We need to talk about Kevin by Lionel Shriver

Publisher: Serpent’s Tail.
First Published: 2003
400 pages
Rating: **

The statement “… a person’s relationship with their mother affects their overall mental health and psychological stability,” might be a truism but it is one that I’ve seen evidence of repeatedly throughout my life. It really does seem to be true that if a person has a good relationship with their mother – or remembers her fondly if she is dead - he or she ultimately tends to be ok. They might make bad mistakes or get dealt unfortunate hands in life, but they usually come out alright in the end. On the other hand, those who continuously struggle to find their peace or moral compass or sense of self – or whatever – almost always have bad relationships with - or memories of - their mothers. If you are sceptical of this blanket assertion, test the hypothesis on the people around you – you might be surprised at how accurate it is. And, please don’t misunderstand me; I’m not suggesting that people who have dysfunctional relationships with their mothers are likely to end up as multiple murderers while they are still children. But I am saying that child murderers (as in children that commit murder, not people who murder children) are likely to have bad relationships with their mothers.

Let’s talk about Kevin is Lionel Shriver’s seventh novel although I’ve never heard of her before. It is a fictional attempt to make sense of school killings in America, an occurrence which seems to be verging on epidemic and is no doubt of grave concern to American parents. The book takes the form of a series of letters written by Eva Khatchadourian to her estranged husband. Their son has killed seven learners, a teacher and a cafeteria worker in his school gym with a crossbow. In her letters, Eva retraces her relationship with her son from being ambivalent about having children in the first place, through her various resentments during pregnancy to his total rejection of her from infancy onwards. He was, from the start, a most objectionable child, refusing Eva’s breast and to be toilet trained until beyond the age of six. He also deliberately and cunningly played his father up against her and perpetrated calculated acts of cruelty on some of his unfortunate school mates and younger sister.

The book is well-written although Shriver’s style occasionally betrays that she also writes for The Wall Street Journal and The Economist. The voice of Eva is intelligent, confident and above all, honest. She does not shy away from accepting responsibility for her son’s actions where she believes it to be due, but is equally determined to point out instances in which she believes her husband made mistakes and harboured misconceptions. Childless herself, Shriver feared that she may struggle to accurately represent the experiences and feelings of a mother but I did not particularly find this to be so. I found her representation of Kevin far less believable as she attributed ill will and pre-meditation to him from birth onwards. That a baby may be born with a malevolent spirit I can accept but that a newborn baby can plot and scheme and manipulate, I do find hard to swallow.

Woven into the plot is a catalogue of the times, places and children involved in actual school murders with some incidents taking place both before and after Kevin’s fictional attack. It is indeed sobering to contemplate how frequently this kind of thing happens in America. In many cases, breakdowns in mother / child relationships undoubtedly played a role and Shriver shows us in her book how - even with the best of intentions - this can be so. But she also shows that it is really not that simple. Although a twist near the end reveals why any happy ending the reader might have been hoping for cannot in fact be, there are tiny hints of some kind of resolution between Kevin and Eva towards the end of the novel. Or at the very least, changes in Kevin’s perception.

This was not a book I particularly enjoyed. There’s something strange about books in which you fail to identify at all with the central character who seems to have absolutely no redeeming features. I had a similar reaction to Filth by Irvine Welsh because of the utterly deplorable Bruce Robertson. But I quite liked Eva; a worldly wise, no-nonsense kind of woman who is relatively cynical about the shallowness of the American psyche and tells things candidly, the way she sees them. While not necessarily enjoyable, We need to talk about Kevin is a good read; well written, well researched and well crafted.
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***: Must Have.
**: Borrow.
*: Don’t bother.