Guardian Newspaper 1000 Novels discussion
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We Need to Talk About Kevin
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We Need To Talk About Kevin - April 2015
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Lisa
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rated it 5 stars
Apr 09, 2015 08:03AM
April read from family and self
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I just finished it and haven't yet collected my thoughts. Were you going to give it a try?
Kaycie wrote: "Hey Leslie!I just finished it and haven't yet collected my thoughts. Were you going to give it a try?"
No, I don't have time this month but was curious what it was like.
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I also really enjoyed the narrator and get style of writing and analyzing, so I think that added to my enjoyment of the book.
I do recommend it. I dont really know of any book like it. I'd be curious to hear what you think, so definitely update the thread if/you read it!
My review of We Need to Talk About Kevin:4 Stars
A really excellent book that only really missed out on the full 5 stars by being a touch too long and because I didn't 100% accept the writing style.
The novel is a series of letters written by Eva Katchadourian to her estranged husband through the year leading up to their son's 18th birthday following his imprisonment for murdering a dozen people in a high school massacre (his twist being that he uses a crossbow, rather than a rifle).
As we follow the letters, the novel is less about Kevin, the high school killer, and more an analysis of Eva and how much, if any, she and her family, contributed to the killing rampage - the classic nature vs nurture debate. Eva worries whether her coldness to the boy caused his severe personality issue, or if, as she originally maintains, he was misanthropic from birth.
Eva is an unreliable narrator though - as we all are about our own lives. She almost certainly minimises her own behaviour, possibly emphasises Kevin's bad behaviour (or possibly not, given the later events), and adds a rose tinted layer of sweetness over her husband's.
But mostly its an examination of motherhood, specifically mothers who dislike both being a mother and the children they have borne. The loss of a self and separate identity, the morphing into a role rather than an individual. My favourite and most telling line in the whole book was:
"The whole time I was pregnant with Kevin I was battling the idea of Kevin, the notion that I had demoted myself from Driver to Vehicle, from Householder to House."
My one (and serious) misgiving though was that I simply didn't believe the letters as letters. The voice was constantly too literary, despite little tweaks to make it seem informal. I almost never fully accepted the sense that someone was sat at a table writing these letters, they always felt like a novelist writing novelistic literary letters. And it might seem a churlish argument that a novel of letters reads like it was written as a novel, but I stand by it. A letter in a novel MUST feel like a letter you'd receive in the post and if it doesn't it fails slightly.
However, all that aside, it was a brilliant read and a brave topic to write about.
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