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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

We Need To Talk About We Need To Talk About Kevin (Spoilers)

  
 
Cat Chant
13:11 / 14.06.05
I'll have to have another look at this book and post again in more detail, I think, but for the moment I wanted to respond in particular to Ariadne's comments in this thread.

Ariadne wrote:

My first reaction to it was one of intense identification – I don't want children and the beginning of it, where she described her decision about whether to have one, and her reactions to pregnancy ... well, to be honest I over-identified at first, and was just looking to the book to confirm my own feelings!

I think (over)identification with the narrator might be partly key to differing reactions to the book - I don't want children either, but as a result, I (like the author of this novel) don't have any. And if I didn't want children, and I had a better-paid job than my partner, and my partner wanted children, if I did make the asinine decision to have children even though I didn't want them, I wouldn't be their primary carer. I would get the person who wants to spend time with the children to spend time with the children.

So I guess my first problem with the book was not so much that the narrator makes different lifestyle choices from me, but that it took so many things for granted. It's supposed to be examining the "untold stories" of motherhood, mother/child relationships, etc, but, like, never once does it raise the possibility that maybe Daddy should stay home with the kids. I mean, I know it's not conventional, but it would be a better outcome than what ended up happening. I just felt that it cheated: in order to make a very unlikely set of events look "inevitable", it obfuscated a number of very important choices that had to have been made along the way.

And the revelation at the end that Kevin had murdered Celia wrecked the psychological plausibility of the book for me even further. It's a very clever way to structure a novel, but you can't convince me that a bereaved mother/widow, writing letters to her dead husband, is going to withhold the information that she had another child until the middle of her letter-writing phase, and withhold the information that that child (together with the addressee of the letters) is dead until she's done writing the letters. I don't think grief is narrative or linear, anyway - none of my grieving letters have started from the beginning and gone on through the whole story - but I can see how you need to have a degree of artifice in structuring a novel. This degree of artifice, though, means I can't possibly believe the main character wrote those letters. Which means I can't possibly enter into the book.

Oh, and plus, I didn't like the prose - I was reading lots of sentences out to Tangent to mock them, so I'll try and fish some examples out when I get home.
 
 
Ariadne
19:04 / 14.06.05
It didn't matter to me that the letter-writing wasn't 'real' - I felt it it became pretty clear early on that it was a story-telling device, and the fact that Franklyn wasn't responding and possibly wasn't reading them was intriguing, rather than annoying.

And I really liked her voice! Whether Eva was a 'good' writer or not isn't really the point - she is herself, and speaks as such, and I think that character hung together well.

I agree on your questions as to why she stayed at home - half way through I was wondering why she stayed with the family at all. But I don't feel that made it unbelievable - lots of people still, still, feel the mother should be at home and she does also go on about how she sets herself challenges and tries to go through with them. And Franklyn wasn't painted as a particularly modern thinker.

So - I do appreciate your points, but I wonder if you're maybe doing a little bit the same as I did, but from a different angle, and identifying with it to the point where you get annoyed because she's not doing what you would do? Forgive me if that's way off the truth - I just know I was shocked to see how much energy I put into it at first because of that identification.
 
 
Ariadne
20:12 / 14.06.05
My apologies, Deva - I just re-read your post and you do mention the 'identification' aspect as a possible factor in your dislike of it.

I suppose I just feel that she's done (Eva, not Shriver) what an awful lot of people do. It's really seen as unnatural to feel as you and I do, to actively know that you do not, under any circumstances, want children. Lots of people believe all the hype about 'it's different with your own' and then find out that's just not true. Not necessarily, anyway. And once you have the child, how do you admit failure of the maternal spirit? I believe a lot of people don't - even to themselves.

Shriver, I've read, was in that 'shall we, shan't we' stage before writing the book - and maybe she would have tried to stay home and play Mummy, who knows? But the process of writing the book convinced her not to do it. At least that's the story I read somewhere - I can't guarantee it's true.
 
 
Ariadne
21:02 / 14.06.05
I've done my usual and run away with my argument above - it's probably too much to suggest that 'lots' of women are sitting regretting their decision to have children. But I believe, based on a very unscientific overview of my friends, that it happens more than is admitted.
 
 
dogtanian
09:26 / 15.06.05
i've just read this book, and i liked it. i too identified with the intense desire to not have children.

i disagree that it didn't discuss enough why the husband didn't stay home - i think it was made pretty clear at the outset that he was a man's man, and i think it highlighted the fact that most people still do take it for granted that the mother stays home - it's still seen as abnormal if the father is the one that stops working. i thought the fact that she gave up so much more than he would've (in my opinion) to stay home was a good point. while his job was what he enjoyed, it was something that could feasibly have been worked around a domestic schedule whereas hers required total immersion and therefore total detachment on giving it up.

i was quite surprised that there was no mention of the sister for a long time, but then, she wasn't there for the first half of kevin's life thus far, and since the letters were the story telling device, it didn't make too much difference to the book for me. i thought the bit where we find out about the murders of the husband and daughter was a great twist, even though i'd pretty much worked out they weren't around anymore, in the deeper sense, it still worked.

the thing that intrigued me, that i think has been overlooked in reviews, is what kevin was trying to achieve, regards his mother. we have seen lots of discussion about what her role was, where she may have gone wrong, why his upbringing may have resulted that way, but the signals between kevin and his mother were very ambiguous. all along i felt there was some kind of pact between them. it was interesting that although he was pretty hateful to his mother, he despised his father, with whom he was "normal" - i think perhaps he respected his mother, in that he let her into what was happening. when we found out he'd kept pictures and when he softened at the end, i wondered whether maybe he had realised his mother's antipathy and was just trying to get attention/respect etc.

overall, i liked it, i thought it was well written - she sounded suitably mumsy, like a mother of that age would be expected to sound, which lent the big events even more impact in their description.
 
 
Cat Chant
11:44 / 16.06.05
it highlighted the fact that most people still do take it for granted that the mother stays home

That's interesting. I think by not raising the possibility it precisely didn't (and couldn't) highlight anything. This discussion is making it clearer to me that maybe I read books in a different way to a lot of people (and I think this is connected to the fact that I like genre fiction and, as a rule, I hate literary fiction: this novel is a pretty good example of why, so I might expand a bit on that). One of the big differences, I think, between litfic and genre fiction is that literary fiction seems to think (possibly through what I would consider a misreading of the genre of tragedy, especially Greek tragedy) that it's clever, or beautiful, or truthful, or all of the above, to present things as "inevitable", by creating a fictional world in which certain things are just not possible. I hate that. I find it claustrophobic and dishonest. I think it's truer to write books in which it would be possible to find a solution to the problems the characters face. Even if they don't find the solution themselves, the possibility should be present in the world of the novel. If there's no way a story could end happily - whether it does or not - then I don't care about the story. I think it's a cheat, and I think it's a horrible way to represent the world. If Kevin had been a savage indictment of our society's view of motherhood, which trapped Eva into having to raise a kid she doesn't like, then that would have indicated some ways out of the tragic inevitability, an outside to the story, and I would have cared about the people in it: but I don't live in a world where people are powerless over their situations for no reason (in my world, when people are powerless, which they frequently are, there are usually systematic reasons for it, which can be analysed and, hopefully, someday, changed), and I don't recognize the value of pretending that such a world exists.

Blimey. I didn't know that was coming. Sorry. I'll get back to talking about We Need To Talk About Kevin at some point...
 
 
Cherielabombe
10:03 / 21.08.05
Wow, I just finished this book and I think it's one of the best books I've read this year (Though then, unlike Deva, I love literary fiction.

One thing I found quite interesting about this book is that I could never quite trust Eva's interpretation of events. You have Franklin as a foil to Eva's character, and in Franklin's eyes, Kevin was a 'good boy' misunderstood by Eva. How do we know that Eva's view of Kevin - as a wicked miserable boy - is accurate? We know that she abused Kevin, and it's certainly true that children who are abused by their parents 'deserved it,' as Eva's character certainly implies in regards to Kevin. Additionally, other characters in the book refer to her as 'defiant,' and Franklin insists that she never sees the good in Kevin. How do we know this isn't true? Even the bond that Kevin and Eva seem to have isn't all that uncommon in abusive relationships.

I didn't really like Kevin, though as the story went on I gained more sympathy for him. And I especially didn't like Eva. Which was one thing I kind of liked about the book - I don't think Schriver created an especially sympathetic character in her heroine. I hated her banging on about her superiority to other Americans and her Armenian heritage - and I liked that Kevin threw that back in her face. But I found the story itself really engaging.

Also if we recall, she was on the fence about children but she DID get pregnant with Kevin intentionally. Then once she was pregnant she was too afraid to stop it. I'm sure there are lots and lots of people who face pregnancy in a similar way.

I had pretty much worked out the twist at the end with Celia and Franklin but I was still wondered what exactly had happened to them and I was jumping out of my skin when I got to that part!
 
 
Cherielabombe
10:07 / 21.08.05
Oh yes - and I also liked how, rather than affirming and allowing their life to go on (in answser to 'The Big Question', as Franklin calls it), Eva and Franklin's decision to have a child actually ends up destroying their life and the happiness they had prior to his birth.
 
 
Benny the Ball
11:39 / 21.08.05
This is in my pile to read, given to me by my housemates girlfriend. It sounds really good, but I'll wait until I've read it before I post more - just wanted to say that glad someone has started a thread about it.
 
 
Cat Chant
11:29 / 02.10.05
Off-topic, but I did want to point out what a terribly unpleasant person Lionel Shriver is (link is to a Guardian essay she wrote on how terrible it is that white people aren't breeding enough and soon they/we will be swamped by those feckless overpopulating brown people: The long-dominant populations in most of Europe are contracting, and maybe by the time they're minorities in their own countries they will have rights, too - among them at least the right to feel a little sad). In a way, of course, this is irrelevant to her novel, but on the other hand, it has some bearing, since what I most object to in Kevin is precisely a profound misunderstanding of how people work and what is important in the world.

One example: the moment at Kevin's prom where a girl is dancing on her own to a Talking Heads song, and Kevin whispers "something" (we never find out what) which stops her dancing and also means she will never dance on her own again. This moment can only be produced by a completely unrealistic, transcendent idea of EEEVIL which has nothing to do with the embodied interactions of people which actually comprise parenthood and adolescent socialization: it has some power as a metaphor (Kevin stands for the forces of socialization and normalization that prevent the expression of free and authentic individuality, as metaphorized in a hideously cliche'd way by the beautiful free-spirited dancing of an adolescent girl), but it would and could never happen. No girl who has reached the age of seventeen without discovering that there are negative social consequences to dancing on your own in an unfashionable dress at a school dance could ever be stopped forever from doing so by a single sentence from a single human being. That's pretty much acknowledged in the text: the reason we never find out what Kevin says to her is that any actual words would be insufficient to convey the PURE EEEVIL of the effect they have in the narrative - fundamentally, Kevin is doing magic here. He acts and has effects on a level which cannot, in fact, be given any real existence, any actual words, any actual deeds. So why should I care about him? Why should I think that this book has any more relevance to issues around parenthood, adolescence and/or crime in contemporary America than a mediaeval mystery play?
 
 
modern maenad
09:32 / 08.10.05
Just finished this in the early hours and all fired up to joint the debate.....so, I should say straight up that I found this a stimulating, provocative read. Deva I can see where you're coming from regarding the closing down of possibilities in Eva and Franklin's parenting roles, but I'm with dogtanian in viewing this as part of Shrivers critique of US cultural norms. And I saw her holding back on announcing the second child as a narrative device, and for me one she got away with as the letters were predominantly a chronological account of her and Kevin's lives to date.

And Deva I initially misread your comment about a a mediaeval mystery play as a statement about a mediaeval morality play, and thought bingo!! I found it an intensly sophisticated, allegorical piece of writing, with the author positioning several competing/conflicting voices in a series of moral/cultural explorations. For example I read the tension between Eva and Franklin's experiences of and relationships to being American as a slice of the debate over US cultural imperialism, and liberal guilt over said imperialism. On the subject of Eva sacrificing her career/business/sanity to motherhood I read this as predominantly an indication of/response to her own internal, emotional reaction to motherhood, a sort of guilt induced overcompensation, bound in the context of a suffocating, omnipresent cult of ideal motherhood. There was so much twisting, turning and wrangling, both within Eva and between her and Franklin, that Eva's actions seem to increasingly evince the schism between various versions of herself (pre-motherhood, perfect-mother-in-head, pre-Kevin wife, disintegrating post-Kevin wife-and-mother...) As communication broke down further between Eva and Franklin, the distortion/disruption seemed to intensify. I'm also suprised that this has been described as an account of reluctant/regretfull motherhood, as though this was the case with Kevin, the premise is undermined by Eva's experience of mothering Celia, whom she adores. I'm not saying that this isn't a meditation on motherhood gone wrong, or the conflicting feelings of motherhood, more that I found it had more than one maternal dimension.

On the subject of school shootings/adolescent violence, children-as-murderers etc. I've not really thought/felt this through fully yet. I'm pretty intregued by Shriver's not-so-subtle final allusion to Kevin's sudden tranformation into reflective, mature, on-the-brink of remorseful adult in the final pages, and its implicit courting of the view of children as lacking moral fluency, hence diminished accountability. I say I'm intregued because throughout the narrative Kevin is so forcefully presented as a motivationally coherent, freakishly mature/aware child. And Deva, on your point regarding Kevin as eeeviiilll, I sort of agree, but at same time read the characterisation of Kevin as Shriver trying to problematise and perhaps ever parody the evil child murderer archetype. I'm also intrigued by what I took as an ironic poke as Freud's psychosexual stages of child development, as Kevin falls down resplendently at each one (oral - he's repulsed by her breast; anal - he's in nappies 'till he's 6; phallic/oedipal - he kills his father; latency - he's an extreme version of anti-unsocialised etc; genital - he masturbates in front of his mother....). In a way these 'failures' at each of the stages are like flashing red runway lights guiding us in to his denouement, on the other I think they're Shriver taking a dig.

Having said that I felt this operated at a faily symbolic level in its exploration of various themes, I also feel Shriver did an excellent job on the minutiae of interaction/communication. I thought her depiction/construction of Eva and Franklin's relationship was stunning, and the most authentic of all the relationships depicted. From pretty much the first page I relished her observations and turn of phrase. And also, just like Cherielabombe has said, I feel Shriver's intermittent poking at the authenticity of Eva's account is the necessary string holding the whole piece together, while threatening to pull the whole thing apart.

could go on, but want to hear more what others thought, and perhaps pick up on a few of the themes in more detail.
 
 
modern maenad
14:21 / 08.10.05
have been mulling this over some more this afternoon, and something that keeps haunting me is the question why Eva keeps visiting Kevin, and why she isn't more incandescent with spitefull, vengefull rage at him as the killer of her partner and other child. Then it struck me that perhaps this is one of the key (?) points, her continuing attention to Kevin being the ultimate testimony of her maternal commitment to him. I then started musing on the seductive, slippery question of why Kevin 'did it', and found myself turning everything upside down, and pondering whether this is about Franklin's failure as a partner and father. Had he not been so thoroughly immersed in his fantasy of a father, he may have done a better job of being a good father/partner, then perhaps Kevin's excesses might have been brought up short at the water pistol/map destruction stages. So is the whole veneer of this being a meditation on the failure of the mother a backhanded critique of the failure of the father, nuclear family model etc.?
 
 
Cat Chant
10:06 / 11.10.05
Wow, modernmaenad, you rock. Mostly I think Kevin is (along with the Rowling books) an example of popular fiction being characterized as "dark and complex" when it's actually just profoundly muddled - shoving together a bunch of contradictory worldviews isn't complex, it's just not thought through - but I might be starting to see what people are getting out of this book now, so thanks, yayy!

Good point about Celia there - she just reads to me like an attempt to get Eva off the hook (see, she is a good mother, except when her child is EEEVIL), and plus I think I lost the last shred of sympathy I could have had with Eva at the point where she knows Kevin maimed his sister, and does nothing about it.

throughout the narrative Kevin is so forcefully presented as a motivationally coherent, freakishly mature/aware child

Which has to be Eva's fantasy about him, right? I think that's my main problem with the book - it doesn't have enough distance between author and narrator for Kevin to show through as a person in his own right. I mean, I don't get any sense, through Eva's (and, I'd argue, Shriver's) crazed projections onto Kevin, that there's a person there with his own sense of who he is and what he's doing. With Eva, we get a sense not only of Eva's idea of herself but also of, for example, the struggle between the multiple Evas you characterized so nicely, but with Kevin we only get this "motivationally coherent", single-minded, one-dimensional Evil child - we only get Eva's fantasy of him, passed off in the writing as the "real" Kevin. But it can't be the real Kevin, and the book becomes muddled and incoherent on both the morality-play level and the level of the characterization as a result.
 
 
modern maenad
12:12 / 11.10.05
deva Hooray someone's come to play.....Like your point about Celia being a devise to let/get Eva off the hook, and working as moral yardstick to emphasis Kevin as freak-of-nature bad boy. Regarding Eva's lack of action after the maiming, I suppose I was letting myself be swayed by the notion of Eva's uncertainty that it was Kevin, but really, the way she recounts the episode there didn't appear to be much doubt in her mind. It may be overly generous but I'm reading that as more evidence of Eva being trapped and lonely in the marraige, and her self trust/knowledge having been eroded. I remember thinking that getting Franklin to agree that they'd never leave them alone together was a bit lame. When it comes to monodimensional Kevin, yes, I agree, as a character he's pretty implausable/impenetrable, but I've read that as partly an indication/indictment of Eva's own perspective/testimony and also a device/comment on the whole construction/representation of child killers. I'm fascinated by Shriver's decision to use the moment of transition to legal adulthood (18yrs) as the place to suddenly open Kevin up, to suggest the beginnings of the development of a more complex emotional life.
 
 
Jack Vincennes
08:17 / 21.10.05
From when I started reading it, I really, really wanted to like this book; I'd been reading this thread with eyes half closed (for fear of spoilers, which I largely avoided), and everyone who liked it here made it sound so amazing, but it just didn't work for me. I think that a lot of my problem with it was something like Deva's complaint that there's too much outside the text that we're supposed to pick up.

Cherielabombe: One thing I found quite interesting about this book is that I could never quite trust Eva's interpretation of events.

What was outside the text, for me, was mostly to do with this. Unreliable narrators are probably my very favourite narrative device of all time, and I really felt Kevin failed on these grounds; I really didn't see the occasional glimpses of something being a bit wrong with Eva's account of events. Really, our suspicion that she might not be entirely correct seems to be founded on the fact that nothing could be that bad; but we already know that he killed people at his school and strongly suspect that he killed his father and sister, so if things are going to be that bad why not as bad as Eva says?

I suppose (sorry, just finished it last night so still thinking it though) part of the evidence she's not reliable is when Franklin buys the house -which was a stupid thing for him to do -and she descibes at length the house she wanted, and did the whole "You never listen to me :sad: :sad: :sad:" thing -that was possibly meant to indicate that she wasn't communicating as clearly as she thought she was. But by that point I was finding her so profoundly irritating it just seemed to be more evidence that she was a profoundly irritating human being, so maybe that was something I didn't pick up on.

More later, which will I hope be better thought through -infeasibly sleepy, will try to marshall thoughts better.
 
 
Cat Chant
13:08 / 21.10.05
I really didn't see the occasional glimpses of something being a bit wrong with Eva's account of events.

Yes! There's too much overlap between author and narrator, or something - as you say, Eva isn't really a technically successful unreliable narrator. The book probably makes most sense as one long plea from Eva for... forgiveness, or understanding; as a self-justification on a massive scale. But it's also through Eva that we get our sense of what the book is constructing as the right way to be - the difference between good and evil. I mean, okay, I know it has to be through Eva, because that's the only voice we can hear in the book, but compare it to something like Pale Fire. There's not enough of a distinction between what Eva's conscious of saying, in her plea for self-justification, and what she's not conscious of giving away, so the main device of the book - the tension between (1) Eva's fragmenting/multiple sense of self and her investment in those various selves (mother, wife, businesswoman, human being) and (2) the book's construction of the moral/political universe within which its narrative takes place - is, well, kind of fucked.

I'm interested in modernmaenad's discussion of Kevin in relation to media constructions of child killers, particularly because that gets away from the framing of the book wholly in terms of good/bad motherhood. Say more (when you've recovered from your cold), modernmaenad!
 
 
Jack Vincennes
15:24 / 21.10.05
Your Pale Fire comparison is interesting -that and Lolita were very much books I was thinking about while reading WNTTAK, they seemed to deal with similar aspects of Americana; the emigre experience and the things that lie beneath the society's self-image are probably the more obvious points of comparison. Thinking about those books, I almost wanted Franklin to be the narrator; Eva knew too much, she understood Kevin better than any of the other characters and her perception of Frankin's version of fatherhood as 'dorky' really didn't let any ambivalence slip through. I think that an earnest narrator desparately trying to explain to his wife that their son would never have put bleach in their daughter's eye whilst simultaneously trying to fight back the possibility that it could happen would be very effective. Of course, that wouldn't have worked in the plot as it was told, but Eva could have got a marvellous "Besides, you are insane" sort of moment, and it's a version of events I'd like to read.
 
 
Ganesh
16:20 / 24.10.05
Meant to post here back when I'd just finished reading the book itself - which, I have to say, I greatly enjoyed, albeit with reservations. Strangely, the bits I enjoyed the most were at the start of the book, before Kevin's arrival. As someone who's visited friends and sat with a rictus-smile throughout the familiar social ritual of paying fealty to their 'charming' offspring while resenting the fact that we can no longer socialise like we used to, I was hugely grateful for a protagonist whose mindset here echoes my own. There's a description, early on, of Eva and Idiot Husband (Franklin?) having lunch with another couple, a couple with young children, and I recognised sooo many of Eva's sentiments it was hard not to keep pausing to shout out, "YES!".

When Kevin is born, however, it becomes a different kind of story, for reasons set out by Deva, above. Kevin is just such an alien, such a monster, that any sense of his plausible reality is fatally compromised. In effect, he becomes a receptacle for implausible otherness to the extent that he's reduced to a concept, a plot device. He reminded me of Hannibal Lecter or, perhaps more appositely, the murderous baby in Ray Bradbury's The Small Assassin: he makes a good yarn but he doesn't even begin to make make psychological sense. The book's still a page-turner, but it's a page turner in the sense of a fairly conventional horror story or splatter movie. Kevin makes a great serial killer cipher, but behind the monstrousness, he doesn't really hang together.
 
 
Our Lady Has Left the Building
16:04 / 16.06.07
Finished reading this and don't really have much to add other than I agree with the general consensus. It is, unfortunately, a competent story but not a particularly good one. The first thought I had is that it is around one hundred pages too long, the story would have been better if told in less space. It's been so long that I'd more or less forgotten what an objectionable person Shriver seems to be when she writes for the Guardian. Her writing style is so obviously 'fear my L33T literary skills' that I found it difficult to believe in any of the characters, I couldn't wonder how reliable Eva's recollections were because I couldn't believe she existed, hence I found Franklin's ridiculous defence of his son's actions just more and more time wasting, and because of Shriver's style I was probably two dozen pages in before I realised he was dead, and I'm normally twist-blind. And the fact that Celia is mentioned all of once before Eva decides to have a second child, do you think Shriver didn't actually intend for there to be a second child when she plotted the novel?

So how does this compare with that other paean to childhood, The Omen? I've not watched either version of that but in Kevin's pre-literate days I would guess Shriver's version is an attempt at a more literary version of that, minus the mournful choirs singing? It was all a bit Frankenstein too, in that Eva and Victor both plunge in to a course of action without not really thinking their actions through, Victor creates his monster, Eva conceives a child that's bad from the first cell division, when both creatures are born their creators realise the mistake they have made.

I rather get the opinion this is meant to be a horror story for parents, a horror story for those that believe that children are born free of inhuman taint and pure as angels. If you don't actually believe that, if you think children can be mean and wicked for no real reason then you, like me, might be standing round wondering exactly what the fuss is. And, for a final bit of snark, I have to suggest that if this won the Orange Prize for Fiction, 2005 must have been a really bad year for women's fiction.
 
  
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