We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver

We Need to Talk About Kevin
by Lionel Shriver
Pub. Date: April 2003
Genre: Fiction
416pp

Synopsis from BN.com:
Eva never really wanted to be a mother—and certainly not the mother of the unlovable boy who murdered seven of his fellow high school students, a cafeteria worker, and a much-adored teacher who tried to befriend him, all two days before his sixteenth birthday. Now, two years later, it is time for her to come to terms with marriage, career, family, parenthood, and Kevin's horrific rampage in a series of startlingly direct correspondences with her estranged husband, Franklyn. Uneasy with the sacrifices and social demotion of motherhood from the start, Eva fears that her alarming dislike for her own son may be responsible for driving him so nihilistically off the rails.

Why I Picked It:
This book was one that I approached with much trepidation, despite my fascination with the subject matter. I've read The Hour I First Believed, which also deals with high school massacre, and have in my wish list at Audible the new book Columbine by Dave Cullen. Maybe it's because I have a teenager in high school. Maybe it's because the child who kills his classmates is named Kevin. Maybe it's because it's from a mother's point of view. But I did finally check it out from the library, and it sat staring at me for weeks as I renewed it, renewed it again, and then finally just returned it and ended up listening to it on my ipod.

My Review:
The narrator of the story is Eva Khatchadourian, a smart, skeptical New Yorker, who is writing letters to her estranged husband, Franklin, in the aftermath. She writes, "...one of the things that impels me to write is that my mind is huge with all the little stories I never told you." Lionel Shriver writes Eva's letters with such detail - they are revealing, intimate, angry, insightful, and written in such a way that the reader becomes the letter recipient as she attempts to come to terms with what their son has done as well as her own ambivalence about having a child in the first place.

These letters she writes are sometimes angry, always revealing, descriptive and raw. They are soul-baring in their self-revelation, profound descriptions of the woman's body from a sex object to the transformation into the act of pregnancy and childbirth. She describes the sacrifice of giving up a high-powered career to become a mother to a child she could not bond with. The stress and division the struggle of motherhood, career and child-rearing put upon their marriage, eventually forcing it's destruction. The letters are a sort of delving into the deep pockets of memory, sifting through the things unsaid, the things unresolved, to find the answers to all the questions.

But before I go any further, I have an objection or two. At first, I didn't really like the format of the story developing through one-sided unanswered letters. I wanted a response from Franklin! I also want to say, for the record, that I really resented the author's insistence on using $10 words I had to look up in the dictionary. Okay. Moving on.

This book explores the questions: "Who's to blame? The child? The parents?"

It was very hard not to immediately jump to a conclusion when the mother is saying things like, "What possessed us? We were so happy! Why, then, did we take the stake of all we had and place it all on the outrageous gamble of having a child?" This is within the 30 pages of the book, and I knew it was going to be a hard book for me to read without trying to jump through the pages and strangle her. Again, this is why I decided to listen. Having a voice made me less apt to act on my impulses because I won't be violent if a real person is involved - strangling a book is just fine with me though.

But even as she is revealing her struggle with the child she bore who seems to reject her from the start, calming only in his fathers arms, you see a woman who is conflicted with her love for her child despite her inability to bond in the typical sense. Even when she is calling him a "little shit", within the context and once you've been more properly introduced to what sort of child Kevin was, I could understand her frustration.

In the end, I came to understand Eva. Sympathize. Empathize. In fact, I started to think of Eva as a friend I would meet for lunch on Tuesdays and listen as she would pour her heart out. It was not an easy book, subject, or friendly, happy cast of characters. But, I do recommend it because it's thought provoking, incredibly well written (yes, despite the vocab lessons), and, ultimately, heartbreaking.