We Need to Talk About Kevin

[altariel]

This post is full of spoilers; I strongly advise you don't read if you haven't read We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver, and intend to.



I was very interested to read this book because I'd heard such mixed reviews of it from people whose opinion I respect. Ultimately, I think my reading was strongly influenced by two things. Firstly, I knew that there was a plot twist, so after about 50 pages, I thought, "Oh Franklin's dead," and then, when Celia turned up, "Yup, her too."

Secondly, I'd already read this column by Lionel Shriver, and it was an effort to switch off my ensuing dislike for the author and not transfer it to the book. I did largely manage after about a third of the way through, but this bit from that column kept playing through my subconscious throughout my reading:

"If I feel, oh, a little wistful about the fact that my country of birth, the US, will within my lifetime no longer be peopled in majority by those of European extraction (I'm German-American on both sides), that passing dismay has never been considerable enough for me to inconvenience myself with giving lifts to football practice. Frankly, if I can't be arsed to replace myself with a reasonable facsimile, immigrants willing to nurse sick little boys through their fevers have truly earned the right to take my place."

Hmm. These sentiments did trouble me as I watched the Armenian cuckoo in the American nest transform into a nihilistic mass-murderer. Perhaps Shriver had thought that making Kevin an All-American Boy would have been too corny. But... I don't know, something felt wrong. It seemed the same kind of mistake that led Joss Whedon to make the Antichrist an African-American woman.

I'll admit cheerfully that I like artifice in narrative - basically I like the illustration of the fundamental interconnectedness of all things - this is why I loved Case Histories by Kate Atkinson, and The House of Sleep by Jonathan Coe. But people doing stupid things for the sake of the plot I like less.

The first example would be Eva quitting her high-flying job to take on the childcare, leaving her freelance husband as the primary breadwinner, but I'll let the book persuade me here, given this takes place in the early 80s and I've just spent a good part of the week plowing through contemporary government statistics on disparities between men and women in terms of career and earnings potential. The second, however - which I thought was not so much stupid as verging on the criminally insane - is not pulling the plug on the whole shebang the second she suspected that Kevin was responsible for the loss of Celia's eye. At the very least - and Eva is aware of this, Franklin says it to her - her belief that her son could do this was desperately dysfunctional. In addition, it has the unfortunate effect of making Celia entirely a cipher: a child set up from the start to die.

There was a great deal that I liked. It's very well-crafted, particularly the final set piece. In places, it's very funny (she got a laugh from me at one of the moments of worse horror, which is not easy to pull off). I liked how the events were related across the period of the Florida recount, as the U.S. shifts from Clinton-era shenanigans to Bush-era family values. I very much liked the end, with the glimpse of a future that Eva and Kevin might share. I'd like to read that book as much, if not more.

I think my problems with the book are with elements of its execution, rather than message: that nuclear family is in part a belief we talk ourselves into, that motherhood is not necessarily a woman's best or ultimate destiny.

Comments

[hafren.livejournal.com]

I so do not like any of Shriver's columns in the Guardian. It isn't just what she says, it's a smug certainty about the tone....

[altariel.livejournal.com]

She has not impressed in those columns, no. I had a hard time getting past her voice while reading the (first person) narrator of the novel.

[gair.livejournal.com]

Gah my mouse is playing up so I can't cut-n-paste, but a heartfelt 'yes' to her failure to pull the plug on the whole shebang at the point where she thinks Kevin has taken Celia's eye out! The thing that most bothers me about this book isn't just that the narrator makes bad decisions, but that I don't get the sense that the narrator lives in a world where good decisions would be possible. And not in a good, tragic-inevitability, Sophocles sort of a way, just in a muddled, Shriver-hasn't-thought-it-through kind of a way. Like the point about how ridiculous it is that Eva is the primary child-carer when she loves her job and hates her child; it might be fair enough that the idea doesn't occur to Eva (though Kevin gets his mother's surname, which suggests Eva doesn't just go along with gender convention), but it doesn't seem to have occurred to Shriver, either.

I tend to like books which, without devaluing the importance and scale of the fictional world, set it in a larger world, where resolutions are possible even when they don't occur. Jane Austen manages very well to write about the troubles of bourgeois marriage manoeuvrings without, somehow, suggesting that that's everything in the world. Young Adult fiction also does this really well - without trivializing the experiences of adolescence, giving its readers the sense that there is a larger world in which different choices, different narratives, different resolutions are possible. Litfic which doesn't do that is often praised as 'dark' or 'tragic', but it seems to me just to be MUDDLED AND LAZY.

::congratulates self on having kept finger off CAPSLOCK till the last sentence::

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Like the point about how ridiculous it is that Eva is the primary child-carer when she loves her job and hates her child

I think it was an unnecessary contrivance that Franklin was a freelancer: it did less to push home the message of it being unfair that Eva is the one to quit her job than to make me think, "But that's a really daft decision from a financial POV, why aren't they job-sharing?" If Franklin and Eva had been roughly in the same place in their careers, surely that would have made the point more strongly? I can't remember whether Franklin and Eva discuss this in the book or not.


Kevin gets his mother's surname, which suggests Eva doesn't just go along with gender convention

Also serves to highlight further his Armenian descent.

First draft of this post had people doing stupid things for the sake of the plot in CAPSLOCK.