Shriver writes a shattering book about Kevin

Review By  Fiona White.

We Need to Talk about Kevin by Lionel Shriver is a shattering book and tackles many taboo questions head on:  Is mother love a totally natural instinct?  Is it Nature or Nurture which determines a child’s character?  Are some people just born ‘bad’?

 

By choosing to write in an epistolary style, Shriver allows the character of Eva to express many socially taboo thoughts and feelings and to reveal her bewilderment at the tragic circumstances leading to her son’s imprisonment.  She agonises that she might have contributed to his sociopathic attitude by being a ‘bad’ mother and shows the depth of her guilt.

 

The first half of the book moves slowly and I found the self-absorbed, calculating character of Eva hard to like.  However, the pace of the narrative picks up as Kevin reaches his early-teens and the latter chapters make compelling reading.  ‘Watching a train wreck in slow motion’ comes to mind because we know early on in the book that Kevin has committed murder and we want to know how, where and why.  Suspecting that Kevin had been so unspeakably evil as to deliberately blind his little sister was the turning point for me: this was a taste of the truly awful event for which we were inexorably heading.

 

I found the character of Franklin very frustrating.  If both parents do not present a united front to their child over discipline and standards of acceptable behaviour, any half-smart child will soon manage to drive a wedge between them.  Franklin appears astonishingly blinkered to the possibility of his son’s manipulation and pathetically eager to accept any explanation Kevin cares to offer in justification of however egregious a transgression.

 

One has to question the wisdom of Eva dwelling so often and so openly in front of Kevin on the teen-age school killings – it seemed almost to present him with a challenge.

 

Ultimately Kevin succeeded in depriving his mother of everything she held dear: her business, her home, her wealth, her daughter, her husband.  Was his ultimate intention to have her to himself and not to have to share her energies and affections with anyone or anything?  He had recognised clearly the shortcomings of his father and the strengths of his mother.  He could now contemplate his future with the care of his mother and without competition from his sister.  Criminal he undoubtedly was; smart and self serving he unquestionably is.  Disturbing, very disturbing!

 

I don’t believe that his mother failed Kevin – parenting is a lottery at the best of times.

 

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