We Need To Talk About Kevin (2006) - Plot & Excerpts
The short review: HOLY CRAP YOU GUYS NOBODY TOLD ME THERE'D BE EYEBALL STUFF I HATE EYEBALL STUFF THIS BOOK IS SCARY AS &$#%! HOW DO I LOVE THIS BOOK SO MUCH?The details: A few weeks ago, a GR friend of mine reviewed a book about women who are regretlessly childless. (Yes, my spellchecker just told me "regretlessly" isn't a word. It is now.) A troll swaggered over to the comment section and mansplained that he knows plenty of women who wish they'd had kids when they had the chance, so all us gals should go home and reproduce now if we haven't already.I thought of him when I read We Need To Talk About Kevin. Which, just for the record, was written by a woman who really, really doesn't regret not having kids, and who wrote this brilliant story about a woman who didn't want kids but had them anyway.Shriver captured so many of my own feelings that I reached a point where I had to put this book down every few pages, saunter into my 17-year-old son's room, and say, "Um, you're okay, right? Feeling pretty good today? No urges to, I don't know, mow down a bunch of your classmates?"And he'd say, "Mom, I don't have classmates, remember? We homeschool."And I'd say, "JUST ANSWER THE QUESTION."Okay, that didn't happen. But this book definitely spooked me. Partly because it's terrifying, and partly because although I had a child because I wanted to and I see no reason to think he's a sociopath (and lots of evidence to support the idea that he empathizes with those around him to a painful extent), I shared a lot of this narrator's emotional experiences.I, too, gave birth and waited for that "I would do ANYTHING for this person" wave of unconditional love to hit me the way everyone promised it would. And you know what? It didn't. Not when the midwife handed me my newborn and all I felt was terrified that this child who felt less like a baby and more like an uncooked chicken would slip from my arms and I'd set a land-speed record for Worst Mother Ever. Not in the next few weeks, when I was numb with exhaustion and what I now know was a pretty dire case of postpartum depression and all I could think was, I'm supposed to be the happiest I've ever been. What's wrong with me? Not in the months that followed, when I felt a sort of guilty anger over feeling trapped with someone who certainly needed me, but didn't seem to love or even like me.I remember almost bursting into tears when I read an op-ed piece in a local parenting newsletter. The author's youngest child was a few months old, and had just reached, according to the writer, "that adorable age" when a baby's face lights up when her mother comes into the room and picks her up from her crib after naptime. I remember thinking, You have to be fucking kidding me. Because my son was the same age as her child, and if I ever pulled a stunt like leaving him alone long enough for him to notice I was gone, he wouldn't have beamed at me when I came back. He would – and I knew this from bitter experience – have given me a look that said, "Where the hell have you been?"And naptime? What was that? He slept so little that my friends tried to cheer me up by sending me articles about how kids who don't nap grow up to be total geniuses. I remember looking at him one particularly rough day and thinking, You'd better grow up to be Mozart, pal. And by the way – it still won't make up for putting me through this.I'd been a nanny for years. I'd taken care of two younger siblings when I was a teen and they were caboose babies no one else had time for. Heck, I'd even taken a live-in job in a home for severely disabled children.Nothing had prepared me for this, because my kid just plain wasn't like other kids. And I wasn't the kind of easygoing person who would be a good match for him. I don't roll with the punches. I punch back.We weren't a good fit, and nobody had ever said that was a possibility. You had a kid and you loved your kid and it was a hard job but the loving made it all worthwhile.So my guilt increased, which of course did wonders for my still-undiagnosed depression.I remember saying in desperation to my stepmother, "I just want to be able to put him down once in a while." She laughed heartlessly and said, "He's a baby! What did you expect?"Later that same visit, he fell asleep. I put him in his crib. Twenty minutes later, he woke up howling. I went and got him. My stepmother looked at me. "That's it?" she asked. "That's the whole nap?""That's it," I said grimly. "That's a good day, for him."She looked humbled. "I remember when Brian was a baby. I really counted on those couple of hours when he went to sleep and I could get something done after lunch.""Must have been nice," I said.I felt guilty at feeling so "touched out" all the time, and I felt really guilty when I thought about a friend of mine who had dealt with depression of her own and who swore that after she had her baby, she never felt suicidal again, or even all that depressed, because it just wasn't an option anymore. "Life stops being about you and starts being about them," she said. Unless you're me, apparently. I love my son. I did even then. I'd die for him, and I took and continue to take great pleasure in his company. I think the world is a better place for having him in it.I loved him, even when I worried that I didn't. But it wasn't frothy or overwhelming or all-at-once, and it didn't turn me into one of those baby-talking morons I still dislike. And I'm not at all convinced that even now, when things are much easier and we can both consciously work on our relationship and I love and like my kid – even now I'm not convinced my love is completely unconditional.Maybe it is. Or maybe I'm just not cut out for that kind of emotional work. So it's a good thing my son is really really almost certainly not a Kevin. Getting back to the actual book I'm supposed to be talking about here: This is the story of a terrible mother who didn't love her baby, so he grew up to be a monster. Or maybe it's the story of a flawed but not evil woman who happened to give birth to a Bad Seed. Or maybe life is way too complicated to be forced into such oversimplifications.All I know is that this book is scary as hell – and yet I found it oddly reassuring to read about a woman whose clueless husband asks what she'd expected motherhood to be – "a walk in the park?""Not a carefree stroll," she snaps back, "but this is like being mugged in the park!"And then, a few pages later, that narrator admits to a friend that someone forgot to hit her with the magic motherlove wand:"I realize this doesn't sound very nice. But I keep waiting for the emotional payoff."I loved the dark humor in passages like this one:"I realize it's commonplace for parents to say to their child sternly, 'I love you, but I don't always like you.' But what kind of love is that? It seems to me that comes down to, 'I'm not oblivious to you – that is, you can still hurt my feelings – but I can't stand having you around.' Who wants to be loved like that? Given a choice, I might skip the deep blood tie and settle for being liked."And I almost burst into tears – in a good way, kind of – from the relief of seeing someone else say this:Let's talk about power. In the domestic policy, myth dictates that parents are endowed with a disproportionate amount of it. I'm not so sure. Children? They can break our hearts, for a start. They can shame us, they can bankrupt us, and I can personally attest that they can make us wish we were never born. What can we do? Keep them from going to the movies.If you're going to read this book – and I think you should – don't read anything about it. (This review doesn't count. It's mostly about me, anyway.) I was innocently reading an article in the New Yorker about Lionel Shriver, and the idiot writer spelled out the whole surprise ending without any warning at all. If Christine Smallwood is reading this: all is NOT forgiven. Why would you even do that? Either I've read the book, in which case I already know the ending and don't need you to tell me; or I HAVEN'T YET, in which case you should burn in a very specific hell in which you and your fellow sufferers are clonked on the head by a constant rain of hardcover copies of brilliant novels, and when you finally manage to find shelter and pick one up and start reading it, you get halfway through and then Satan strolls up and spoils the ending for you and YOU HAVE TO KEEP READING ANYWAY.Not that I'm bitter or anything.Read this book and be prepared to have the pants scared off you. Oh, and if you're happily childless? Buy multiple copies of it, so you always have one on hand to throw at people who tell you that you're totally missing out. "Really?" you can ask as they duck and cover. "That's not what this book says. You should read it. But first let me tell you the ending."
It is now abundantly clear to me why this novel is such a popular selection for book clubs the world over -- it is a family saga that features a sordid tragedy, filled with abhorrent, compelling, wretched, titillating detail. It is a book meant to conquer and divide its readers, elicit strong emotion, a take-no-prisoners approach that leaves you anything but detached and unmoved. I can't imagine anyone coming to the end of this ordeal (for it is an ordeal) and not have some opinion, if not a plethora of them, on the nature vs. nurture debate and parental culpability in a child's deviant behavior. The power of the book is not in its brilliance or originality (because it can claim only a trace amount of both) -- its power lies in its subject and the passive-aggressive way in which it is delivered in the first person -- a cloying, nails-on-a-chalkboard supercilious tone surely meant to inflame. Its power is not in the reading, but rather what follows -- the heated, emotional, no-holds-barred tempest of feeling it can only serve to generate at its conclusion. It's an A-bomb type of deal -- right up there with abortion and capital punishment -- and it will make you question the very core of many of your beliefs. But I didn't enjoy it. It's not a book to savor. Even the prose is overwrought, perfectly capturing Eva's hapless condescension and sense of superiority brimming over in her letters to husband Franklin, as much a part of her character as Kevin's sociopathic tendencies. And herein lies my biggest problem with the novel -- it seems to me Shriver goes out of her way to present Kevin as a "born psychopath". Over hundreds of pages, the portrait builds, the evidence mounts, layer upon layer, Kevin as The Bad Seed. That I don't have a problem with. I actually fall into the camp who believe sociopaths can most definitely be born -- a true by-product of nature with very little if nothing to do with nurture. I first thought Shriver was taking the easy way out to explain Kevin's mass murder as the product of a truly evil, unstoppable, beyond redemption monster. Real life is usually much more complicated and contradicting than that. Then I began to see the real horror for what it was -- an unlovable child, who could not feel love, who could not feel much of anything really and the deep-seated terror and repulsion that would accompany that realization, to recognize this thing in your midst that is of your flesh and blood as alien, unknowable, menacing, monstrous. Then I wondered ... okay ... what came first? Kevin's sociopathy which evidenced itself at birth, or Eva's cold rejection of her son, her unwillingness to embrace him in a mother's love the sure cause for his later descent into darkness? You could even accuse Eva of being an unreliable narrator of the worst sort, painting a portrait of Rosemary's Baby even while she flagellates herself with guilt over her inability to see him as nothing other than Damien-esque, a self-fulfilling prophecy if ever there was one. Despite any of Eva's shortcomings as a mother and a human being, in the end there was no doubt in my mind that Kevin was not made but born. The frigid embrace of a hyper-critical, suspicious mother aside, Kevin came out of the womb absent some fundamental building blocks to engage in life and experience empathy. His above-average intelligence became a weapon to better wield cruelties and abuses upon his victims who he saw as no more significant than ants under a magnifying glass. Ironically, the only person he had any semblance of respect for was Eva herself, if only because she was the only person to see past the artifice into Kevin's dark heart. I also think Kevin responded to Eva's sense of superiority as well, that she thought she was better than most appealed to his own arrogance and self-inflated importance. But then ... (view spoiler)[towards the end, we see Kevin showing some level of remorse and regret, at least that he had hurt his mother in a profound way, if not for his other hapless victims including his father and little sister. This is what disappointed me and pissed me off, because it felt like a cop out. After writing a convincing and chilling portrayal of a child sociopath, Shriver now seems to backtrack. It's like she wants it both ways -- Kevin a born sociopath AND a misunderstood teen -- a by-product, nay victim, of his mother's inability to love him unconditionally. This duality might work stylistically if your intent is to stimulate the nature vs. nurture debate, but I think it weakens the story considerably. To have Kevin visibly shaking at the daunting prospect of adult incarceration, to cling to his mother in a helpless childlike embrace, is so OUT OF CHARACTER for everything that's come before as to make it meaningless.What did chill me -- and maybe this was the point all along -- is Eva's final acceptance of her son now that the worst has happened. The fact that she has a room waiting for him when he gets out of prison did not strike me as a mother "standing by her child no matter what" (finally!) but that Eva's mind had broken and this was no more than a twisted, gothic grotesquerie to claim the only family left to her. That she did not whisk her daughter away from the monster in her midst WHEN SHE KNEW what he had done to her sickened me. That Eva should now forgive the unforgivable when her daughter's body lies cold in the ground is unfathomable to me and left me with the hairs on the back of my neck standing straight up. (hide spoiler)]
What do You think about We Need To Talk About Kevin (2006)?
It's been a couple of years now since I read this book; which I find to be amazing because I still think about this novel all the time.It has spurred so many conversations regarding nature vs. nurture, I couldn't even count them all.One thing I did learn from this tale was that I could absolutely LOVE a book without liking any of the characters in it. Previously, I didn't think that was possible. Now I know that it is.I highly recommend this story to horror fans, especially those that love psychological horror. You will be thinking about it for months or years to come, I guarantee it.
—Charlene
In two of her novels, Shriver is not afraid to write about subjects which stick in the craw of most American's today. In her 2010 novel, So Much for That she tackled to American health care system and in 2003 in We Need to Talk About Kevin, it was school shootings. The story consists of Eva Khatchadourian's letters to her husband Franklin; they start from twelve months after their son Kevin has done the unthinkable and killed seven classmates, one teacher and a cafeteria worker. Eva is looking back over her and Franklin's life together. Their life is going along pretty damn well except for the issue of having children. Eva finally capitulates after she decides she wants a child for her own selfish reasons. Parenthood is not easy for Eva and this is the manner in which her whole relationship with Kevin proceeds. Although not for lack of trying on Eva's behalf: Kevin is a difficult child, he thwarts Eva at every turn and responds only to Franklin. This is the pattern of their family life on a whole. Motherhood is not a happy experience for Eva and Kevin is far from the ideal child. In my opinion, he is downright evil, conniving and socio-pathic. The method Kevin employs to kill his victims is both unexpected and shocking; indeed, reflective of his warped personality.One long barrage of missives after another, you hear nothing but Eva's side, Eva's viewpoint, Eva's feelings and while this could be stultifying, it works because it intensifies Eva's position. But on the whole, Eva's attendant reasonings for having a child in the first place are so skewed, is it any wonder the event would be so miserable an exercise for her? The term Kevin used to address his mother with, I found totally creepy: "Mommer", it almost sounds mechanical or robotic. I read We Need to Talk About Kevin when it was first published and upon my second read, for me the subject matter is still Fifty Shades Of Awful. It was a very disturbing read. I finished the book near midnight and the ending slewed me. Like a kid who needs a comedy after a horror movie, I had to then start re-reading one of my favourite novels to dispel the images We Need To Talk About Kevin had imprinted on my consciousness. The Daily Mail cited it as “harrowing, tense and thought-provoking” and I agree on all counts. Shriver won the 2005 Orange Prize for Fiction for this novel and frankly, I am surprised it did not win the Pulitzer. It has sold over one million copies and if you haven't read this book, you are missing out on an incredible piece of literature. Although saying it was enjoyable in the normal sense of the word would be a stretch, none the less, it was a novel I could not put down. 5★
—B the BookAddict
This is one of the most profound books I have ever read. Every paragraph is constructed in layers of meaning. I was so drawn into the book I felt as if I was there. I can only call this a masterpiece. Never have I felt and pondered each line. I was however, very thankful for the built-in dictionary of my reading device! It is not just the story of one boy and a heinous crime. it digs deeper into societal norms, does our environment really play any role in our innate personalities, and who are we as a country really? Expect your every waking moment to be consumed with this read. It is one I will never forget.
—Debbie "DJ" Wilson
