BOOK REVIEW

We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver. Orange Prize

(Brought to you by kat impatientreader.com)  Eva Khatchadourian is a broken woman living in a wretched apartment where her cheap furnishings and fixtures crumble into disrepair. She numbly earns her paycheck at a local travel agency, and returns home to type out a series of letters to her absent husband that sift through the details of their lives that led to her current circumstances. We Need to Talk about Kevin unfolds first-person in a series of these letters.

Two years ago, her 15 year-old son Kevin committed an atrocity:  he murdered seven classmates, a cafeteria worker, and a gifted teacher who tried to befriend him.  He did all this deliberately before his sixteenth birthday so that he wouldn't be tried as an adult.

Unlike the perpetrators of many school shootings, Kevin didn't commit suicide because he considers that an out for weaklings.  Kevin has always followed the news stories of his "colleagues" (the murderers) the way normal kids follow baseball stats.  He remains especially incensed that the "Columbine kids" stole his thunder by launching their massacre only a few days after his.  Every time his mother visits him at the juvenile offender facility, he gripes about it.

Eva doggedly continues to visit Kevin just as she forces herself to write to her husband.  At first, she shows up to question Kevin to try to fathom the unspeakable things he has done.  He regards her with dead eyes and knowing smirks. Later, it seems that she keeps in contact with Kevin because he is all that she has:  her husband with their young daughter has abandoned her.  Her deepest fear is that her shortcomings as a mother made Kevin the psychopath that he is. Partly in compensation of this, she refuses to give up on him now.

Once, Eva was a wealthy entrepreneur and a self-made woman.  The daughter of Armenian immigrants, she reacted against her mother's agoraphobia and forged a career that necessitated traveling the world.  She started a series of travel guides called Wing & A Prayer aimed at college students and adventurous types who want to globe-trot on a shoestring budget. Over the years, her business became a sensation and made her rich.

She and her husband Franklin were deeply in love.  He did well financially in his somewhat ridiculous career of scouting location shots for advertisements.  They fashioned a bohemian life in New York City, and worked hard to be edgy and liberal and intellectual and cosmopolitan. They made fun of their friends as each couple started reproducing and bogging down into domestic bliss.  Secretly, though, Eva knew that Franklin wanted children.  She, however, didn't. How could she when her business required her to jet off to the Third World several times a year for weeks at a time?

But Eva is a complex woman, seething with restless insecurities. Is her life all that it can be?  Is she missing out on an essential experience?  Is she selfish to deny Franklin his heart's desire?  And, perhaps most foolish of all: does she need a baby in order to grow up and be a real adult?

Eva gets pregnant. Franklin is overjoyed. Eva feels scared and full of regret. She suffers a prolonged and difficult labor as if the baby resents being forced out of her womb.  Well, "resentment" will become Kevin's defining trait.

From the very beginning, Kevin is a bizarre and spiteful baby. He screams incessantly, running through a series of nannies who cannot deal with him.  Almost before he can walk, he's pulling people's hair, knowing that he hurts them.  He refuses to get potty-trained, and defecates as an act of revenge.  Eva can see all this, and hates Kevin for it.  She makes a pretense of caring for him (trying to breast-feed him, which he refuses to do), but both her husband and Kevin – young as he is – are not fooled.

Later on, secretive and brilliant Kevin learns to talk and to read on his own. He hoards his achievements as if not wanting to give his parents any satisfaction or joy in his development. He tells his parents nothing, but they notice that other kids shun him at school and act afraid of him.  Soon he's loudly pleasuring himself right in front of his mother as she hurries to slam his bedroom door between them. Obviously Kevin is a psychopath, and probably was one from his first breath.

At least Kevin seems to acknowledge his mother as his intellectual equal.  Franklin, he treats with a mocking gee-whiz-Dad irony, and Franklin believes that Kevin's "hero-worship" of him is sincere!

Kevin is the son he's always wanted, and Franklin thinks that Eva resents Kevin because she had to cut back on her career. He believes none of the bizarre observations about Kevin that Eva brings up. The mind-boggling denial that Franklin manifests about Kevin is the hardest thing to swallow in this novel. But sometimes hope and desire will give smart people the most appalling blind spot, and it's to the author's credit that the reader can see this.

Kevin really is smart. In one intriguing scene, he reluctantly goes out to dinner with Eva who is making one of her infrequent attempts to bond with him. They bicker, but at least they're talking. 

Intoxicated by her success, Eva starts opening up to Kevin, which leads to her to a pretentious diatribe against her fellow Americans – something you might expect from the brittle, dissatisfied, and essentially spoiled woman that she is.  Kevin absorbs everything she says, and then rips her arguments to pieces – starting with her long-standing lament about how the Turks massacred her Armenian ancestors back at the turn of the century. This is from a prosperous Armenian-American millionaire who has never known a day of fear in her life!

Eva decides she wants another baby.  She refuses to fail at anything in her life, and motherhood needs a second try. By now, this family's life is turning into a train-wreck.  Franklin teeters on the brink of divorcing Eva because of her cold heart towards Kevin.  Kevin, aware of this, plays it for everything he's worth.  But Eva gets pregnant.  When she has a sweet little daughter Celia, Franklin openly prefers Kevin.  Eva in turn lavishes attention on Celia. Nothing short of disaster can result from this.

Even here, the author refuses to take the easy way out.  Celia is not an easy child to like either, but for different reasons.  She is a shrinking violet, very dependent, and of only average intelligence. Franklin sneers at her.  Kevin torments her. And Eva cares for her with affection but also an impatient sense of duty.  Here is where We Need to Talk about Kevin slipped from a five-star book to a four-star book for me: Eva leaves Kevin alone with Celia.  She knows what kind of creature he is!  Does she just get tired and careless?

But the main event is still coming:  Kevin's school massacre.  I know this is an appalling subject, but the author describes it with restraint, precision, and intense control. You are fascinated in spite of yourself. The consequences of his actions reveal much that remained hidden through the book.  The ending even hints at redemption – though I personally felt that if there were ever an argument for capital punishment, Kevin is it.

I'm glad I read this harrowing novel.  We Need to Talk about Kevin is the only epistolary novel I have ever been able to finish – let alone gripped in my hands late at night, unable to put it down.  Novels composed of letters have fallen out of style because they are so boring!  The fact that you're reading someone's letters is too distancing:  you know the events have already happened, and the correspondents have survived.  The only time an epistolary novel has any fire is when it is uncovering secrets, and the author uses this to great effect here. 

We Need to Talk about Kevin gets four stars out of five.  Get it for your book club; you will not be able to stop talking about it. It can be found on Amazon.com through this link:

We Need to Talk About Kevin: A Novel (P.S.)

Noteworthy Links:   Wonderquest - Science Q/A! The Connection - Tech blog! Author site - John the Eunuch Historical Mystery series, Cozy Mystery List for all your cozy mystery needs, Obsidian Bookshelf - reviews of gay-themed fiction.
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