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We Need to Talk About Kevin, by Lionel Shriver
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Now a major motion picture by Lynne Ramsay, starring Tilda Swinton and John C. Reilly, Lionel Shriver’s resonant story of a mother’s unsettling quest to understand her teenage son’s deadly violence, her own ambivalence toward motherhood, and the explosive link between them reverberates with the haunting power of high hopes shattered by dark realities. Like Shriver’s charged and incisive later novels, including So Much for That and The Post-Birthday World, We Need to Talk About Kevin is a piercing, unforgettable, and penetrating exploration of violence, family ties, and responsibility, a book that the Boston Globe describes as “sometimes searing . . . [and] impossible to put down.”
- Sales Rank: #21231 in Books
- Brand: Harper Perennial
- Published on: 2011-12-27
- Released on: 2011-12-27
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .97" w x 5.31" l, .75 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 432 pages
- Harper Perennial
From Publishers Weekly
A number of fictional attempts have been made to portray what might lead a teenager to kill a number of schoolmates or teachers, Columbine style, but Shriver's is the most triumphantly accomplished by far. A gifted journalist as well as the author of seven novels, she brings to her story a keen understanding of the intricacies of marital and parental relationships as well as a narrative pace that is both compelling and thoughtful. Eva Khatchadourian is a smart, skeptical New Yorker whose impulsive marriage to Franklin, a much more conventional person, bears fruit, to her surprise and confessed disquiet, in baby Kevin. From the start Eva is ambivalent about him, never sure if she really wanted a child, and he is balefully hostile toward her; only good-old-boy Franklin, hoping for the best, manages to overlook his son's faults as he grows older, a largely silent, cynical, often malevolent child. The later birth of a sister who is his opposite in every way, deeply affectionate and fragile, does nothing to help, and Eva always suspects his role in an accident that befalls little Celia. The narrative, which leads with quickening and horrifying inevitability to the moment when Kevin massacres seven of his schoolmates and a teacher at his upstate New York high school, is told as a series of letters from Eva to an apparently estranged Franklin, after Kevin has been put in a prison for juvenile offenders. This seems a gimmicky way to tell the story, but is in fact surprisingly effective in its picture of an affectionate couple who are poles apart, and enables Shriver to pull off a huge and crushing shock far into her tale. It's a harrowing, psychologically astute, sometimes even darkly humorous novel, with a clear-eyed, hard-won ending and a tough-minded sense of the difficult, often painful human enterprise.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* In a series of brutally introspective missives to her husband, Franklin, from whom she is separated, Eva tries to come to grips with the fact that their 17-year-old son, Kevin, has killed seven students and two adults... Guiltily she recalls how, as a successful writer, she was terrified of having a child. Was it for revenge, then, that from the moment of his birth Kevin was the archetypal difficult child, screaming for hours, refusing to nurse, driving away countless nannies, and intuitively learning to "divide and conquer" his parents? When their daughter, loving and patient Celia, is born, Eva feels vindicated; but as the gap between her view of Kevin as a "Machiavellian miscreant" and Franklin's efforts to explain away their son's aberrant behavior grows wider, they find themselves facing divorce. In crisply crafted sentences that cut to the bone of her feelings about motherhood, career, family, and what it is about American culture that produces child killers, Shriver yanks the reader back and forth between blame and empathy, retribution and forgiveness. Never letting up on the tension, Shriver ensures that, like Eva, the reader grapples with unhealed wounds. Deborah Donovan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
“Ms. Shriver takes a calculated risk . . . but the gamble pays off as she strikes a tone of compelling intimacy.” (Wall Street Journal)
“Furiously imagined.” (Seattle Times)
“An underground feminist hit.” (New York Observer)
“A slow, magnetic descent into hell that is as fascinating as it is disturbing.” (Cleveland Plain Dealer)
“Shriver handles this material, with its potential for cheap sentiment and soap opera plot, with rare skill and sense.” (Newark Star Ledger)
“Powerful [and] harrowing.” (Entertainment Weekly)
“Impossible to put down.” (Boston Globe)
Most helpful customer reviews
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful.
What would you do if your child was a psychopath?
By Kira S.
WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD. DO NOT READ IF YOU DON'T LIKE SPOILERS
This is one of the few times I was glad I had watched the movie before I read the book. I was prepared for the horrors to come. I knew the mother, Eva, was not particularly likable, and did not want to have children. The only reason she chose to do so is that her husband, Franklin, wanted a child so badly, and she loved her husband desperately and wanted to please him. Eva was capable of love; the attachment disorder was not her fault. In the letters she addressed to her husband, she described numerous scenes where she searched for Franklin frantically at the airport after returning from her trips abroad because she missed him so badly. And she loved her second child, Celia, even though she clearly saw what she perceived as Celia’s character flaws, something many parents have difficulty doing.
So as to the question of nature versus nurture, I think we were given ample clues that the primary cause of Kevin’s problems was nature, although his nature made it extremely difficult for his mother to nurture him in any meaningful way. In answer to questions raised by other reviewers – yes, some children are born with brain defects that prevent them from experiencing normal human emotions. Read up on recent brain research. It will open your eyes.
Another aspect of the situation which was quite frustrating is Franklin’s sheer pig-headedness in refusing to see what Kevin truly is. As the author presents Kevin’s behavior, he has some aspects of sociopathy, which includes the ability to present a charming and attractive face to those he wishes to deceive. Franklin saw what he wants to see, and after years of defending Kevin, Franklin was entrenched in this world view. To backtrack would be to admit that he had been wrong since the beginning, a difficult thing for anyone to do. But to refuse to face facts after Celia’s injury – well, I can’t help wondering what Franklin was thinking about as he lay on the lawn bleeding out after Kevin shot him in the neck with an arrow.
I can understand Eva on an intellectual level, I cannot empathize with her. My husband and I both wanted a child. I had a good idea of what was involved with raising a child. I was eleven years old when my younger brother was born, so I ended up doing a lot of the child care because my mother worked long hours and my father was disabled. Eva was unprepared for the emotional and physical stress involved in caring for a child, but Kevin’s nature made her job a hundred – a thousand! – times harder than for most mothers. My conclusion quite early in the book, especially since I had seen the movie, was that the problem was at least 90-95% Kevin’s, 5-10% Eva’s. She was not the most likable person in the world, but she was capable of love when the person she loved was able to love her back. Whatever Kevin felt for his mother - and he did have feelings toward her - it wasn't love.
Since my own experience as a mother has been the complete opposite of Eva’s, I particularly did not understand the ending. She finally found a way to love her son? She planned for him to live with her after he got out of Sing Sing, whatever “walk[s] out the other side”? I have cut relatives out of my life for far less than what Kevin did: Incest. Pedophilia. Even disrespectful and hurtful behavior toward me. Of course, none of these acts involved my son, but I can say without a doubt that if I had put up with fifteen years of the kind of behavior Eva put up with from Kevin, and then he did what he did, I would get him the best legal representation I could afford but he would never, ever hear from me or see me again. Apparently Eva’s feelings of guilt and responsibility for Kevin’s behavior drove her to the masochistic extreme of regular visits to Kevin in prison, and planning to once again take responsibility for him when he was released. Better her than me.
As for the writing – I found particularly the first one-third to one-half of the book very slow going. Overly complex and turgid prose slowed me down considerably. I am not impressed when an author goes out of her way to sound “literary”. In particular, in a story told in epistolary fashion, words should flow naturally, like conversation. And as I got further into the book, it did flow a little better – or maybe I just got used to her style. In the last half of the book, the exposition was broken up with dialogue more frequently, which helped.
I rarely give books four stars. That means “would read again.” I have seen the movie twice. It is conceivable that at some future date I will read the book again. The copy I am reading now is from the library. I plan to buy a copy for my collection, so that I will have it when and if I decide to read it again.
33 of 34 people found the following review helpful.
We need to talk about Lionel Shriver's thesaurus.
By S.E.E.
We need to talk about Lionel Shriver's thesaurus. As another reviewer noted, this book reads like someone who writes with one window open on Microsoft Word and the other on Thesaurus.com. Phrases like "immediate rapacities" and "superficial peripatetics" and "lambent joy" seemed more designed to impress than to communicate. The fact that this epistolary-novel is supposed to come from one estranged spouse to the other seems wholly unimaginable. Is this how a bohemian character who writes budget-friendly travel guides for starving students would communicate with her husband? I doubt it.
My biggest complaint is that the book was over-written. (Example: Every day we spent apart, I would conjure that wide warm chest of yours, its pectoral hillocks firm and mounded from your daily 100 pushups, the clavicle valley into which I could nestle the crown of my head on those glorious mornings that I did not have to catch a plane.)
I also got bored with the newspaper-like summaries of every school shooting ever. I want insight into this family, not a superficial recounting of the same widely-known facts of every other school shooting.
Obviously, this was not my favorite book. I can see how it would prompt discussion and but absent a group debate, this book made up entirely of unlikeable characters is both tiresome and grim.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
I want to say that I really did enjoy reading this book
By Lauren Shipton
First, I want to say that I really did enjoy reading this book. The prose is advanced and lengthy, but I enjoy books like that because they improve my vocabulary. I read this on my iPad and made a point of highlighting the words I did not know so I could reference them later--I learned quite a few. The first 25% of the book moves agonizingly slow, with most pages dedicated to intricate, deep thought processes and emotional trails of the the narrator. While that was difficult to make my way through, I grew to admire it, because it takes an incredibly talented writer to capture the nuances of our everyday thoughts and connect them to a larger picture. What I mean, is the author take the reader on a journey through the mind of Kevin's mother from before his conception to his current day in prison. The thoughts she had during his infancy tied together with thoughts and actions in his later years, and that I find incredible.
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