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.
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