Book Review: We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver

Eva Khatchadourian is ambivalent on the notion of children: she fears the curtailing of her life and career, and the mind-numbing spiral into a world of baby-talk and mushy foods. But yet, Eva has always wanted something more out of her life than what it has offered up to her from its platter of banality. The anguish she experienced at her tenth birthday party stemmed not from the fact that her mother didnt make an effort, but rather that she'did, and the result failed to transcend the puerile, the day to day.

For Eva, the decision to have a child emerges from an existential haze that is slowly descending on her to blinding effect. The birth of a child is seen in society as something transcendental, a way of establishing oneself as a member of a club that has bragging rights to its very existence: it is, perhaps, Eva thinks desperately, a way of escaping those endless barriers and manacles of daily life. But her romantic designs are soon humbled when she learns that pregnancy and motherhood are perhaps, in reality, as she has suspected, poisonous carrots dangled in front of dreamy, worldly women in order to entice them into a club of behavioural manipulation, and to narrow their sphere of existence rather than blowing it wide open.

Eva, the owner of a shoe-string travel guidebook company, whose very spiritual nourishment comes from the unique mixture of fear and delight of travelling abroad and who bathes in other cultures as a way of cleansing herself of her very Americannesssomething she loathes enough that she flies the flag of her Armenian background wherever possiblesees having a child as, perhaps, a journey into those most unrelatable, challengingly foreign vistas. But rather, she finds motherhood draws a rather terrible parallel with a trip she takes to Africa not long after her son is born: everything is too much this way or that way; there is no comfort to be found; the available paths for the hapless tourist are few, and the desire to venture beyond these carefully delineated tour-guided areas can, so very readily, end in disaster. And if this does indeed happen, its your own fault.

Although the infertile are entitled to sour grapes, its against the rules, isnt it, to actually have a baby and spend time at all on that banished parallel life in which you didnt, muses Eva retrospectively, as she writes to her husband in the wake of what we learn is a multiple homicide committed by her teenage son Kevin. But a'Pandoran perversity draws me to prise open what is forbidden. I have an imagination, and I like to dare myself.

We Need to Talk About Kevin is constructed in epistolary format, taking the form of a series of lengthy letters written by Eva as she contrasts her present situation with that of the past, slowly working her way towards the inexorable school shooting incident. In her brutally honest, unflinching manner, she carefully excavates the emotional artefacts of her past, carefully cataloguing and describing them, and as archaeologists do, ascribing a sense of narrative and purpose to them.'Kevin is a novel that has famously divided its readers into two camps: those who put Kevin Khatchadourians actions down to an innate evil, and those who skewer Eva for her conflicted approach to parenthood, and even the conflicted manner in which she identifies as a parent: the precocious Kevin, from an early age, seems to catch on to this, calling Eva Mommer, a term that she readily goes along with.

Such small details, however, exist alongside larger ones across the identity and experience of Eva, and there are numerous instances of Eva settling in situations that are less than ideal, and others where she seems to seek out the terrible out of a desire for self-flagellation. She speaks of rough sex in the bedroom; marries a man who is the veritable opposite of the man that she thought that she would end up withindeed, her husband is, in my mind at least, a blindly sexist man who is so wrapped up in his own entitlement that he scarcely sees Eva as a person; gives up her body and autonomy throughout and indeed after a pregnancy; sacrifices her career in order to align with pressing societal expectation, nevermind that she is the CEO of a successful business, while her husband is a mere location scout; and meekly backs down when her husband purchases a vast suburban McMansion that is the antithesis of the home that Eva has always wanted.

Its perhaps prescient, then, that Eva demands that her son should take her surname, so that she might have something upon which she is allowed to make her mark. Admittedly, though she only succeeds in her efforts after a good deal of protestation on her husbands behalf, and her coup is only managed after evoking the Armenian genocide as an argument in its favour. The venom oozing from this scene, and the claim that she tries to makes of her son, provides an interesting contrast to Evas later matter-of-fact comment of her approach to parenthood being conditionalthe conditions strict. She goes on to note that perhaps, rather than testing for deformities, the doctor in charge of her amniocentesis might have tested for malice, for spiteful indifference, for congenital meanness. The implication is, of course, that Eva may be aware that she carries these very transgressive genes.

I do wonder whether these qualities had been found that Eva would have acted on them: indeed, the very unqualified nature of the passage suggests to me that Kevins nature is something that Eva simultaneously despises and admires, largely because Kevin is so very much Eva, but without the fetters of being born female: I learnt from the best, Kevin says at one point.'We Need to Talk About Kevin is not a simple study of nature versus nurture, but it is also one of identity, projection of self, and of the reconstructive nature of prose. Eva has lived a life of the boundaries and limitations that are impressed from every angle on women, and especially on those women who choose to walk amongst the child-bearing mainstream. Her escapes overseas are a leap for oxygen after spending so long in the airless void of the dank depths of anti-intellectual consumerist America, but every effort to rail against the pressures of the cultural amniotic sac that surrounds her is stymied by cultural norms and the constantly evoked concept of tradition. If it is even noticed in the first place. Eva, then, is a victim of anti-feminist expectation, and she is, quite conceivably, angry about it.

In a world where women are tolerated under a guise of equality, its little surprise that Eva finds herself struggling for a voice. And one way of having another opportunity to speak is through having a child.'In a way you get to do everything twice, she says. Even if our kid had problems at least they wouldnt be our same own problems. But, despite this, Kevins constant, endless misdemeanours go all but unnoticed: Evas husband either turns a blind eye to his sons behaviour, or fails to notice it at all. You never do [see anything wrong], mutters Eva darkly at one point, simmering with the frustration of her desperation, and indeed Kevins ownfor Kevin is an extension of Eva, of coursegoing unnoticed.'For you he was our son, she notes in one of her letters to her husband. There was a persistently generic character to your adoration that Im certain he sensed.

For me, the constant battle between Eva and Kevin is that Kevin is as much as symbol as he is a character: he is Evas anger and frustration made manifest, the very embodiment of her own sense of uselessness and the focus of her country on the pithy, the trivial, the ephemeral. Kevins atrocious final act is, in a way, a violent interpretation of Evas own desperation, and perhaps something that means far more to her than it does to him.'So he is resentful, she says at one point. And I dont blame him for being bored with his own atrocity already, or for envying others their capacity to abandon it. And yet, Eva, though she ostensibly abhors his actions, sets about reliving them and the compounding moments of transgression that lead up to this final protest.

As far as I can tell, it was War on Weirdos, she says of the increased vigilance surrounding a series of copycat school shootings. But I identified with weirdosWere I a student at Gladstone High in 1998, Id surely have written some shocking fantasyabout putting my forlorn family out of its miseryor in a civics project on diversity the gruesome detail in which I recounted the Armenian genocide would betray an'unhealthy fascination with violence.

In fact, given the distanced nature afforded by the books epistolary format, its not inconceivable that Kevin is not just a vessel for Evas ever-growing disillusionment: I cant help but feel that her earlier admission to wanting to prise open what is forbidden suggests that what we are reading may not necessarily be the truth at all, and that we may indeed be reading an imagined narrative. How much of Evas account is veracious, and how much is sheer imaginationa protest on paper, in the non-violent manner that Eva has spent her adult years preaching?'His silence seemed to confront me with a miniature version of my own dissembling, she says at one point. If I found our sons visage too shrewd and contained, the same shifty mask of opacity stared back at me when I brushed my teeth. And perhaps, then, theres more to Evas husbands simple statement:'The answer, if there is one, is the'parents.

For someone who eschews violence and seeks protest through other means, is it so unlikely that a woman who has striven all of her life for a voice might do so through the page, through that very medium that has allowed her to forge her career and to reflect? (Or, perhaps, if Kevin is indeed the stuff of the real world, through a third party who has all the benefits of being a white male at his fingertips?) Moreover, the letter format of the novel is adamantly one-sided, meaning that response and recourse is not possible: perhaps the non-responses to Evas letters have rather less to do with the fact that the person to whom she is writing is dead, but rather that for all we know he might not have existed in the first place. There is a certain truth in madness, and though Evas account is achingly lucid, it is difficult to determine where recollection is replaced with projection, and to me Eva and Kevin become very much one another, with the difference being that one lives in a world of non-actualised protest, while the other makes a statement so overt it cannot be ignored.

The Gordian connectedness of Eva and her son and their nihilistic outlooks is perhaps most clearly illustrated when Eva asks her son what he did what he did, and Kevin answers with, I thought I knew. But Im not so sure any more. And its this endless ambiguity that is what make this such a brilliant, haunting read.

Rating:

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Other books by Lionel Shriver: