Book Reviews

Reviewed by Lynley Capon

Gripping from start to finish, We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver (2003, Harper Perennial, 400 pages) left me emotionally stirred every time I had to put it down to do other things. Although written by a woman and told from a woman's viewpoint, every father and all prospective parents should read it. Unsurprisingly, Shriver won the 2005 Orange Prize for We Need to Talk About Kevin, her eighth published novel.

Written as a series of letters from a distraught wife to her estranged husband, this is an emotional thriller and a close study of blind paternal love and maternal ambivalence. It examines the role that such issues may have played in the title character's decision to murder people at his high school.

Kevin's mother, Eva, starts to write letters regularly to her ex-husband, Franklin, after the event that tore apart their lives. Kevin killed nine people, including a teacher, on what began as a normal Thursday. As Eva writes her letters, she tries to unravel the past to find why the awful event happened and who, if anyone, is to blame.

Her first letter starts: “Dear Franklin, I'm unsure why one trifling incident this afternoon moved me to write to you. But since we've been separated, I may most miss coming home to deliver the narrative curiosities of my day, the way a cat might lay mice at your feet.... Were you still installed in my kitchen, slathering crunchy peanut butter on Branola though it was almost time for dinner, I'd no sooner have put down the bags, one leaking a clear viscous drool, than the little story would come tumbling out, even before I chided that we're having pasta tonight so would you please not eat that whole sandwich.”

Through the letters, we learn how Franklin and Eva met and fell in love, how she was a travel-guide writer with her own company, how they quarreled about her long trips and how eventually they came to be Kevin's parents. The choice to have a child was long and convoluted. Eva never felt comfortable about her pregnancy. She had been perfectly content to accept the completeness of being a couple. But Franklin wanted children, and she decided that maybe she needed to broaden her experiences.

More letters describe the difficult birth, the long labor and Eva's sense that Kevin was reluctant to be born. She tells of her difficulties in getting the baby to feed due to his apparent antipathy to her or in sleeping due to his constant screaming. Readers, too, feel the huge weight of motherhood and Eva's misgivings.

Soon Eva is diagnosed as having post-natal depression. Her response was: “The term was less diagnostic as tautological. I was depressed after Kevin's birth because I was depressed after Kevin's birth. Thanks.”

Franklin constantly condemns Eva for having a negative attitude. Instead of understanding and supporting her, he acts the part of a superior father. She explains to him: “I know you doubt me on this, but I did try very hard to form a passionate relationship to my son. But I had never experienced my feeling for you, for example, as an exercise that I was obliged to rehearse like scales on a piano. The harder I tried, the more aware I became that my effort was an abomination.... Hence it was not just Kevin that depressed me, or the fact that your own affections were increasingly diverted; I depressed me. I was guilty of emotional malfeasance. But Kevin depressed me as well, and I do mean Kevin and not the baby. ”

As time passes, Kevin becomes a difficult toddler, one who does everything to upset his mother, yet his father thinks he's cute. Babysitters never stay more than one night. When in kindergarten, Kevin shows clear signs of sadistic and wayward behavior. Each time that Eva points out Kevin's faults, Franklin refuses to listen, makes excuses and even cheers on Kevin. As I read Eva's letters, I wanted to spank Kevin and rail at Franklin for being a blind fool.

At one point, I cheered when Eva lost her temper and hurled Kevin across a room. At age five, he still gleefully soiled his nappies. Eva realized it was a deliberate ruse, even as Franklin made all sorts of excuses for the boy. The throw caused a broken arm. At the hospital, Eva felt amazed that Kevin told the doctor he fell off his change table onto a large toy truck, causing the break. Back home, he proudly told Franklin of his fall, and Eva noted the truck placed to support the story. Then he stopped pooing his pants.

Scary tales of neighbor children being hurt and other nasty incidents punctuate Kevin's growing years. Although Eva suspects her son, Franklin never accepts Kevin's responsibility and decries Eva for disloyalty. When Kevin reaches age seven, Eva has a baby girl. Franklin didn't want another child and fumed at Eva for getting pregnant without his consent. The girl, Celia, differed from Kevin in every way and behaved very much as Eva's child. Kevin told Eva she'd be sorry one day for having Celia. In time, Celia suffers many indignities at Kevin's hands, but none that Eva could prove to Franklin.

Eva often mentions the many school-shootings in the news and their discussions at home about them. She has a date with 14-year-old Kevin to try to understand him better, much to Franklin's derision. Although the effort looks like a failure at the time, we later learn differently.

Along the way, Eva also discusses her current situation as a social pariah, boredom at her new work, having sold her business to cover court costs after Kevin's trial, and the political scene as George W. Bush and Al Gore battle over their presidential chances. She tells of her twice-weekly visits to Kevin at the juvenile prison, his reaction to her presence and the growing bond they develop. The last letters are so astounding, and the truth of Franklin's misguided belief in Kevin so shocking, that you're left gasping.

Eva ends her letters: “...I have come full circle, making a journey much like Kevin's own. In asking petulantly whether Thursday was my fault, I have had to go backward, to deconstruct.... The truth is, if I decided I was innocent, or if I decided I was guilty, what difference would it make? If I arrived at the right answer, would you come home?
This is all I know. That on the 11th April 1983, unto me a son was born and I felt nothing.... Because after three days short of 18 years, I can finally announce that I am too exhausted and too confused and too lonely to keep fighting, and if only out of desperation or even laziness, I love my son.”

Lionel Shriver, named Margaret at birth, changed her name at age 15 to one she liked better. As a tomboy, she preferred a boy's name. Raised in a strict Presbyterian home in North Carolina, she sprinkles a strong antipathy for religion into We Need to Talk About Kevin.

A journalist, Shriver wrote for The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, The New York Times and The Economist before starting a column in The Guardian in 2005. There, she expressed views on controversial topics. Now aged 54 and previously having lived in Nairobi, Bangkok and Belfast, she resides in London with her husband, a jazz drummer whom she married at age 45. She has no children.

Approval rating: 90 per cent.

(July 11, 2011)

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