We Need to Talk About Kevin (2005)
Who wrote it?
Lionel Shriver (1957- ; active 1987- ) born as Margaret Ann Shriver in Gastonia, North Carolina, U.S. Her upbringing was religious, with her father a Presbyterian minister and Theologian. She changed her name to Lionel aged 15, purposefully choosing a more conventionally male name to align with her self-identification at the time as a ‘tomboy’. She currently lives in Bermondsey, South London, having also spent time living in Nairobi and Belfast, and married jazz musician Jeff Williams in 2003.
Prior to We Need To Talk About Kevin, Shriver had written eight novels, seven of which had been published - albeit to relatively limited attention - beginning with 1987’s The Female of the Species. She described the publication of Kevin as a “make or break” moment for her career. Written largely in her spare time alongside her day job as a journalist, she had no real faith that it would be the novel that changed the course of her career.
She has since published nine further novels, though none have perhaps scaled the heights of Kevin either in terms of critical acclaim or commercial success. Perhaps most notorious was 2016’s dystopian The Mandibles, which led to criticism of her depiction of Latinx and African American characters and a subsequent public furore after she used an Australian speech to rail against the concept of cultural appropriation. She has since become something of a regular controversialist in this space, publicly criticising Penguin Random House’s diversity policies in 2018 and offering critiques of “woke / identity politics” still more recently.
What's it about?
We Need To Talk About Kevin is told from the perspective of Eva Khatchadourian, a comfortably well-off former author and publisher of a series of travel guides. It’s structured around a series of letters she writes to her partner, Franklin, in the years after their troubled son Kevin killed nine people in a high-school massacre, and was subsequently incarcerated for his crime.
Through this series of letters, we experience Eva’s present-day reality as she has to deal with the continuing aftermath from the victims’ families and press, while visiting Kevin in his juvenile facility. More significantly, though, she recounts the story of her and Franklin’s life from around Kevin’s conception and searches for clues as to his motivations. Central to all of this is her own sense that her indifference towards having children was at least partly responsible for shaping Kevin’s troubled childhood, during which he himself seems indifferent to virtually everything, resists eating and toilet training and begins to torment and disrupt fellow students and children from a young age.
Also noteworthy is the relatively different relationship Kevin has with Franklin, with whom he is far more (ostensibly) enthusiastic and participatory in his father’s ‘All American’ curriculum of sports fandom, Happy Days and suchlike. While Eva paints herself as consistently pessimistic about Kevin’s intentions (amidst which some judgements even she admits were proven wrong) she depicts Franklin as hopelessly naive, determined to believe in the ideal of the perfect happy family until the very last possible moment.
Despite knowing throughout the novel where things are heading, it still reserves a few surprises which (while guessable) manage to pack an emotional impact and keep it readable until the end.
What I liked
It’s easy to see why this captured the public imagination at the time of publication. In some senses it operates as a very specific time capsule of the relatively early years of high school massacres, a post-Columbine era in which the perpetrators were still typically held to be troubled teens with a predilection for metal and horror movies, rather than the more modern shift towards highly politically motivated violence.
Beyond this point in time relevance though, its success is no doubt down to its encapsulation of a more eternal and universal concern, around fear of having children and taking this to its ultimate extreme - beyond the obvious concerns about having a child (reduced freedom, sleep, etc.) what if your child ended up being an actual monster?
Shriver has said that she has typically received reactions to the novel that fall into two broad buckets - those who sympathise with Eva as being ignored by those around her and left to bear the brunt of the challenge of raising an evidently troubled child, and those who see Eva as virtually entirely at fault for Kevin’s development, and therefore the archetypal ‘bad mother’. She comments that these reactions often seem to be from people who have read two different novels, and that she actually views this as a success in terms of her intention. I’d be inclined to agree with her on that point: the whole point of the novel is that it doesn’t present a clear answer to the question of whether Eva is a victim or a ‘bad mother’. Eva herself is trying to reconcile this, but the fact that we see events only from her perspective further highlights the very obvious fact that she’s an unreliable narrator of her own story. Balancing this out in our minds, and weighing up similar questions around the much more elusive Franklin (deluded and naive absent father, or a force for good trying to instil some positivity to offset Eva’s indifference/outright hostility to Kevin?) is one of the pleasures of reading this book.
That’s also probably one of the reasons for its stratospheric success - it’s easy to read and feel like the author is on your side, regardless of which side that is…
Eva is a well-constructed character in that sense - there’s enough in there at the beginning to draw your sympathy before she gradually reveals a tendency for misjudgement and some (let’s be honest) entertainingly unhinged / extreme opinions on children and the world in general.
That lack of filter is definitely something that kept me hooked - I had a fear that this book might be overly "obvious” in its messaging but there are multiple moments throughout that shake you out of your expectations and make you sit up and pay attention.
What I didn’t like
Overall I found it a captivating read with some enjoyable provocations, but at the same time it didn’t entirely dispel my fears of it being a bit voyeuristic and almost a little trashy. There’s nothing wrong with that inherently, but it definitely felt a little less classy (?) than many equivalent prize-winners, and though it’s not based on a true story as such it wasn’t entirely lacking in the tendency for sensationalism that it appears to lightly criticise in media and documentary makers of the time.
I guess, also, that the conversation around these kind of tragic events in the US has moved on a little in the intervening decades. Though Eva’s observations around many of the killers being thin-skinned men lashing out after minor rejections from women still feels like it has plenty of resonance in an era of Incel culture…
I’d manage to avoid Shriver’s many controversial outbursts over the years, including during my reading of the novel, so they didn’t influence my perspective at the time. However, looking back it does slightly colour some of the more extreme opinions expressed via Eva - reading it with an innocent eye, I was happy to celebrate Eva as an entertaining invention, but with the benefit of hindsight, some of her views probably track pretty closely to Shriver’s own.
A more prosaic criticism - I sort of felt that it went on a bit too long?
Food & drink pairings
A few glasses of wine before bed
Prozac
Fun facts
The judging panel in 2005 was fairly celeb-heavy, with comedian Jo Brand and the legendary Moira Stuart rubbing shoulders with the likes of Joanne Harris from the literary side.
Shriver has remained childless, and although she has moderated her pubic position on the merits of parenthood, continues to support Population Matters, an organisation that supports sustainable initiatives to reduce overpopulation, including discouraging larger families.
The novel was adapted for film in 2011 (after a long gestation period beginning in 2005), directed by Lynne Ramsay (Morvern Callar, You Were Never Really Here) and written by Rory Stewart Kinnear. It starred Tilda Swinton as Eva, John C Reilly as Franklin and Ezra Miller as Kevin, and received generally positive reviews.
Vanquished Foes
Joolz Denby (Billie Morgan)
Jane Gardam (Old Filth)
Sheri Holman (The Mammoth Cheese)
Marina Lewycka (A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian)
Maile Meloy (Liars and Saints)
I’ve not read any of these, though I am intrigued by anything with a name as good as The Mammoth Cheese. No overlap at all with the Booker Prize for this one.
Speaking of the Booker, 2005 saw a surprise winner in the shape of John Banvile’s understated The Sea.
Context
In 2005:
7/7 Suicide Bombings on London's transport network
Hurricane Katrina devastates the US Gulf Coast
Stampede at the Al-Aaimmah bridge in Baghdad, Iraq, kills 953 Shia Muslim pilgrims
Kyoto Protocol comes into effect
North Korea announces that it possesses nuclear weapons
Provisional IRA orders end to campaign and disarmament
Angela Merkel takes office as first female Chancellor of Germany
Andrew Stimpson, a 25-year-old Scottish man, is reported as the first person proven to have been 'cured' of HIV
First human face transplant takes place in France
Death of Pope John Paul II; succeeded by Pope Benedict XVI
Marriage of Prince Charles & Camilla Parker Bowles
Live 8 concerts take place across the world, raising awareness of Make Poverty History campaign
Launch of YouTube
Microsoft's Xbox360 launched
First flight of the Airbus A380
Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Marina Lewycka, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian
Stephanie Meyer, Twilight
Revival of BBC's Doctor Who
Brokeback Mountain
Batman Begins
Madagascar
LCD Soundsystem, LCD Soundsystem
The National, Alligator
M.I.A., Arular
Life Lessons
Maybe: kids are risky business, don’t have them…
Maybe: kids are great, unless you’re inherently very selfish and slightly deluded…
Or maybe some combination of the above. Or neither.
Score
7.5
I think it’s a worthwhile read both as a bit of a time capsule and as an exploration of more universal themes, and there is some clever stuff going on here in terms of perspective. I still can’t quite bring myself to score it as highly as many of the other winners of the Prize in its first ten years though. Whether or not that’s valid, or I’ve been swayed a bit by reading some of Shriver’s opinions that I’m not so keen on, I’m not entirely sure. Being honest, I think it’s a bit of both.
I gave John Banville’s The Sea, which took home the Booker in 2005, an 8.
Ranking to date:
Property (2003) - Valerie Martin - 9.5
The Idea of Perfection (2001) - Kate Grenville - 9
When I Lived in Modern Times (2000) - Linda Grant - 9
Larry’s Party (1998) - Carol Shields - 8.5
Bel Canto (2002) - Ann Patchett - 8.5
Small Island (2004) - Andrea Levy - 8.5
A Crime in the Neighbourhood (1999) - Suzanne Berne - 8.5
A Spell of Winter (1996) - Helen Dunmore - 8
We Need to Talk About Kevin (2005) - Lionel Shriver - 7.5
Fugitive Pieces (1997) - Anne Michaels - 6.5
Next up
Back to the 2022 Booker shortlist for a bit, before jumping back in to the Women’s Prize with 2006’s winner, On Beauty by Zadie Smith.
