We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver
This is definitely one of those books that stays with you. I have a few books like that in my life. There are so many that you read and then they drift away, not leaving anything very much behind, and then there are the few that imprint themselves on your consciousness and won't leave you. Sometimes they just speak to you about something very personal, and sometimes they give you a glimpse of something you can hardly imagine and hope never to experience. We Need to Talk about Kevin is one of the latter. But it does not stay with me because it is shocking, but because it is so vivid. For anyone who missed the hype, Kevin commits a high school massacre. I can say that because it's not the kind of book that leads you up slowly to an unpleasant climax, you know right away that something really horrific has happened, but, although I had inklings, the twist at the end was still shocking. Eva writes the book as a series of letters to her husband. She obviously thinks it is a story he doesn't know, at least not from her perspective. The book lets you see her in all her humanity, weaknesses and insecurities abound, and yet I felt that her strength was the unspoken part of the story, the fact that she is able to tell it in the first place. She does not love Kevin, she does not even like him, she struggles to be a mother and to make sense of the way he feels about her in return. As a parent it is a profoundly unsettling story because it has you doubting everything you thought you felt or might feel about your own children. Kevin is not likeable, he is vicious and destructive, but you only have his mother's word for this, or rather her interpretation of his behaviour. She is plagued by the idea that she has caused her son to be the person he is, and almost makes you think it too. The style is so informal and intimate you come to think of her as a close friend, with all the sympathy that implies. She tells the whole story, mixing up recent events with the history of her relationship with her son, his childhood examined in minute details, exactly as you imagine a mother would when faced with needing an explanation for such an act. For me the one weakness of the book occurs when she is visiting him in prison and Kevin makes some little aside to his mother about the need to get her attention. It felt uncharacteristic of the rest of the book, because it feels like the worst kind of cliché. Potentially, with a poor writer this book could have been packed with clichéd characters and emotional reactions, and it isn't. Confrontational would be a good way to describe it. It asks some pretty big questions about human nature. It really challenged all the smug complacent feelings I have ever had about the adults my children might turn out to be.
It reminds me somewhat of Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child which has a very similar theme. I read this one whilst pregnant, and would definitely not recommend doing that. The mother in The Fifth Child has a baby who seems, right from the start, to be in conflict, not just with her but with the whole world. She tries very hard to treat him like her other children but his presence destroys the family that she worked so hard to create. In the end she is forced to abandon him, or rather to accept that he will not be what she wants. I read this many years ago but recently found, trawling through my mum's bookshelves, one called 'Ben, in the world' which is a follow up to his story. It is sitting under the bed in the pile of ones waiting to be read, so maybe there is hope?
We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver
Published by Counterpoint 2003
ISBN 1 85242 889 9
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