Book Review: We Need to Talk About Kevin
A mother wrangles her way through her relationship with her son, who is incarcerated for killing eleven people at his high school. In a series of letters to her absent husband, Eva Khatchadourian examines who she is as a mother and who her son innately appears to be. She questions whether people are born depraved or are products of their environment.
Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin is a chillingly intimate analysis of the factors that might drive a youth to massacre his classmates.
In 2003, when the novel was published, the U.S. was still reeling from the Columbine shooting. Since then, the ante has been upped, and in 2016 alone there were at least fifteen (as reported in Wikipedia).
Shriver’s initially focuses small before going large. The first quarter of the book establishes Eva Khatchadourian’s character. She is surprisingly candid about her ambivalence over becoming a mother. Recently married to Franklin and with a booming travel guide business, she is not ready to move into full-time parenthood. Her uncertainty only worsens when her firstborn exhibits what could be described as sociopathic behavior, a decided propensity for control battles. Even as an infant, Kevin seems calculated. Nothing gives him pleasure, and in a wickedly determined manner makes sure that Eva does not have an easy ride. To make matters worse, as Kevin grows up, he learns that he can dupe his father into believing he’s a gee-whiz kind of kid and that any difficulties that Eva has is all in her imagination. Talk about gaslighting!
As the novel progresses, the focus expands beyond the nuclear household as Kevin interacts with neighbors, classmates, and teachers. Shriver now starts looking at the big picture. She pulls in details of actual school shootings, until fiction and fact effectively blend. By the time Kevin instigates his massacre, the reader has a greater sense of the ripples that brought on this tidal wave, and yet in the end, even as we crave a definitive answer as to why it all occurs, we have to accept that there may not be one.
I had to read this novel in small doses – five to twenty pages at a time. This was partly due to my discomfort with Kevin’s increasing levels of cruelty as well as the story’s evident trajectory. Another reason I read it slowly was that Shriver gives you a lot to think about. Her prose is keenly articulate and rich. She excels at similes that often left me amazed that I had never thought about something that way before. For example, Eva describes their modern-style, glass-and-brick home as resembling “the headquarters of some slick, do-gooding conflict-resolution outfit … where they’d give ‘peace prizes’ to Mary Robinson and Nelson Mandela.” Later, she adds that “the moving parts of the house were all silent, its surfaces smooth. The closet doors had no handles. None of the woodwork had fixtures. Drawers had gentle indents. The kitchen cabinets pushed open and shut with a click… [The] whole house was on Zoloft.”
One interesting symbol Shriver uses is Kevin’s propensity for wearing clothes that are too small for him. It may be a peculiar fashion statement – his cuffs are at his shins, his pants don’t buckle over his hips, his shirt exposes his midriff. But it’s the perfect metaphor for this child/adult juxtaposition of the school shooter. An adolescent enacts a crime that seems too adult to perpetrate. So, how do you stuff an adult-sized crime into the clothes of a youth? When a shooter is tried as an adult, the justice system is stating that the criminal cannot hide behind the façade of age. There are certain actions that we know are wrong, so you can’t play innocent.
But Shriver seems to be proposing that there are myriad factors as well as innate characteristics that determine how an individual acts. Both social environment and inborn traits fashion each person, so you can’t point to one or the other. Everything blends. There is a big picture of the world and a smaller, more focused picture of the individual.
I have two, very small critiques of the novel. One is the title, which has a sensationalistic quality to it. I kept considering other possibilities yet could not come up with any. I guess it works, since the book has been on my radar for a while, probably because the title is memorable. It also emphasizes the notion that we all should be talking about to address the violence in society.
My second critique is that when Kevin is an infant, and Eva is going through a rough spell being a homebound mother, the author practically demonizes Kevin. He is such a difficult child that I almost expected his head to spin around as he vomits and curses in Latin. Given that when ten-year-old Kevin comes down with a fever and his behavior temporarily softens, he must have some internal awareness of how to interact normally, so his challenging infancy comes across as diabolic.
Still, these are small complaints. I am fairly certain that this novel will be on my end of the year Best Of list. I’d have to read a bunch of other mind-blowing books to have this one bumped off my top ten.
Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin is a chillingly intimate analysis of the factors that might drive a youth to massacre his classmates.In 2003, when the novel was published, the U.S. was still reeling from the Columbine shooting. Since then, the ante has been upped, and in 2016 alone there were at least fifteen (as reported in Wikipedia).
Shriver’s initially focuses small before going large. The first quarter of the book establishes Eva Khatchadourian’s character. She is surprisingly candid about her ambivalence over becoming a mother. Recently married to Franklin and with a booming travel guide business, she is not ready to move into full-time parenthood. Her uncertainty only worsens when her firstborn exhibits what could be described as sociopathic behavior, a decided propensity for control battles. Even as an infant, Kevin seems calculated. Nothing gives him pleasure, and in a wickedly determined manner makes sure that Eva does not have an easy ride. To make matters worse, as Kevin grows up, he learns that he can dupe his father into believing he’s a gee-whiz kind of kid and that any difficulties that Eva has is all in her imagination. Talk about gaslighting!
As the novel progresses, the focus expands beyond the nuclear household as Kevin interacts with neighbors, classmates, and teachers. Shriver now starts looking at the big picture. She pulls in details of actual school shootings, until fiction and fact effectively blend. By the time Kevin instigates his massacre, the reader has a greater sense of the ripples that brought on this tidal wave, and yet in the end, even as we crave a definitive answer as to why it all occurs, we have to accept that there may not be one. I had to read this novel in small doses – five to twenty pages at a time. This was partly due to my discomfort with Kevin’s increasing levels of cruelty as well as the story’s evident trajectory. Another reason I read it slowly was that Shriver gives you a lot to think about. Her prose is keenly articulate and rich. She excels at similes that often left me amazed that I had never thought about something that way before. For example, Eva describes their modern-style, glass-and-brick home as resembling “the headquarters of some slick, do-gooding conflict-resolution outfit … where they’d give ‘peace prizes’ to Mary Robinson and Nelson Mandela.” Later, she adds that “the moving parts of the house were all silent, its surfaces smooth. The closet doors had no handles. None of the woodwork had fixtures. Drawers had gentle indents. The kitchen cabinets pushed open and shut with a click… [The] whole house was on Zoloft.”
One interesting symbol Shriver uses is Kevin’s propensity for wearing clothes that are too small for him. It may be a peculiar fashion statement – his cuffs are at his shins, his pants don’t buckle over his hips, his shirt exposes his midriff. But it’s the perfect metaphor for this child/adult juxtaposition of the school shooter. An adolescent enacts a crime that seems too adult to perpetrate. So, how do you stuff an adult-sized crime into the clothes of a youth? When a shooter is tried as an adult, the justice system is stating that the criminal cannot hide behind the façade of age. There are certain actions that we know are wrong, so you can’t play innocent.
But Shriver seems to be proposing that there are myriad factors as well as innate characteristics that determine how an individual acts. Both social environment and inborn traits fashion each person, so you can’t point to one or the other. Everything blends. There is a big picture of the world and a smaller, more focused picture of the individual.
I have two, very small critiques of the novel. One is the title, which has a sensationalistic quality to it. I kept considering other possibilities yet could not come up with any. I guess it works, since the book has been on my radar for a while, probably because the title is memorable. It also emphasizes the notion that we all should be talking about to address the violence in society.
My second critique is that when Kevin is an infant, and Eva is going through a rough spell being a homebound mother, the author practically demonizes Kevin. He is such a difficult child that I almost expected his head to spin around as he vomits and curses in Latin. Given that when ten-year-old Kevin comes down with a fever and his behavior temporarily softens, he must have some internal awareness of how to interact normally, so his challenging infancy comes across as diabolic.
Still, these are small complaints. I am fairly certain that this novel will be on my end of the year Best Of list. I’d have to read a bunch of other mind-blowing books to have this one bumped off my top ten.
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