We Need To Talk About This Book

[commonpeople1]

We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This novel is the equivalent of driving by a fresh highway pile up. You go slowly past it, seeing all the bodies crushed inside, the blood on the cement, the sound of ambulances and police far off. You try to look away but you can't. You feel angry at yourself for choosing to drive on that particular time of the day, but later at night you think that maybe you've learned something from the experience.

The novel is made up of letters written by Eva, a successful businesswoman who gave up her career to raise a family, to her husband Franklin, about their young son Kevin who has been sentenced to prison for a killing spree at his school. They are written at the turn of the century, at the height of the epidemic of school shootings in America, just before the twin towers came down on 9/11. The first hundred pages were hard going, as Eva is quite wordy and adds, frankly, a lot of unnecessary padding to the story. But once you get used to her narrative voice, it becomes a compulsive read - a modern horror tale.

I'm not convinced though that it's as good as it's praised. It's popularity surely rests on its subject matter (mother fails to bond with son) rather than the story itself, which is quite tricksy and reliant on some unbelievable plot twists, though Shriver does have a fantastic way with words. It's hard to go into the story without giving things away, but suffice to say that I wasn't convinced Eva - in all her intelligence and perception - could have quietly stood by certain events in her life. Also, the novel's climax calls into question some of the novel's initial build up, making the behaviour of the neighbours towards Eva in the first hundred pages inexplicably bizarre.

I suppose that's the whole point of some horror - it's irrational and plays to the readers' fears. It gets its kicks from exploring our darkest imagination rather than trying to neatly tie things together. I do feel a little bit cheated out by Shriver, but I enjoyed the carnage nevertheless.

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Comments

[doraphilia.livejournal.com]

i LOATHED this book and did not understand why it received so much acclaim. You pointed out some of the major problems I had with it.

This is my goodreads review
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/58575515

[commonpeople.livejournal.com]

I read your review and it looks like we latched on to the same problems! I enjoyed the horror/thriller aspect but I did feel a little cheated in the end when I realised that a lot of the story was initially set up to misguide the reader and keep the final reveal a secret - at the expense of believability and coherence in the narrator's voice. Some of the themes were quite heavy handed too (Eva/Eve; Liberal vs Conservative take on American violence).

[waywardgaze.livejournal.com]

I hated the way the book was so torturously structured to protect the reveal, too. She was believable as a cold, analytical person, but if, looking back, that's how she would address her late husband, or how little she would be thinking about her beloved daughter...that’s a character at least as neurologically abnormal as her son.

[commonpeople.livejournal.com]

Absolutely. I think it can be argued that she was abnormal on purpose - and the final letter's conclusion about where Kevin will go after prison attests to that - but I didn't think the structure of the novel was there to represent that, but only to keep plot twists hidden.