Book-It '10! Book #55
The Fifty Books Challenge, year two! This was a library request.
Title: We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver
Details: Copyright 2003, Counterpoint
Synopsis (By Way of Front Flap): "That neither nature nor nurture bears exclusive responsibility for a child's character is self-evident. But generalization about genes are likely to provide cold comfort if it's your own child you just opened fire on his fellow algebra students and whose class photograph-- with its unseemly grin-- is shown on the evening news coast-to-coast.
If the question of who's to blame for teenage atrocity intrigues news-watching voyeurs, it tortures our narrator, Eva Khatchadourian. Two years before the opening of the novel, her son, Kevin, murdered seven of his fellow high school students, a cafeteria worker, and the much-beloved teacher who had tried to befriend him. Because his sixteenth birthday arrived two days after the killings he received a lenient sentence and is currently in a prison for younger offenders in upstate New York.
In relating the story Kevin's upbringing, Eva addresses her estranged hsuband, Frank, through a series of startlingly direct letters. Fearing that her own shortcomings may have shaped what her son became, she confesses to a deep, long-standing ambivalence about both motherhood in general-- and Kevin in particular. How much is her fault?
We Need to Talk About Kevin offers no pat explanations for why so many white, well-to-do adolescents-- whether in Pearl, Paducah, Springfield, or Littleton-- have gone nihilistically off the rails while growing up in the most prosperous country in history. Instead, Lionel Shriver tells a compelling, absorbing, and resonant story with an explosive, haunting ending. She considers motherhood, marriage, family, and career-- while framing these horrifying tableaus of teenage carnage as metaphors for the larger tragedy of a country where everything works, nobody starves, and anything can be bought but a sense of purpose."
Why I Wanted to Read It: John Waters referred to this book in Role Models as "a page-turner from the Devil's Reading List".
How I Liked It: I was uneasy about this book. It seemed to be a straight-forward psychological thriller although Waters is often tongue-in-cheek about his recommendations.
That said, it's never as over the top as a Waters recommendation would suggest, although it veers close (both appropriately and not so appropriately) at times.
The book is fairly well crafted for what is a complicated, highly sensationalized, over-media-dissected subject. Similarly, the story itself could've easily fallen into a number of traps in lesser hands. Would the story be simply The Bad Seed in 1999 drag? Would the surrounding characters be as empty as even true narratives about school shootings can make them?
Thankfully, neither is the case and Shriver's main character is not Kevin but the narrator, his mother Eva, who Shriver imbues with humanity without over-sympathy: she feels empty at the birth of her first child yet her motives are clear and as inexplicable to her as they are to us.
The book does not seek to resolve any of the questions that arose from the rash of school killings of Generation Y; rather, it poses more, probing the concept of innate motherhood, the idea of rejecting social roles of many kinds, and always identity.
The book is not without its shortcomings and character dialog does sometimes strain, causing an almost cartoonish cast to some exchanges. Adolescent dialog is notoriously hard to write and while Shriver manages to generally pull off Kevin with fair plausibility, there are a few bruises when Kevin gets particularly flippant. On a prison visit, his mother probes his motives for his killings, trying to get a reaction. She suggests one victim in particular, a pretty, popular girl, died as a result of spurning Kevin's advances. Kevin returns with
"That Barbie doll was all accessories." (pg 244)
Recalling Kevin at fourteen (we are taken from the childless stage of his parents' marriage up until the "present", which from the dates on the letters extends from roughly a year and a half to two years after the massacre), he has a brush with the law that he talks his way out of along with punishment from his easily-snowed father. Kevin's mother overhears him relating the experience of talking to his father to the weaselly friend with whom Kevin was caught:
“ Kevin did not seem to be joining in with Lenny's cackle. "Yeah, well," he said. "Lucky for you I got Mr. Plastic off my back. But you should have heard the scene in here, Pugh. Straight out of Dawson's Creek. Fucking nauseating. Thought I'd bust into tears before a commercial break from our sponsors." ” (pg 266)
Okay, credit for the timely television show reference (even if it does fail chronologically: the incident is described as December 1997 whereas Dawson's Creek did not air until January of 1998), but when was the last time a television network referred to a commercial break as "from our sponsors"? Particularly from a fourteen-year-old in 1997?
For that matter, why exactly would a teenager so quick to drop "fuck" and "cunt" use words like "pipsqueak", "twerp", and "weenie"?
Shriver's missteps with dialog don't end with Kevin. All African-American characters in the novel sound the same, from a star athlete that finds himself among Kevin's victims to the unlucky cafeteria worker (ditto) to the mother Eva encounters in the visitor waiting area of the prison. All speak a jive-y English that rings as ersatzly "urban" as Hattie McDaniel in Gone With the Wind. It can be interpreted, perhaps, as a flaw of the narrator rather than the author. Eva admits her own "prissy middle-class" leanings about certain aspects of Black culture and fears she might sound racist by noting that Black people seem to be good at waiting, something she observed in her travels in Africa as well. She remarks on her son's "African American accent" becoming "quite accomplished" in prison after hearing him proclaim "I ain't sayin' nuttin'". She does also make mention of the tight reserve of the White mothers in the waiting room (versus the aforementioned placidity of the Black mothers). Unfortunately, lending credence to the problematic nature of the writing itself (rather than the character doing the narrating) is the fact the Black mother Eva encounters in the waiting room delivers a soulful (of course!) bit of food for thought about mothering once she learns who Eva is (and the fact Eva feels blamed by the public et large for her son's actions). She also delivers one of the only pieces of genuinely positive human interaction Eva receives in the novel post-massacre (the other being from her own mother). It wouldn't be unreasonable to consider that this might make her almost, but not quite, the Magical Negro of the story.
While a slip like that is hard to see an author making intentionally, the simultaneous glee and earnestness with which Kevin memorizes the stats of his fellow mass-murders and reads them off like sports or movie trivia may actually be intentionally over-the-top. It occasionally has a feel not unlike the rather preachy Natural Born Killers that can distract away from the gravity of subject (which is generally the idea). When we're finally taken through the moment of Kevin's treachery, it feels almost comic relief in parts. For one, he's using a crossbow and at one point Shriver dryly describes the causalities as looking like a "family of porcupines" after Kevin was through. As for the particular teacher that saw promise in him, earlier that day in class he played what the teacher described to Kevin's mother a few months earlier "a game we play" where he asks for the definition of an obscure word he's sure she won't know (the first time he asked, it was "logomachy"). The teacher enthused to his mother at that same meeting months earlier that she was glad to admit she didn't know the meaning of the word and "bingo, he's learned a new word-- because he had to find it in the dictionary to ask the question." (pg 334)
The day of the slayings, the word was "malfeasance", a word he hisses at the teacher when she tries to reason with him shortly before he shoots her between the eyes. These factors seem to rob the defining event of the book of some of its impact.
Shortcomings (and possible shortcomings) aside, the book still stands as a multi-layered, engaging read.
Notable: Time is stamped at the top of each chapter, these being in the form of letters Kevin's mother is writing to his father. Always being immersed in current events, after her son's massacre, Eva still keeps up, opening the second chapter with grousing over the Bush v. Gore debacle (November 15th, 2000). We are kept up to date through April of 2001, through the increasing animosity between sides, to Bush's inauguration, through the American crew members held hostage by the Chinese in the spring of 2001. I was instantly curious to see if the book would span over one of the most defining events of a generation and undeniable to anyone even discussing a date, let alone a narrator keeping with current events, but the book stops in April of 2001. There was a quote, however, that's particularly chilling.
In late March of 2001, Eva finds herself "shamefully dependent on television" and whilst flicking through the channels, stumbles upon a documentary about her son that includes an interview with him from prison.
Throughout the book, he's spoken with especial disgust for Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold who usurped what he felt was his position in history by managing a slightly bigger victim count less than two weeks after his and having their massacre becoming commonplace in the lexicon. He professes with disgust the fact they shot at random (his victims were all handpicked, save for the cafeteria worker, who was "collateral damage") and their bombs failed (at one point he opines they committed suicide out of shame for how badly they botched the job).
Now, as Eva watches on television, Kevin rants when the interviewer brings up Columbine.
“ "Nothing, not one thing in that circus went according to plan. It was a 100-percent failure from top to bottom. No wonder those miserable twits wasted themselves-- and I thought that was chicken. Part of the package is facing the music. Worst of all, they were hopeless geeks. I've read sections of Klebold's whining, snot-nosed journal. Know one of the groups that chump wanted to avenge himself against? People who think they can predict the weather. Had no idea what kind of statement they were making. Oh, and get this-- at the end of the Big Day, those two losers were originally planning to hijack a jet and fly it into the World Trade Center. Give me a break!" ” (pg 355)
I've heard that claimed (and I'm sure it was addressed at least at one point in Columbine as whether or not it was true), but it's still chilling to have a character (however fictional) state that before 9/11 actually occurs (despite the fact it's almost certainly post 9/11 when Shriver wrote that bit of dialog).
Title: We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver
Details: Copyright 2003, Counterpoint
Synopsis (By Way of Front Flap): "That neither nature nor nurture bears exclusive responsibility for a child's character is self-evident. But generalization about genes are likely to provide cold comfort if it's your own child you just opened fire on his fellow algebra students and whose class photograph-- with its unseemly grin-- is shown on the evening news coast-to-coast.
If the question of who's to blame for teenage atrocity intrigues news-watching voyeurs, it tortures our narrator, Eva Khatchadourian. Two years before the opening of the novel, her son, Kevin, murdered seven of his fellow high school students, a cafeteria worker, and the much-beloved teacher who had tried to befriend him. Because his sixteenth birthday arrived two days after the killings he received a lenient sentence and is currently in a prison for younger offenders in upstate New York.
In relating the story Kevin's upbringing, Eva addresses her estranged hsuband, Frank, through a series of startlingly direct letters. Fearing that her own shortcomings may have shaped what her son became, she confesses to a deep, long-standing ambivalence about both motherhood in general-- and Kevin in particular. How much is her fault?
We Need to Talk About Kevin offers no pat explanations for why so many white, well-to-do adolescents-- whether in Pearl, Paducah, Springfield, or Littleton-- have gone nihilistically off the rails while growing up in the most prosperous country in history. Instead, Lionel Shriver tells a compelling, absorbing, and resonant story with an explosive, haunting ending. She considers motherhood, marriage, family, and career-- while framing these horrifying tableaus of teenage carnage as metaphors for the larger tragedy of a country where everything works, nobody starves, and anything can be bought but a sense of purpose."
Why I Wanted to Read It: John Waters referred to this book in Role Models as "a page-turner from the Devil's Reading List".
How I Liked It: I was uneasy about this book. It seemed to be a straight-forward psychological thriller although Waters is often tongue-in-cheek about his recommendations.
That said, it's never as over the top as a Waters recommendation would suggest, although it veers close (both appropriately and not so appropriately) at times.
The book is fairly well crafted for what is a complicated, highly sensationalized, over-media-dissected subject. Similarly, the story itself could've easily fallen into a number of traps in lesser hands. Would the story be simply The Bad Seed in 1999 drag? Would the surrounding characters be as empty as even true narratives about school shootings can make them?
Thankfully, neither is the case and Shriver's main character is not Kevin but the narrator, his mother Eva, who Shriver imbues with humanity without over-sympathy: she feels empty at the birth of her first child yet her motives are clear and as inexplicable to her as they are to us.
The book does not seek to resolve any of the questions that arose from the rash of school killings of Generation Y; rather, it poses more, probing the concept of innate motherhood, the idea of rejecting social roles of many kinds, and always identity.
The book is not without its shortcomings and character dialog does sometimes strain, causing an almost cartoonish cast to some exchanges. Adolescent dialog is notoriously hard to write and while Shriver manages to generally pull off Kevin with fair plausibility, there are a few bruises when Kevin gets particularly flippant. On a prison visit, his mother probes his motives for his killings, trying to get a reaction. She suggests one victim in particular, a pretty, popular girl, died as a result of spurning Kevin's advances. Kevin returns with
"That Barbie doll was all accessories." (pg 244)
Recalling Kevin at fourteen (we are taken from the childless stage of his parents' marriage up until the "present", which from the dates on the letters extends from roughly a year and a half to two years after the massacre), he has a brush with the law that he talks his way out of along with punishment from his easily-snowed father. Kevin's mother overhears him relating the experience of talking to his father to the weaselly friend with whom Kevin was caught:
“ Kevin did not seem to be joining in with Lenny's cackle. "Yeah, well," he said. "Lucky for you I got Mr. Plastic off my back. But you should have heard the scene in here, Pugh. Straight out of Dawson's Creek. Fucking nauseating. Thought I'd bust into tears before a commercial break from our sponsors." ” (pg 266)
Okay, credit for the timely television show reference (even if it does fail chronologically: the incident is described as December 1997 whereas Dawson's Creek did not air until January of 1998), but when was the last time a television network referred to a commercial break as "from our sponsors"? Particularly from a fourteen-year-old in 1997?
For that matter, why exactly would a teenager so quick to drop "fuck" and "cunt" use words like "pipsqueak", "twerp", and "weenie"?
Shriver's missteps with dialog don't end with Kevin. All African-American characters in the novel sound the same, from a star athlete that finds himself among Kevin's victims to the unlucky cafeteria worker (ditto) to the mother Eva encounters in the visitor waiting area of the prison. All speak a jive-y English that rings as ersatzly "urban" as Hattie McDaniel in Gone With the Wind. It can be interpreted, perhaps, as a flaw of the narrator rather than the author. Eva admits her own "prissy middle-class" leanings about certain aspects of Black culture and fears she might sound racist by noting that Black people seem to be good at waiting, something she observed in her travels in Africa as well. She remarks on her son's "African American accent" becoming "quite accomplished" in prison after hearing him proclaim "I ain't sayin' nuttin'". She does also make mention of the tight reserve of the White mothers in the waiting room (versus the aforementioned placidity of the Black mothers). Unfortunately, lending credence to the problematic nature of the writing itself (rather than the character doing the narrating) is the fact the Black mother Eva encounters in the waiting room delivers a soulful (of course!) bit of food for thought about mothering once she learns who Eva is (and the fact Eva feels blamed by the public et large for her son's actions). She also delivers one of the only pieces of genuinely positive human interaction Eva receives in the novel post-massacre (the other being from her own mother). It wouldn't be unreasonable to consider that this might make her almost, but not quite, the Magical Negro of the story.
While a slip like that is hard to see an author making intentionally, the simultaneous glee and earnestness with which Kevin memorizes the stats of his fellow mass-murders and reads them off like sports or movie trivia may actually be intentionally over-the-top. It occasionally has a feel not unlike the rather preachy Natural Born Killers that can distract away from the gravity of subject (which is generally the idea). When we're finally taken through the moment of Kevin's treachery, it feels almost comic relief in parts. For one, he's using a crossbow and at one point Shriver dryly describes the causalities as looking like a "family of porcupines" after Kevin was through. As for the particular teacher that saw promise in him, earlier that day in class he played what the teacher described to Kevin's mother a few months earlier "a game we play" where he asks for the definition of an obscure word he's sure she won't know (the first time he asked, it was "logomachy"). The teacher enthused to his mother at that same meeting months earlier that she was glad to admit she didn't know the meaning of the word and "bingo, he's learned a new word-- because he had to find it in the dictionary to ask the question." (pg 334)
The day of the slayings, the word was "malfeasance", a word he hisses at the teacher when she tries to reason with him shortly before he shoots her between the eyes. These factors seem to rob the defining event of the book of some of its impact.
Shortcomings (and possible shortcomings) aside, the book still stands as a multi-layered, engaging read.
Notable: Time is stamped at the top of each chapter, these being in the form of letters Kevin's mother is writing to his father. Always being immersed in current events, after her son's massacre, Eva still keeps up, opening the second chapter with grousing over the Bush v. Gore debacle (November 15th, 2000). We are kept up to date through April of 2001, through the increasing animosity between sides, to Bush's inauguration, through the American crew members held hostage by the Chinese in the spring of 2001. I was instantly curious to see if the book would span over one of the most defining events of a generation and undeniable to anyone even discussing a date, let alone a narrator keeping with current events, but the book stops in April of 2001. There was a quote, however, that's particularly chilling.
In late March of 2001, Eva finds herself "shamefully dependent on television" and whilst flicking through the channels, stumbles upon a documentary about her son that includes an interview with him from prison.
Throughout the book, he's spoken with especial disgust for Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold who usurped what he felt was his position in history by managing a slightly bigger victim count less than two weeks after his and having their massacre becoming commonplace in the lexicon. He professes with disgust the fact they shot at random (his victims were all handpicked, save for the cafeteria worker, who was "collateral damage") and their bombs failed (at one point he opines they committed suicide out of shame for how badly they botched the job).
Now, as Eva watches on television, Kevin rants when the interviewer brings up Columbine.
“ "Nothing, not one thing in that circus went according to plan. It was a 100-percent failure from top to bottom. No wonder those miserable twits wasted themselves-- and I thought that was chicken. Part of the package is facing the music. Worst of all, they were hopeless geeks. I've read sections of Klebold's whining, snot-nosed journal. Know one of the groups that chump wanted to avenge himself against? People who think they can predict the weather. Had no idea what kind of statement they were making. Oh, and get this-- at the end of the Big Day, those two losers were originally planning to hijack a jet and fly it into the World Trade Center. Give me a break!" ” (pg 355)
I've heard that claimed (and I'm sure it was addressed at least at one point in Columbine as whether or not it was true), but it's still chilling to have a character (however fictional) state that before 9/11 actually occurs (despite the fact it's almost certainly post 9/11 when Shriver wrote that bit of dialog).