Lionel Shriver

We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver relates the story of a family whose boy, Kevin, goes on a killing rampage at his high school. This is a book that shook me to the core, I had to read it in short bursts as I needed to take breaks to get away from the darkness. Written beautifully but the subject matter is distressing, shocking and ugly. Told by the mother, Eva, the story of her family unfolds in epistolary form, through letters that Eva writes to her husband, Franklin.

Eva and show more Franklin are very different from one another but they are deeply in love and the decision to have a child is not one that was taken lightly. Eva never really wanted children but decided to go ahead with it as she knew how much her husband desired parenthood. From the moment she gives birth to Kevin, her life becomes more of a horror story. Unable to bond with or love her child, Eva immediately sees Kevin as an adversary. He is shown to be a sly monster, and as he grows he is only too willing to display his evil nature to his mother. His father on the other hand does not see this side of Kevin and feels that Eva is a disinterested, cold mother. As we work our way through the book the story builds in intensity as Kevin matures and that destructive day in April approaches.

I believe that ultimately We Need To Talk About Kevin raises far more questions than it actually answers. As I read about the imploding of this family I couldn’t help but ask myself whether Eva was a reliable narrator. Can someone be born inherently evil? Can a mother’s coldness build a monster? Do parents get the children they deserve? Was this the truth as Eva saw it or is this her own anguish and guilt that she is writing about. Eva puts herself on trial and the reader must form his own judgement. show less

I love epistolary stories! And I love the somewhat pretentious prose of Lionel Shriver's books. This narrator is definitely not a fully likable person, and she does a lot of things that are arguably bad, but I feel that deep down she's trying to do the right thing. The part that always gets me is how she says when she got the call about the school shooting it didn't occur to her that Kevin might be the perpetrator. No matter how much she may have disliked him, she didn't think that badly of show more him.

On a personal note, I read this book when I was convinced I would never have children, and it was something to point to and say "see! that's what can happen!" But after my husband and I decided to adopt, I went back and read this book in one night to see if this book would make me feel differently about our decision, but it did not scare me the way it did before, which is good because I am now the mom of a beautiful daughter! show less

Why I wanted to read it: I was in the mood for Lionel Shriver but the only one that truly grabbed me by description was her newest.

There’s something insightful, funny, snarky, or vivid on pretty much every page. Here’s page 27. Starts with young woman Tommy, answered by protagonist Serenata.

”Well, you post your steps. Every day. Online. Just about everybody clocks up, like, twenty K or more, and Marley Wilson, this total c** from senior year, regularly posts thirty.”
“How many show more miles is that?”
“Just under fifteen,” Tommy said promptly.
“Unless she’s really hoofing it, walking that mileage could take five hours a day. Does she do anything else?”
“Whatever else she does isn’t the point.”
“Why do you care how many steps other people take?”
“You don’t get it. But you should.”

And, another random page, 167, arm wrestling.

When Sloan took his turn, the antagonists were a matched set. They both had the naturally well-formed limbs of born athletes, and the elongated figures of avatars in video games. Meeting each other’s gaze, each seemed to apply gradually more force, but nothing moved; the sides of their palms grew whiter. Only after a full minute did it become apparent that Sloan was merely holding her there.
“So how long do you want to do this?” His voice was relaxed.
“You’re a condescending son of a bitch, aren’t you?”
“I’m a man.”

Last, even though it’s from the Afterword, page 327, it’s not really a spoiler and could as easily have come from the beginning as from the end.

This idea that in historical terms boomers were unusually deluded about the inexorability of their decay now struck Serenata as unfair. For the abundance of human existence, no one got old. They died. Mass aging was a recent phenomenon, and in joining the “old-old” on any scale she and her peers would be pioneers. Besides, Serenata Tersichore had never herself grown old before, so it made a certain sense that she wouldn’t be very good at it.

A strong plot, well worked, with interesting and vibrant characters. Shriver’s insights and observations ring true. show less

Three days before his sixteenth birthday, Kevin Katchadourian goes into his high school, where he shoots and murders seven fellow pupils, a teacher and a cafeteria worker. In a series of letters to her former husband, Kevin’s mother Eva recalls his upbringing and their lives together.

I’ll be honest – for the first 100 pages of this book (my edition was exactly 400 pages) I wasn’t sure I was going to enjoy it. That said, it’s not necessarily a book that you can enjoy as such, given show more that it is about a school shooter. It is set in 2000, two years after the horrific incident, and while Kevin and his specific crime is fictional, it references several real life school shooters. It is a sobering subject, but despite this I have become absorbed in other books on the same subject (for example, the brilliant Nineteen Minutes, by Jodi Picoult).

Eva is frankly, not an easily likeable person – although I sense that she was written that way deliberately. Her ambivalence towards her son since before he was even born, was apparent, and she wrote about him as if he was evil from the moment he arrived in the world. The question at the heart of the book is whether someone can be born evil or if – in this case – Kevin turned out the way he did as a result of his mother’s attitude towards him.

From about 100 pages in however, the book captured and held my attention. I still did not really warm to Eva, although I did feel so desperately sorry for her. I wondered if she was a reliable narrator, and if all the horrible things that Kevin did prior to the school shooting were actually as she described them, but of course events bore out the fact that he was a cruel and reckless young man.

Eva is very verbose and rarely uses one word if she can manage to use twenty. She is also clearly very intellectual and has a superiority complex to others. But she is not without compassion, even if she is very selfish. I did not like her husband Franklin either, although admittedly we only ever get to know him through Eva’s own filter. But his blind defence of his son made me want to shake him for his naivety. (Again though, I wonder how the same events would have played out written from Franklin’s point of view.)

Anyway – it’s relentlessly bleak, but you kind of have to expect that going in. It’s a book I’ve been meaning to read for a number of years, and I’m glad I finally did. On the whole, I would recommend it although I don’t think I would rush to read any more books by this author. show less