We Need to Talk About Kevin
by Lionel Shriver
Summary
Eva Khatchadourian writes letters to her husband Franklin, and the letters are the novel. Their subject is their son Kevin, who two days before his sixteenth birthday locked classmates and a teacher in the school gym and killed them with a crossbow. Eva visits him in juvenile detention, sifts his childhood for the origin of what he did, and addresses it all to Franklin, reconstructing their marriage from the day she, a travel writer who never much wanted children, agreed to have one.
Her account of Kevin is chilling from infancy: a baby who screamed at her and was placid for his father, a boy of flat, watchful malice who destroyed what his mother loved and performed innocence for Franklin, who saw only a normal kid and a cold wife. The book's engine is that Eva is not a reliable narrator of her own motherhood and knows it: she interrogates whether her ambivalence made Kevin or merely met him, and Shriver keeps the nature against nurture verdict genuinely open for five hundred pages.
What Eva is not telling, about their daughter Celia's eye, about where Franklin and Celia are, arrives late, and lands as hard as anything in contemporary fiction.
It is talky, essayistic, sometimes overwritten by design, and completely gripping. Eva's show off vocabulary is itself characterisation: a woman writing her way around what she cannot say plainly, to a reader she has her reasons for addressing.
Around four hundred pages.
Best for readers who want the school massacre examined from the kitchen rather than the corridor, and the great modern novel of maternal ambivalence, a subject fiction had barely touched.
Historical Context & Significance
We Need to Talk About Kevin won the Orange Prize in 2005, and its road there is publishing legend: Lionel Shriver's agent could not sell it, the manuscript was widely rejected as unmarketable in the wake of Columbine and September 11, and it crept out in 2003 to polarised reviews, the Guardian calling it misguided. Word of mouth, largely among mothers who had never seen their own ambivalence in print, built it into a bestseller over two years, and the prize confirmed what readers had already decided. It was later voted the readers' favourite winner in the prize's history.
Shriver, an American in London, had published six earlier novels to little notice; this one made her a public figure, a role she has occupied combatively ever since.
Lynne Ramsay's 2011 film, with Tilda Swinton as Eva and John C. Reilly as Franklin, premiered at Cannes and gave the book a second surge; Swinton's performance is now inseparable from the character.