We Need to Talk About Kevin

"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..."


Ok bloggies, we need to talk about We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver.  This Orange Prize winning book is getting major hype these days, as the motion picture of the same name, starring Tilda Swinton and John C. Reilly, comes out this month.  (Side note, this nye, before going out for a wild evening in Van, I went out to starbucks in White Rock without mascara on.  Pulled a Swinton. Probably the most daring aesthetic move I've made in all my life.)

Shriver's book is narrated via a series letters (ooo epistolary novel! How very Victorian of you! How very much my jam!) from Eva Khatchadourian to her husband Franklin.  In these letters, Eva goes over, start to finish, her ambiguous relationship with motherhood, and whether or not she had something to do with her son Kevin's decision, at age 15, to murder seven classmates, a teacher and cafeteria worker at his highschool.

From page one, Shriver's novel is absolutely captivating.  You get completely sucked in to Eva's life, and her twisted relationship with her equally twisted son.  Shriver's writing style was an absolute delight, and I was especially impressed with her use of vocabulary.  I finally got around to downloading the dictionary.com app for my iPhone, if only because I needed to look up words constantly while working through this book.  In what you could loosely term metafiction, Shriver's Eva and Kevin are equally adept in vocab, a little detail I greatly appreciated.

In her own blurb about the book, Shriver writes:

"The novel does implicitly ask: "Has Kevin been mangled by his mother's coldness, or is he innately horried?" Yet I hope that this question is no more resolved in the book thn crude oppositings like "nature vs nurte" are ever reconciled in real life...Is Kevin inherintely evil, or is Eva- who admits about motherhood, "I was terrible at it" - ultimately to blame for how he turned out? I don't know. You tell me."

Indeeeeed, these are the complexities that Shriver executes just...just amazingly really.  I'm lucky that I never came across this book in school, because I don't think I'd be able to write a paper on it without breaking the weighty "don't praise the author" rule- without breaking it many times.

Kevin is a sadistic asshole.  You hate him, you hate him so much, and you can't blame Eva for hating him too.  But then you're like- wait a second, she's his MOTHER, she's supposed to love him unconditionally no matter what, what is WRONG with her?  The back and forth is what makes this book so gripping, and so obsession worthy.  Although he is not as developed throughout, Eva's husband and Kevin's father, Franklin, is also a fascinating character, if technically a "flat" one.  He fills out the typical parental role, loving unconditionally even when the reader is highly convinced that he shouldn't.  The fact that at the heart of her letters and the whole reason for her going over her motherhood is Eva's deep love for Franklin is something that gets lost in the excitement and hideousness of the plot.  It is, however, perhaps one of the reasons the reader may lean towards identifying with Eva, with this clearly human emotion of hers.  

In true review fashion, I can't give away the ending, but man, does it ever take you to a deep place.  This book is not for the faint-of-heart.  It is possibly the best example I've ever read of "heavy"reading, if you take the term in an emotional sense.  It is a times downright depressing, and yet it is so impeccably written that if you think you can muster some darkness, you should give it a try.  If only to learn what dolorous, fricative, logomachy, and maleficence mean.

The Marriage Plot

One of my new year's resolutions is to "enrich my life through literature and music".  To complete the lit portion of this pledge I hope to read a book every ten days.  So far, I'm on track, having recently finished Jeffrey Eugenides' latest work, The Marriage Plot.

I got this novel from both my mother, and one of my aunts, tipping you off, dear readers, to how much it seems suited to me.

For starters, I've been a fan of Eugenides before.  While most people may recognize his name in association with The Virgin Suicides, I was much more impressed with Eugenides' second work, MiddleSex, in which he explores the issue of gender identity, surrounded, of course, by the many branching issues that come with it.  The book won a pulitzer prize, and for good reason.  Its a challenging read, but one that makes you feel super intelligent while perusing its pages.

Moving on to E's latest work!  If I may, the hook on the front flap of the cover is the reason I knew I had to read this book, and likely the reason my mum and her sister chose it for me as well:

"Its the early 1980s - the country is in a deep recession, and life after college is harder than ever.  In the cafes on College Hill, the wised-up kids are inhaling Derrida and listening to Talking Heads.  But Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English major, is writing her senior thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot, purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the greatest English novels."

The protagonist of this novel is me!

After having read more than just the front flap of The Marriage Plot, however, I have to admit that this description is a little bit misleading.  While Madeleine starts off super into Victorian Lit, and comes back around to it in the end, she spends a fair chunk of the text getting into the philosophical stuff her fellow students are getting into.  This is ok though, as Madeleine's academic leanings aren't the point of Eugenides' work anyways.

Amazingly, this novel is a tongue-in-cheek 21st century version of its title, of the "marriage plot" from Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Middlemarch and so many others.  At the same time, its an exploration on feminism (which I always love), gender stereotypes, religion, sexuality, mental health and RELATIONSHIPS. (and the list goes on).

Along with Madeleine, we follow the college and post-college lives of her boyfriend and eventual husband Leonard- a brilliant-minded science student who suffers from manic depression, and religious studies student Mitchell, who falls in love with Madeleine from day one and spends his year after graduation backpacking across Europe and then India with his roommate from college.  Its a love triangle of sort, but a complex one, complicated by several of the issues I mentioned above.

I have to say that Mitchell's storyline is a little bit cliche, in that he does some lily-pad hopping to and from religions, but is never able to overcome his own ego to give over to the whole "more than me" concept that seems to centre many of them.  He is at times a bit of a dog in his treatment of women, but in the end makes an incredibly gentleman-like decision that made the whole book worth reading.

Madeleine isn't the most likeable character, but I liked her.  Throughout the novel, she makes both admirable and stupid decisions, so if she's not typically "likeable", she's at least believable.  I saw many aspects of myself in her character as well, which always does the trick for getting a reader into her reading material.

Leonard, for me, is one of the more interesting characters- which is saying something, because he's a boring lump for most of the text.  The reality of the situation is that Leonard is in a depressive state for a huge chunk of the novel, and only twice (compared to many more times for Madeleine and Mitchell) do we get a window into his side of things.  I think Eugenides does an admirable job of portraying a character dealing with a mental illness, which is not something that is easy to do.  I've got some huge empathetic feelings towards Leonard, and I really respected the way that E represented Leonard's journey with his disease, and how it effects the people around him.

So while the novel may not necessarily be worth reading if looking at characters alone, the "hot topics" that Eugenides explores through these characters are. We get so many angles: stereotypes and stigmas are enforced, then subverted- they are turned on their heads, made fun of, and ultimately left up in the air. I love it.

The Marriage Plot is not your typical Victorian novel; its not your typical love story.  It is, however, a captivating and thought-provoking read that can definitely find a place in your heart- if you let it.