We Need to Talk About Kevin: A Novel (P.S.)
by Lionel Shriver
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Book Summary Information
Author: Lionel ShriverEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-07-03
ISBN: 006112429X
Number of pages: 400
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Book Reviews of We Need to Talk About Kevin: A Novel (P.S.)
Book Review: The new children's hour
Summary: 5 Stars
Between the dark and the daylight,
When night is beginning to lower,
Comes a pause in the day's occupations,
That is known as the children's hour.
A whisper and then a silence,
Yet I know by their merry eyes
They are plotting and planning together
To take me by surprise.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "The Children's Hour"
School shooters were the menace of the late `90s, holding adults in their sweaty little grip for nearly a decade. In 1996, a teacher and two students were killed in Moses Lake, Washington. In 1997, a thirteen-year-old student shot a classmate over $40. That same year, Evan Ramsey killed a student and the principal of his school in Bethel, Alaska; Luke Woodham killed three classmates, wounded seven, and stabbed his mother to death in Pearl, Mississippi; and 14-year-old Michael Carneal shot up a Paducah, Kentucky school prayer group, killing three.
In 1998, the juvenile shooters became more brazen. That spring, a 13-year-old partnered with an 11-year-old in Jonesboro, Arkansas to kill five and wound ten. A month later, Andrew Wurst killed a teacher in Edinboro, Pennsylvania and, in Springfield, Oregon, Kip Kinkel upped the ante by murdering his parents as well. The epidemic seemed to culminate in 1999, when 12 were killed and 24 injured at Columbine High School in suburban Denver.
The counter-epidemic was no less predictable and no less morosely enthralling as the country scrambled frantically to understand why. In the wake of the Columbine murders, the victims' families filed lawsuits against the police, the school district, AOL Time Warner, Palm Pictures, Sony Entertainment, and the parents of the perpetrators.
Blame for the murders was widely scattered and carelessly aimed. Video games, movies, rock music, godlessness, gun control, and working mothers were all discarded before cliques and adolescent bullying were uneasily adopted to explain this spate of children spinning violently out of control.
In 2003 (still two years before 16-year-old Jeffrey Weise would kill seven people in Red Lake, Minnesota), Lionel Shriver tackled the question fictitiously in We Need to Talk About Kevin (Perseus Books). In a series of letters to her husband, Eva Khatchadourian sorts through her son's childhood and her own reluctance about motherhood in an effort to understand what drove Kevin to murder nine of his classmates on the eve of his 16th birthday.
Granted, the epistolary artifice is forced and Shriver (who proudly describes herself as a pedant) is a verbal show-off, telling the story in languorous, unnecessarily complex sentences. But Kevin is still a brilliant tragicomic satire of child-centered families in the `90s, raising the possibility that we're allowing these little beasts to run wild in the name of building their "self-esteem."
Eva is a casualty of child-centeredness. She reluctantly scales back her career in publishing travel guides to have a child she isn't sure she wants and, from birth, she ascribes malicious intent and intractable motives to Kevin's behavior. She's impatient, sharp-tongued, and has little use for the mawkishly sentimental notions of ideal maternity.
Shriver obviously expects us to ask whether Kevin's problems are all his mother's fault and we can never quite ascertain Eva's credibility. She admits she was a terrible mother, but even this conclusion is suspect as she inflates the mother-son relationship to unreasonable proportions (which she acknowledges as a form of vanity).
But it's hard to avoid the possibility that child-centeredness has as much to do with Kevin's murderous tendencies as Eva's chilly reception of motherhood. At its core is the belief that children, due to an assumed psychological fragility, are utterly shaped by their parents and therefore "good parenting" means the mother must subsume her entire identity in her children. What's more, she must enjoy every moment of this for, if she does not, the child will sense her ambivalence and be warped by it.
One earmark of child-centeredness is over-indulgence and lack of discipline. If children do something bad, it's assumed to be the fault of the parents (primarily the mother and usually because she is, in some way, selfishly indulging herself).
Another related earmark is a preoccupation with the child's psyche and self-image. The theory goes that, because children are entirely shaped by their parents, they are assumed to be a tabula rasa and intrinsically good. Anything the mother does (particularly any selfish desires or less-than-enthusiastic attitudes) can mar this perfect slate, resulting in bad behavior and mental illness.
There's an historical myopia to these steep and immutable maternal expectations. They fail to acknowledge that parenting and childhood are culturally-defined and that beliefs about child-rearing change drastically across time and place. To even come close to meeting child-centered expectations requires a certain amount of wealth and leisure. Before modern conveniences made this possible, no parent would have had the time or disposable wealth to focus this much energy on parenting as a task in itself -- there was too much farming, weaving, hunting, ranching, and domestic labor to be done. Yet somehow society managed to progress anyhow.
Nonetheless, most readers will cheerfully collaborate in blaming Eva and few blame Kevin's father, Franklin, who sees only good in his son and undermines any attempt to discipline him, placing a wedge of marital discord between the parents. Kevin is coddled and over-indulged by a father who becomes so invested in the kind of son he wants that he fails to see the son he actually has. Kevin can get away with anything and has no respect for Franklin from the beginning.
That readers sympathize so readily with Franklin underscores the expectation that mothers will give everything while fathers will get a free pass no matter how inept or uninvolved they may be. Can a failure to discipline truly be considered superior parenting to a failure to indulge? Even if we accept that Kevin was born a tabula rasa and would have been ok if he'd been born to different parents, wouldn't a failure to see his flaws have been at least as influential as Eva's reluctance to have him in the first place?
There is arguably the strongest textual evidence that Kevin has an organic mental illness and has been a sociopath from birth. And, on this score, Shriver has obviously done her homework. He presents a lot of the vague sort of symptoms that correlate with sociopathy, but which can't be taken as conclusive proof of it: constant crying in infancy, an unusually large head and lack of muscle tone (as a child, pediatricians describe Kevin as "floppy"), an unusual acceptance of boredom, a tendency to "zone out" (eyes glazed over and mouth hanging open), extreme difficulty with toilet training, and an alarming lack of empathy.
It's hard to read this book and not give in to the temptation to settle on one or two particular answers. But part of the tragedy of the Kevins of the world is that they have no meaning. There's no way to make them safe and pocket-sized and controllable without being, to some degree, dishonest about them.
What drove Kevin off the deep end may be the most obvious question posed by the novel, but it's also the most banal, ultimately resolved only through a leap of blind reader hubris. We close the book with no more certainty about what causes school shootings than when we picked it up - and author interviews suggest this was probably the point. We grapple for The Answer out of the same vanity exhibited by Eva - the need of the privileged to find order in the universe and use that order to ward off disaster. If there is no definitive answer, then any parent is capable of producing a monster.
Besides, there are much more interesting questions posed by Shriver's keen insights into American culture and our nihilistic little hearts.
Kevin sees a kindred spirit in his mother because Eva is able to peek into the same black void of meaninglessness that makes Kevin's life so intolerable, but which everyone else around them ignores. Kevin looks to Eva to guide him through this Nietzschean Hell that he holds in such contempt. And herein lies Eva's failure - much greater than not being nice and feminine and maternal: she was never able to give Kevin's life meaning for him.
If we accept at face value that Eva's problem is a failure to be instinctively maternal, we risk ignoring her much greater character flaws that would have been no less flaws had she never decided to reproduce. If anyone around Kevin could have convinced him that life has meaning, it would probably have been Eva. She's the only one who would have given him an answer that wasn't coated in dishonesty and foolishness. Instead, she tells him that the cure to existential boredom is to "bring a book."
Eva and Franklin wanted a child in order to answer what they called the "Big Question" - the purpose of human existence - which Eva later realizes may be the most selfish part of their reasoning. They can't give Kevin's life any meaning because they had kids as a way to give their own lives meaning.
It's a question that's never before been raised in the whole course of human history. Children used to be essential because they were needed for labor. Now that the First World no longer needs children economically, it's become a viable question: Do I want children and, if so, why?
It's a question that's needled American readers and given Lionel Shriver the reputation of an ice queen. Shriver (who changed her name from "Margaret Ann" to "Lionel" at age 15) is an American expatriate living in London whose mixed feelings about the United States may shine through in Eva even more than her contempt for the soppiness and boredom of motherhood. And she indulges these fierce American insights even with her characters.
Franklin, a hot dog-snarfing Republican patriot, is both the stereotypical American and the way we want to see ourselves. He embodies our national story and the way we cling, in the face of all evidence, to the insistence that the whole rest of the world sees us the same way we see ourselves -- reality need not apply. In many ways, Franklin is a better person than anyone else in the novel, but his complete refusal to acknowledge reality is his undoing.
Eva, the daughter of Armenian immigrants, is also a sort of American cliche, but one that the Franklins like to minimize. She's the gadfly. She's the stereotypical East Coast liberal who idealizes Europe and Canada and rolls her eyes at all those ignorant rubes she's stuck sharing a country with. She believes she's smarter than they are and, though she's right, she's not a better person for it. Her honesty is unacceptable to the Franklins because it pierces the national story of American superiority and, ironically, it's her own honesty that makes her miserable. It enables her to not only see everything that unfolds for what it is, but to realize her own hand in making it that way. At least Franklin's ignorance is bliss.
Kevin is the dark side of American culture that nobody wants to talk about. Our meaninglessness. Our boredom. Our dissatisfaction with consumerism. We have everything, so what's left to take pleasure in except hedonistic sadism and destruction? Kevin is really the logical outcome of combining the Franklins and the Evas.
Even little Celia -- Kevin's small, timid, and self-effacing sister -- has a symbolic role to play. She's our other unmentionable dark side. Our fear and our sense of isolation. She's the reality that, for all America's international bravado, we're really so petrified of The Terrorists that we're quivering under the bed, peeing ourselves. And it's too bad she's unmentionable, because she's also our un-self-conscious innocence, our artless naivete, our incorruptible sweetness.
For all Shriver's evident frustrations with child-centeredness ("the same folks who are inclined to sue builders who did not perfectly protect them from the depredations of an earthquake [are] the first to claim that their son failed his math test because of attention deficit disorder and not because he spent the night before at a video arcade"), with therapy culture ("a complaint common enough to have a name...dangles options like Internet chat rooms and community support groups for rhapsodic communal bellyaching"), with cheap forgiveness ("conspicuous clemency has become the religious version of driving a flashy car"), or with exceptionalism ("Americans are...self-righteous and superior about their precious democracy, and condescending toward other nationalities because they think they've got it right - never mind that half the adult population doesn't vote...Worst of all, they have no idea that the rest of the world can't stand them."), what really seems to stick in her craw is the American love of spectacle. As Christopher Hitchens (whom I'm loath to quote, but in this instance, he's right) once said, "All Americans really want, deep down, is to be special."
So, was Kevin then responding to a dysfunctional society obsessed with fame by any means necessary? For a short season, school shootings were a fad. They went from the distant, unrealistic fantasies of misfit kids to a quasi-legitimate form of adolescent self-expression. Adults fed the fad by speaking in darkly hopeful tones about how it could happen in their town too. It got a lot of attention and kids always do things that garner lots of adult attention. It didn't take kids long to figure out that shooting up their school would make them famous all over the country.
Shriver shrinks not from polemic when she has Kevin deliver the following speech to the TV cameras: "You wake up and you watch TV, and you get in the car and you listen to the radio. You go to your little job or your little school, but you're not going to hear about that on the 6:00 news, since guess what. Nothing is really happening...You watch TV all night or maybe you go out so you can watch a movie, and maybe you get a phone call so you can tell your friends what you've been watching...What are they watching?...People like me...you're listening to what I say because I have something you don't: I got plot." [Italics original]
Perhaps it's poor form for an author to shame her readers in this way, but it's certainly effective. We know going into it that Kevin shoots up his school and I was, true to form, gobbling the book up in anticipation of a gory climax. Just the same way millions of people sat glued to the television on the day of the Columbine murders.
Our insatiable appetite for disaster porn may serve the higher purpose of giving us someone to loathe. Andrea Yates was once everyone's favorite mother to hate. We needed her so we could say, "Hey, I may not be perfect, but at least I'd never drown my five children in the bathtub." Thereby drawing a clear, reassuring line between good mothers and bad mothers. Yates externalized what is perhaps a common reluctance about having kids and a fear of snapping at some point and hurting them. Maybe so many people wanted to kill Andrea Yates in order to kill the part of themselves that feared they could identify with her.
Shriver herself provokes nearly as strong a reaction as Eva, apparently for the unfeminine crime of saying and doing whatever she pleases. Shriver's cheerful admission that she finds children messy, loud, tiresome, and "brutally dull" has earned her a reputation as "anti-child," implying that any woman who doesn't enjoy children is abnormal and suspicious. She openly disdains American tackiness and spends as much time overseas as possible. When she won the Orange Prize for Kevin in 2005, she was criticized for not displaying the proper humility. The BBC ran a photo of her jubilantly kissing her award and she admitted that she not only very much wanted to win, but believed that she deserved to win.
It's this desire for iconoclasm that proves Eva - and her creator - to be ironically and ineluctably, even lovably, as American as apple pie.
Summary of We Need to Talk About Kevin: A Novel (P.S.)
The gripping international bestseller about motherhood gone awry
Eva never really wanted to be a mother?and certainly not the mother of the unlovable boy who murdered seven of his fellow high school students, a cafeteria worker, and a much-adored teacher who tried to befriend him, all two days before his sixteenth birthday. Now, two years later, it is time for her to come to terms with marriage, career, family, parenthood, and Kevin?s horrific rampage in a series of startlingly direct correspondences with her estranged husband, Franklin. Uneasy with the sacrifices and social demotion of motherhood from the start, Eva fears that her alarming dislike for her own son may be responsible for driving him so nihilistically off the rails.
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