Book #9: We Need to Talk about Kevin

Book #9: We Need to Talk about Kevin by Lionel Shriver

January 20, 2013


The title of this book is somewhat ironic. Now that Kevin is the topic of conversation, it is far too late for the conversation to occur...or is it? The story is told from the perspective of Eva, Kevin's mother. Kevin, 17, is locked away in a New York state juvenile detention facility. His crime? Murdering 11 people and injuring two others with a crossbow, most of the killing taking place in the school gym as he took down a teacher, a cafeteria worker, and other students. Nearly two years after the infamous Thursday, Eva begins writing letters to her late husband Franklin, in an effort to try to understand what happened and why...and to finally have the conversation that Franklin had been avoiding all of his son's life.

The reader is meant to figure out throughout the course of the novel that Franklin is dead. At first, it is implied that he and Eva are merely "separated," as they'd been discussing divorce before Thursday happened. But more and more obvious clues are dropped throughout the story; I figured out that Franklin would be one of Kevin's victims before Celia, his little sister, even came into the story, though I was embarrassed that I hadn't figured it out sooner. But I was drawn in to the story and its characters, especially the narrator Eva.

In her letters, Eva tells the story of Kevin's life and her relationship with her son, while keeping Franklin up-to-date on the happenings in her current, miserable life. She still lives in the same New York suburb, risking run-ins with the family members of her son's victims and other hostile community members on a daily basis. At the beginning of the book, it is revealed that one of the parents, the mother of a beautiful girl whom Kevin had shot through the heart with an arrow like some deranged cupid, had tried to sue Eva, I guess for being so negligent of a parent that she would "allow" her son to become a murderer. The case was dropped, and when I figured out that not one, but two members of Eva's family had been victims that day as well, I felt angry on behalf of the protagonist.

But the more pressing issue in the book was Eva's relationship with her son, whom she'd been reluctant to have in the first place. I understand women like Eva, who are well-educated and well-traveled and view themselves as being a little above the "ordinary" people who have boring jobs and who live in the suburbs and drive SUVs and live their lives for their children. There are some things that I like about her: I agree with many of her criticisms about contemporary American life (though I would not yell out these views in public, as she often does in the book, nor would I wear my pride and superiority on my sleeve the way that she does), and I understand her hesitation to have children. I'm still young myself, so I have lots of time to decide (or to at least find myself in a situation where having children would even be a question), but some of the ideas in this book will definitely come back to haunt me when it becomes relevant.

Franklin is more old-fashioned, you could say, than his wife. He wanted the happy family, suburban life that his wife scorned. But she got pregnant for his sake; she loved him that much. They seemed so different from each other, but they do say that opposites attract. There was a film version of this made a couple of years ago, and though Tilda Swinton as Eva garnered a Golden Globe nomination (I think she's too light-complected to play the Armenian Eva, though I'm sure they didn't make that an issue in the movie; she does have Eva's self-described "androgynous" vibe), the film mostly flew under the radar. John C. Reilly, an actor who is ridiculously versatile (he's one of my favorites) played Franklin in the film. Though as I read the book I didn't see him as Franklin, Franklin had John C. Reilly's distinctive voice, sounding both burly and soft-hearted at the same time. I may watch the movie just to see his performance.

Anyway, Franklin is a likable but infuriating character, though I guess it was easy for me to become annoyed with his blindness to Kevin's "issues" since I had the advantage of knowing what was coming. From the start, it was clear that Kevin was not a normal child. As a baby, he was wrathful, and wanted nothing to do with his mother. Eva reflects, with no small amount of guilt, that perhaps he could sense her own hesitation, the fact that she had not been overcome with motherly love and joy when he was first born. Kevin's relationship with his parents is very different. With his father, he takes on the pretense of being a happy-go-lucky kid, accompanying his father on outings to museums and battleground sites with forced enthusiasm. With his mother, he is surly and sarcastic, sometimes quite mean...but honest.

As Kevin gets older, Eva sees some terrible signs that her son is a malicious sociopath. But whenever he finds himself in a compromising situation (encouraging a girl in his kindergarten to scratch her eczema rashes until they bled profusely; being the obvious culprit when a neighbor's bike is tampered with; getting caught throwing hunks of bricks at racing cars from an overpass), he is always able to convince his father that he is a victim, unfairly targeted or in the wrong place at the wrong time. His mother knows him better, but any attempt to discuss it with Franklin is futile. As a reader, I found myself hoping in vain that Franklin would see the light, that he and Eva would finally come together as a team and really talk about Kevin, stopping the tragedy that I already knew was going to happen.

I also found myself hoping that Eva, the one person who seemed to really know Kevin (though not the only person in his life who was suspicious; his father was the only one who saw him as being a completely innocent, upstanding young man), would find some way to connect with him, and I would get frustrated with her when I saw opportunity for her to do so. She could have taken his comments in stride; she could have made a joke of it. As a pretty easy-going person, I would have laughed it off if Kevin had verbally disemboweled me at dinner, complimenting him on his ability to see past even his own mother's bullshit and hypocritical tendencies. But Eva was too prideful. Or rather, she was too afraid to try to connect with him; any attempts that she made (and they were few and far between) were half-hearted, and she would later admit that her own son's mind was like a "foreign country." She'd made her fortune traveling to other countries and unraveling their mysteries for curious travelers, but her son's mind was one place she was too afraid to venture.

So who is to blame for Thursday? Eva does blame herself, in some ways, though she knows that it is pointless to do so. She knows it will not bring back Franklin or Celia. She knows that it will not make Kevin, who never seemed to care about anything or anyone at all, sorry for what he did. At the end, it seems that he is starting to allow himself to appear as more of a human being. In a television interview, he defends his mother when questioned about the lawsuit that was filed against her, and a camera shot shows that he has a picture of her taped on the wall next to his bed (the same picture, Eva notes, that she'd noticed had gone missing from the house after Celia's birth). At their last meeting before his 18th birthday (after which he will be transferred to an adult prison, though his sentence is very light considering his crime...he calculated it perfectly, doing is deed 3 days before his 16th birthday, forcing the state to prosecute him as a minor), he gives her the glass eye that he'd stolen from his sister's dead body, and even faintly apologizes for what he did. He admits that he doesn't know why he killed all those people, though some clues were dropped in the narrative. He tells his interviewer on TV that he was disgusted with the nation of "watchers," and was simply giving them something to watch. But when he explains to his mother why he didn't kill her, too, he reveals that he wanted her to be one of the audience members...he was doing it for her, at least partially. To hurt her? Impress her? Test her? It isn't clear.

In the end, Eva admits to herself (and to Franklin) that she does love her son. She even has a room waiting for him in her apartment when he gets out of prison. In spite of all of her perceived flaws as a parent (because it is so easy to look and judge...I don't have kids, but I work with kids, and I cannot think of anything more complicated than being a parent), she is a good mother, practically saintly with the love that she still has for this murderer who is her child, even though she doesn't naively expect that he will come out of prison as a completely reformed, "normal" person. At times in the book, it does seem that Kevin is some sort of irredeemable sociopath, a monster, and that infanticide on Eva's part might have been justified (not that she ever considered it). But he's not a monster...he's a human being. Eva believes that he can somehow be redeemed, even though his entire life indicates just the opposite.

Though this book was written over a decade ago (in fact, Kevin's fictional massacre takes place just days before the infamous Columbine High School shooting), it is certainly timely, as in the past year there have been a couple of public shootings that have made headlines in the US: the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado and the elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. The shooters in both of these instances were young men in my own age bracket, not troubled teens. Many people (including actor Morgan Freeman) decried the media for extensively covering these atrocities, especially for splashing the faces of the killers everywhere. Eva makes a similar comment in the book as she recounts real-life instances of school violence that happened around the time of the one her son committed. The killers became stars; the victims faded into obscurity. Surely the attraction of instant fame (however infamous) would be irresistible to some troubled people? Especially someone like Kevin, who saw no point in life, who was resentful of the everyday bullshit all around him (an attitude that Eva probably doesn't realize he picked up from her). Before, people went out of their way to avoid him; after Thursday, everyone wanted to get inside his head.

I'm sure that most parents don't worry that their babies will grow up to be killers. Those crimes are few and far between, thank goodness, in the large scheme of things. But what about having a kid who grows up to be a woman-beater or a child-abuser? Or even just an all-around jerk? Eva decries parents who claim to "not like" their own children. It only speaks to the complexities of love, even the love between a parent and child, that only after Kevin committed his horrible crime that Eva was able to find some things that she actually liked about this son of hers whom she, for better or worse, really loves.

(to the left) The black ribbon in remembrance of the victims of the school shooting just over a month ago. 20 young children killed, and several adults. One teacher was shot after she'd hidden her class in a coat closet, telling the killer (whose name I have chosen not to remember) that they were in PE. 


(to the left) Several people were shot and killed at a midnight premiere screening of The Dark Knight Rises in a Colorado suburb. This led the nation to wonder: are we safe anywhere? Descriptions of the real-life killer remind me of the fictional Kevin. Reportedly, the killer's mother was not surprised when she heard what her own son had done.