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We Need to Talk About Kevin

By Lionel Shriver

(65)

| Paperback | 9781852428891

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Book Description

A stunning examination of how tragedy affects a town, a marriage, and a family, for readers of Rosellen Brown's Before and After and Jane Hamilton's A Map of the World.

That neither nature nor nurture bears exclusive responsibility for a child's character is self-evident. But such gContinue

A stunning examination of how tragedy affects a town, a marriage, and a family, for readers of Rosellen Brown's Before and After and Jane Hamilton's A Map of the World.

That neither nature nor nurture bears exclusive responsibility for a child's character is self-evident. But such generalizations provide cold comfort when it's your own son who's just opened fire on his fellow students and whose class photograph--with its unseemly grin--is blown up on the national news.

The question of who's to blame for teenage atrocity tortures our narrator, Eva Khatchadourian. Two years ago, her son, Kevin, murdered seven of his fellow high-school students, a cafeteria worker, and a popular algebra teacher. Because he was only fifteen at the time of the killings, he received a lenient sentence and is now in a prison for young offenders in upstate New York.

Telling the story of Kevin's upbringing, Eva addresses herself to her estranged husband through a series of letters. Fearing that her own shortcomings may have shaped what her son has become, she confesses to a deep, long-standing ambivalence about both motherhood in general and Kevin in particular. How much is her fault?

We Need to Talk About Kevin offers no pat explanations for why so many white, well-to-do adolescents--whether in Pearl, Paducah, Springfield, or Littleton--have gone nihilistically off the rails while growing up in suburban comfort. Instead, Lionel Shriver tells a compelling, absorbing, and resonant story while framing these horrifying tableaux of teenage carnage as metaphors for the larger tragedy--the tragedy of a country where everything works, nobody starves, and anything can be bought but a sense of purpose.

Critics

  • Not mad about the boy

    We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver 400pp, Counterpoint Press, £19.50 Books seldom feel as contemporary as this one. Set against the farce of the counting of the votes in the 2000 US presidential elections, We Need To Talk About Kevin tells ... (read full critics)

    guardian.co.uk published on Sat, 25 Sep 2010

  • Careful with that crossbow

    We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver Serpent's Tail £9.99, pp400 What sort of a mother hates her own son? Eva Khatchadourian does. What she'd hoped for was someone to bear witness to her life and to give her and her husband Franklin somethin ... (read full critics)

    guardian.co.uk published on Sat, 25 Sep 2010

18 Reviews

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  • 3 people find this helpful

    I have bought this book for quite some time but didn't get round to reading it until recently. The Virginia Tech shooting triggered my interest in the book as I, like many people, have been asking what has driven the killer to commit such hideous and senseless crimes.

    This book will not give ... (continue)

    I have bought this book for quite some time but didn't get round to reading it until recently. The Virginia Tech shooting triggered my interest in the book as I, like many people, have been asking what has driven the killer to commit such hideous and senseless crimes.

    This book will not give you the answer even though the protagonist has been asking why many times throughout the book. It is however a terrific good read and no wonder why Lionel Shriver won the Orange Prize for this. You will no doubt marvel at her unconventional way of telling the story from the perspective of the mother of the teenage culprit of a US highschool mass murder through her letters to her estranged husband. By reading her recollections of childbirth, motherhood and days leading to the fateful event, you will get to know this remarkable woman who had unfortunately given birth to a wicked child and had to live with the horrendous consequences on her own. Listening to her confessions and soul-searching woes is painful. By a stroke of bad luck, she has to live through this worst nightmare of every parent. It is really sad and sometimes would move you to tears.

    The author has a knack for depicting relationships and from the bits and pieces of reminiscence in the letters, you will be moved by the mother's love for her husband and her magnanimity towards her vile son. Through all these, you will get a glimpse of a very sick and twisted mind, even though why he did it is as unfathomable as why he came to this world in the first place.

    Poignant and harrowing, this is a must read for everyone. I love it.

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    Tracy W said on Apr 30, 2007 | Add your feedback

  • 3 people find this helpful

    Review

    Just before his 16th birthday Kevin Khatchadourian murders 9 people; 7 students at his high school, a teacher and a worker in the cafeteria. This is Eva’s, his mother’s version of his life. Of her life prior to Kevin’s birth and how her son changed her life. Told through letter to her husband, Frank ... (continue)

    Just before his 16th birthday Kevin Khatchadourian murders 9 people; 7 students at his high school, a teacher and a worker in the cafeteria. This is Eva’s, his mother’s version of his life. Of her life prior to Kevin’s birth and how her son changed her life. Told through letter to her husband, Franklin, the novel reveals all her thoughts and suspicions. And how the aftermath of the killings have utterly transformed her life, and who she is.

    I’ve mentioned before that I’m not a huge fan of first person narratives. Too often they can be a lazy way of writing. And it is all too easy for the author to include to much detail, or too little. Here, however, it works well. We meet Kevin at his birth and get to see him grow and develop as a person, until that fateful Thursday. And because we are aware of what will happen, as is Eva, she pays special attention to clues that might have alerted her. Anything that might have tipped her off.

    But this, I think, is the problem. From his birth Kevin seems somewhat of a mini-monster. Driving away nannies and childminders when only an infant. I do think that babies have their own personalities, and different babies can have very different behaviours, but to ascribe such malice and rage to an infant who can’t even sit up seems a little far-fetched. It also makes the ‘investigation’ into why teenagers are increasingly turning to murder less relevant. Most of the real mass murders have been perpetrated by normal kids, or those isolated from the mainstream. Yes, Kevin is a loner, but on his own terms. All through the book he comes across as a virtual anti-christ.

    But then again, this is all from Eva’s point of view, and we know that she is biased. She knows what he has done. The very fact that Kevin is a murderer must have some impact on her version of events. And because we only see things from her perspective we have no real way of telling if her memory is faulty. Or if she is portraying Kevin in a less than truthful way. She is our narrator, she is the one telling the story, and we have to trust her. Or at least trust that the events she described happened, though possibly not the way she described. Or maybe just with different motivations.

    An enthralling book, I kept wanting to read more, mainly so I wouldn’t ruin the ending by thinking about it too much. Although I don’t think that it was ruined, despite me having a fair idea of what was to happen. Also, given the fact that this is a novel, and therefore fiction, it has an aspect of closure, or maybe of moving forward that is slightly unbelievable.

    Despite these tiny misgivings I would recommend this book as one to read. You may not like Eva, she’s very much a woman of strong opinion, but you’ll end up engrossed in her story. And the fact that we can’t be sure whether or not to trust her adds to the story rather than detracts, as it forces us to question her.

    Not one for soon-to-be parents though.

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    Dee said on Oct 27, 2006 | Add your feedback

  • 2 people find this helpful

    mother's worst nightmare

    the question is if your child does something unspeakable, to what extent are you to blame? an amazing story (full of suspense) of a mother's analysis from pre-pregnancy to full horror of the path towards her worst nightmare....surprisingly not depressing but fascinating

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    Gail Paris said on Oct 22, 2008 | Add your feedback

  • Looking forward to seeing the movie version, which I believe will be even more thrilling and satisfactory.

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    James Chen said on Dec 28, 2011 | Add your feedback

  • I put off reading this for quite a while and found it slightly slow to begin with. While the pace of the book didn't really change I began to find the characters facinating and wanted to know every detail, even if it did take a while.

    This is an extremely well written book, the characters all know ... (continue)

    I put off reading this for quite a while and found it slightly slow to begin with. While the pace of the book didn't really change I began to find the characters facinating and wanted to know every detail, even if it did take a while.

    This is an extremely well written book, the characters all know something the reader doesn't making it difficult to put down.

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    Rachaelchauhan said on Aug 26, 2011 | Add your feedback

  • A true bestseller from both its sensational subject and griping style of writing.

    I admit I had to google the name of the protagonist to see if it was based on an actual person (which it is not) though it is inspired by the all too common phenomenon of teenage mass murderers in America. It is very ... (continue)

    A true bestseller from both its sensational subject and griping style of writing.

    I admit I had to google the name of the protagonist to see if it was based on an actual person (which it is not) though it is inspired by the all too common phenomenon of teenage mass murderers in America. It is very gripping reading, not least for the many twists and turns that the author hints at throughout the book. Many readers will probably see them coming but I remained ignorant and enjoyed the suspense.

    It is important to bear in mind that this is a work of fiction, and despite all the research the author has done into the minds of murderers, any conclusions drawn from the book about why some people do such terrible things, can only be conjecture. Shriver doesn't offer us any conclusions, and though the ending sees the mother seem to arrive some sort of break-through with her son, the author puts us into the mind of someone trying desperately to reach her own conclusion in order to understand what has happened. We see the killer through the eyes of his mother the narrator, who becomes more interesting to us than her son as the story progresses, because just as the mother can't relate to her son, neither can we, and instead we attempt to understand this woman we don't know whether to sympathise with or judge as she struggles to understand the part she played in making her son the way he is.

    'Thought-provoking' is an adjective often used to describe books that deal with issues that we don't think about on a daily basis, and this is one of them. It goes deeper than the obvious question of why some people kill without any seeming reason, a question which thankfully the majority of people aren't confronted with regularly, and it makes us think about the questions of nature vs nurture and if a person can truly be evil.
    It's not light-hearted reading, but it is easy to get absorbed in.

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    Conrodette said on Mar 18, 2011 | Add your feedback

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