penned a novel that will stay with you long after you’ve read the last chapter.
We need to discuss........!!!!!!!
We need to talk about Kevin
Reviewer Cameron WoodheadMay 14, 2005
We need to talk about Kevin,By Lionel Shriver,Serpent's Tail, $22.95
Well before the post-September 11 security crackdown, there were metal-detectors in American schools. We have become inured, by sheer repetition, to the grisly aftermath of the US high-school massacre. Just as these tragedies continue to occur, they continue to torment the literary imagination.
Most prominent in fiction to draw on these sad episodes in contemporary history is D. B. C. Pierre's Booker prize-winning Vernon God Little. In it, a small Texan community - horrified by the mass murder of their youth by a disturbed native American boy who subsequently commits suicide - is in search of someone to blame. The mob alights on the killer's best friend, Vernon, whose unflinchingly satirical view of a town gone mad takes on messianic overtones as his inevitable martyrdom approaches.
But if Vernon God Little is a remarkable achievement, it pales in comparison with Lionel Shriver's controversial bestseller, We Need To Talk About Kevin - by far the best novel I've read in years.
We Need To Talk About Kevin takes the form of exquisitely crafted letters written by Eva Khatchadourian to her former husband, Franklin, who leaves her just before her worst nightmare comes to life. Three days short of his 16th birthday, Eva's son, Kevin, shoots seven of his fellow students in the school gym and watches with grim satisfaction as they bleed to death.
In her letters, Eva attempts to discover why Kevin became a killer by examining her domestic life.
Before Kevin came along, Eva and Franklin were happy for a while. Franklin was a location scout for TV ads who could find a slice of Paris in Pennsylvania: an unabashed patriot, a staunch Republican, a believer in the American dream. Eva was a lifelong Democrat who loathed America, the parochialism of its people and the arrogance of its foreign policy. A successful businesswoman, she made her fortune publishing budget-travel guides, after much compulsive globetrotting in her 20s.
In many respects they were chalk and cheese, but very much in love. Still, the decision to have children did not come naturally, at least not to Eva. Franklin saw children as the answer to "the big question" (a question he spent much of his own life avoiding). Eva acquiesced out of vanity: she wanted to prove that she could be a good mother. She was destined to fail spectacularly.
Eva became despondent, a feeling exacerbated when Franklin orchestrated a move from their Tribeca apartment to a house in the 'burbs.
Eva interprets Kevin's misdemeanours as early signs of psychological abnormality. She believes that he deliberately refused to stop wearing nappies. She is convinced that he incited his kindergarten friends to anti-social behaviour. Later, she is appalled by his cruelty to an unfortunate-looking girl at a primary school dance.
But if Eva was always suspicious of the kind of person Kevin was growing up to be, in Franklin's eyes he could do no wrong. As Kevin develops into a sullen, manipulative teenager, his parents' difference of opinion became more pronounced. Eva starts to actively dislike Kevin. And his behaviour deteriorates in response: he masturbates in front of her, throws bricks at cars, and is the prime suspect in his little sister's mutilation.
Whether Kevin was born bad, or was failed by his parents, is a question that Eva cannot ultimately resolve. All she can do is narrate what happened, and continue to visit her son in prison. Indeed, these prison visits are among the most sublime and heart-rending passages in the book.
Of all contemporary American novelists, the one Lionel Shriver most resembles is Jeffrey Eugenides. Like Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides, Shriver's novel is assembled over the broken bodies of children, but it is less interested in the cause of tragedy than the architecture of it, less concerned with why catastrophe strikes than in describing its contours.
What really matters is that Shriver has produced - through the voice of a fearsomely intelligent, self-absorbed, and utterly bereft mother - a breathtaking work of art.
Reviewer Cameron WoodheadMay 14, 2005
We need to talk about Kevin,By Lionel Shriver,Serpent's Tail, $22.95
Well before the post-September 11 security crackdown, there were metal-detectors in American schools. We have become inured, by sheer repetition, to the grisly aftermath of the US high-school massacre. Just as these tragedies continue to occur, they continue to torment the literary imagination.
Most prominent in fiction to draw on these sad episodes in contemporary history is D. B. C. Pierre's Booker prize-winning Vernon God Little. In it, a small Texan community - horrified by the mass murder of their youth by a disturbed native American boy who subsequently commits suicide - is in search of someone to blame. The mob alights on the killer's best friend, Vernon, whose unflinchingly satirical view of a town gone mad takes on messianic overtones as his inevitable martyrdom approaches.
But if Vernon God Little is a remarkable achievement, it pales in comparison with Lionel Shriver's controversial bestseller, We Need To Talk About Kevin - by far the best novel I've read in years.
We Need To Talk About Kevin takes the form of exquisitely crafted letters written by Eva Khatchadourian to her former husband, Franklin, who leaves her just before her worst nightmare comes to life. Three days short of his 16th birthday, Eva's son, Kevin, shoots seven of his fellow students in the school gym and watches with grim satisfaction as they bleed to death.
In her letters, Eva attempts to discover why Kevin became a killer by examining her domestic life.
Before Kevin came along, Eva and Franklin were happy for a while. Franklin was a location scout for TV ads who could find a slice of Paris in Pennsylvania: an unabashed patriot, a staunch Republican, a believer in the American dream. Eva was a lifelong Democrat who loathed America, the parochialism of its people and the arrogance of its foreign policy. A successful businesswoman, she made her fortune publishing budget-travel guides, after much compulsive globetrotting in her 20s.
In many respects they were chalk and cheese, but very much in love. Still, the decision to have children did not come naturally, at least not to Eva. Franklin saw children as the answer to "the big question" (a question he spent much of his own life avoiding). Eva acquiesced out of vanity: she wanted to prove that she could be a good mother. She was destined to fail spectacularly.
Eva became despondent, a feeling exacerbated when Franklin orchestrated a move from their Tribeca apartment to a house in the 'burbs.
Eva interprets Kevin's misdemeanours as early signs of psychological abnormality. She believes that he deliberately refused to stop wearing nappies. She is convinced that he incited his kindergarten friends to anti-social behaviour. Later, she is appalled by his cruelty to an unfortunate-looking girl at a primary school dance.
But if Eva was always suspicious of the kind of person Kevin was growing up to be, in Franklin's eyes he could do no wrong. As Kevin develops into a sullen, manipulative teenager, his parents' difference of opinion became more pronounced. Eva starts to actively dislike Kevin. And his behaviour deteriorates in response: he masturbates in front of her, throws bricks at cars, and is the prime suspect in his little sister's mutilation.
Whether Kevin was born bad, or was failed by his parents, is a question that Eva cannot ultimately resolve. All she can do is narrate what happened, and continue to visit her son in prison. Indeed, these prison visits are among the most sublime and heart-rending passages in the book.
Of all contemporary American novelists, the one Lionel Shriver most resembles is Jeffrey Eugenides. Like Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides, Shriver's novel is assembled over the broken bodies of children, but it is less interested in the cause of tragedy than the architecture of it, less concerned with why catastrophe strikes than in describing its contours.
What really matters is that Shriver has produced - through the voice of a fearsomely intelligent, self-absorbed, and utterly bereft mother - a breathtaking work of art.
Review of this month .........
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.
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.
Monday, April 28, 2008
The Month of May Book Club Choice
Our next book choice is "We need to talk about Kevin" by Lionel Shriver. We meet on Friday, 16th May at the usual venue.............10.30 am start!
This will be introduced by Will.
A variety of reviews will be posted about this book in the next few weeks.
I've read about 200 pages and I'm enthralled.
This will be introduced by Will.
A variety of reviews will be posted about this book in the next few weeks.
I've read about 200 pages and I'm enthralled.
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