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WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN
By Lionel Schriver
Serpent’s Tail. £9.99

I’ve toyed with reading this 2005 novel for a while. I had seen it advertised, but feared its content; reading about the anguish of the mother of a high school mass murderer had little appeal. ‘Yuk’, as my husband said when I summarised the plot. But I’ve read it now and I do recommend it.

Lionel Schriver has structured the book as a series of letters from her protagonist, Eva, to her estranged husband, Franklin, following the Columbine-style massacre perpetrated by their son Kevin. The letters tell the story of their family from before Kevin’s birth until the tragedy referred to always as ‘Thursday’. None of these characters are particularly likeable and indeed Kevin is often repellent, but Schriver effectively creates sympathy and interest as the story un-folds.

Big issues

As you might guess this is a story with ‘big issues’. There’s plenty of material here about the hollowness of materialism, attitudes to America and the nature of evil, but ultimately the central theme is that of motherhood. Eva does not want to be a mother (at least, first time round). She carries out her duties with boiling resentment and real distrust of her son. As the story is told from hindsight we may wonder at her reliability as a narrator; her memory selects events which show a maliciousness in Kevin from birth. She interprets his refusal to breastfeed as rejection of her, his extremely late potty training as a ‘war’ between them both, but these events set alongside sabotaging a neighbour’s bike, and inciting his class to break an heirloom tea set do seem to show a cynical, nasty little boy. The question of nature v. nurture runs through the book with no clear answers, just very sad examples.

Religion detested

I loved the pacing of this novel. I was ambivalent at first, but once a third in I was racing, drawn on by the knowledge that something big and nasty was going to happen. The final chapter is superb, with plenty of surprises which bring satisfaction, while not giving answers to the question of Eva’s responsibility, or of Kevin’s reasons for his attack. There is an element of black humour here as well, which lifts a pretty desperate story, and a sufficient spread of characters and events to lessen intensity.

In an interview, Lionel Schriver commented on the absence of religion from her book: ‘Frankly, I detest religion... [it is] far more a cause of evil than of good in the world’. And maybe the intensity of her feelings show in We need to talk about Kevin. Both Eva and Kevin are angry people, critical and dissatisfied, who look down on Franklin’s simple tastes and love for America. And Eva confesses, as she looks back, that Kevin was ‘spiritually ravenous’, for he had seen the utter emptiness of our culture. So there is a real sense of desolation to this book, and yet at the end hope returns in the form of forgiveness and unconditional love. What has seemed out of the question for 300 odd pages, Lionel Schriver introduces in the final moments, just as at the end of a Shakespearean tragedy a new start is hinted at among the corpses on stage. Faint echoes of the gospel emerge here in the open door a parent offers to a prodigal. This book might not be for everyone, but is definitely worth reading.

Sarah Allen