We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver (Jill)

We Need To Talk About Kevin
By Lionel Shriver
Completed January 30, 2009

When I started We Need To Talk About Kevin, I did so with hesitation. Several readers commented how it was depressing, the characters were unlikable and the subject was uncomfortable. Admittedly, that’s exactly how I would summarize this book. I couldn’t wait for it to end. It was like approaching a car accident, rubbernecking to see what happened and then hurriedly speeding up to get past it.

It’s the story of Eva, written as letters to her estranged husband about their son, Kevin, who killed students and teachers at his high school. Eva is self-loathing, egocentric and probably not the best candidate to be a mother. Through Eva’s descriptions, we learn that her husband was overly optimistic, turning the other cheek at Kevin’s flaws. And Kevin is portrayed as angry and troubled. I am not sure if he had a happy moment in the book.

Like any parent, Eva dissected every moment of her child’s life to determine what went wrong. How did she make Kevin into this murderer? She chronicled her hesitancy to have children, her failures to breastfeed and her unattachment to her son. We learned a lot about her mistakes but little about any successes. Perhaps there were none to write about.

(As a side note, this book made me contemplate how our society scrutinizes parents so heavily when their child murders, but if a 25-year-old man committed the same act, the parents rarely come into question. Moreover, parents always scrutinize themselves, no matter the age of our children.)

We Need To Talk About Kevin didn’t move me like it did other readers. I preferred Jodi Picoult’s treatment of this subject in Nineteen Minutes. It was better rounded, giving you an overall view of the players involved in a school shooting. While I didn’t like the story, I did find Lionel Shriver’s writing to be superb and would read another book by her. We Need To Talk About Kevin just wasn’t my cup of tea. ( )

We Need to Talk about Kevin - Jackie's Review

We Need to Talk about Kevin won the Orange Prize for fiction in 2005.

It is an incredibly powerful book in which the narrator, Eva, describes the events in her life leading up to the day her son went on a killing spree at his high school.

The book deals with one of the few remaining taboos in our society: a mother, who doesn’t like her own child. She feels invaded by pregnancy, and before her son is even born she is scared of him:

….any woman who passes a clump of testosterone-drunk punks without picking up the pace, without avoiding eye contact that might connote challenge or invitation, without sighing inwardly with relief by the following block, is a zoological fool. A boy is a dangerous animal.

Once her son, Kevin, is born he is a difficult baby. He cries constantly and Eva becomes more and more alienated by him. He grows into a difficult toddler and Eva slowly loses control of him.

Having done much research on ’spirited’ children, I did, however, feel that some of Kevin’s behaviour was unrealistic. A single child would not have displayed the strange mixture of reactions that Kevin did.

Eva is also supposed to be a powerful, high flying business woman, who must be of reasonable intelligence, so I find it hard to believe that she would accept things the way they were, and make no attempt to find solutions to her problem. She is rich enough to be able to employ any number of psychologists, or even just read a few books on the subject. I don’t really understand why she failed to do this.

Despite these minor flaws, this book was a great read. It was very thought provoking, and would be perfect for a reading group, as there are so many discussions that arise from it. Are all children sweet, innocent things, or are some born evil?

I couldn’t see how anyone could claim to love children in the generic anymore than any one could credibly claim to love people in a sufficiently sweeping sense as to embrace Pol Pot, Don Rickles, and an upstairs neighbour who does 2,000 jumping jacks at three in the morning.

And how much of a child’s actions can the parent be held accountable for?

When you’re the parent, no matter what the accident, no matter how far away you were at the time and how seemingly powerless to avert it, a child’s misfortune feels like your fault.

This a very important book, especially for new parents. It will remain with me for a long time, and I will be encouraging all my friends to read it - just so I can talk about it!

Highly recommended. Especially for reading groups.



Originally reviewed here.

We Need To Talk About Kevin - Mandy's Review.

I won’t bore you with the basic premise of We Need to Talk About Kevin. If you are reading this, I’m sure you know it is constructed as a series of letters from a mother to her husband, as she tries to make sense of her son’s recent killing spree.

Let me start by telling you what I like about this book. Shriver is a master of structure. She knows exactly what to tell us and when, withholding certain information until exactly the right moment and then dangling just the right amount in front of our eyes, drawing us deeper and deeper into the murky depths, just when we thought we couldn’t take any more. Although this is a difficult and painful book to read, I read it reasonably quickly, precisely because of this luring quality.

The grand questions Shriver tackles are also brave and admirable. Nature vs. Nurture; Good Vs Evil; Conjugal Roles and can we/ should we love our children, no matter what? Yet these issues are clouded somewhat by one of the book’s major flaws.

On page 307, Kevin says to his mother, ‘Is there anything or anybody … you don’t feel superior to?’ Here, he grasps exactly what is wrong with the book. Eva is constantly and tirelessly superior for 400 pages. Franklin is blindly optimistic to the point of tedium - and, here’s the rub, Kevin is so constantly bad, that there’s absolutely no possibility that anyone could love him in any meaningful way. In fact, by about a third of the way through, his actions fail to shock me, I’m rolling my eyes and thinking here we go again.

In other words, the characters are flat, to the point of being one dimensional. I find myself wishing that once, just once, Franklin would lose his temper with Kevin; that Kevin would - I don’t know - offer to help with the laundry or something and that Eva could narrate just one incident without some clever, sarcastic aside. My problem is not with disliking the characters, I’ve read many books where I’ve hated characters with a passion and yet still cared what happens, because I believe in them.

To me, We Need to Talk About Kevin was like watching Tom and Jerry, where one of them (Tom? Jerry? Who cares? And that is just my point) gets flattened by a steam roller again. Shriver would be more qualified to make us uncomfortable if Eva was a little more like us, if Kevin was more like our kids, sometimes good, sometimes bad. It would have been a better book, if I’d been left thinking, there but for the grace of God, rather than, well, that’s all right then.

Laura's Review - We Need to Talk About Kevin

We Need to Talk About Kevin
Lionel Shriver
468 pages

First sentence: Dear Franklin, I'm not sure why one trifling incident this afternoon has moved me to write to you.

Reflections: This is the story of Kevin Khatchadourian, who kills seven high school students, a teacher, and a cafeteria worker just a few days before his 16th birthday. Through letters to her husband, Kevin's mother Eva chronicles his childhood, the horrible events leading up to the massacre, and its aftermath. Eva is searching for answers, and for peace. When did it all begin? Were there pivotal events that set this tragedy in motion? Was it before Kevin was born, when Eva first resented pregnancy's inconveniences? Or, when he wouldn't nurse? Did her postpartum depression have a lasting impact? Or, did Kevin just hate being alive, from the very moment of his birth? There is no hero in this story. All of the characters are flawed and, in fact, even unlikeable. Eva is self-centered and resents the "intrusion" of children in her life. Her husband Franklin is the eternal optimist, failing to see the destructive patterns in Kevin's behavior. And Kevin, of course, is troubled and angry.

We Need to Talk About Kevin is a harrowing and devastatingly sad tale with no clear answers. Kevin's motives are unclear, and while there were many occasions where his parents could have handled a situation differently, their actions were understandable. Any parent reading this book can emphathize and see how they, too, could have made similar decisions.

Lionel Shriver won the 2005 Orange Prize for Fiction for this highly-recommended work. ( )

My original review can be found here.