I am a little late in getting around to reading this book, which won the Orange Prize for Fiction when it was published in 2005. I had heard that it was about a mother writing about her son, a “Columbine High School” type killer, and thought it would make for rather grim reading. I wasn’t wrong, it is a very dark book, but it does ask (and doesn’t really ever answer) some difficult questions.
It’s the old nature/nurture debate explored from the point of view of the mother of a child who nobody would want to claim as theirs. We hear everything from one voice, that of the mother, as she struggles to make sense of what appears to be a senseless act, and traces back through time events that may or may not have bearing on her son’s future behaviour.
Eva Khatchadourian is searingly frank in her account, but it is only her account, her emotions and feelings that we get to hear about. We are left to a large amount to infer what is going on in the emotional lives of others in the story.
Eva is not sure if she wants a child until one night when her husband is very late home and she panics that if he is dead then she will have nothing of him left in her life. It is clear she loves her husband dearly, but she has already made her first mistake. There are no guarantees that a child will be anything like either of its parents, in looks, temperament or interests. Eva draws a short straw and gets a son who has nothing of him that reminds her of her husband, Franklin, but a whole load, including looks, that is uncomfortably close to herself.
By the time she goes through a difficult birth with her son she is already resentful in small ways of the loss of freedoms that she has experienced and this is further compounded by the fact that she feels nothing on meeting her son for the first time. There is no rush of emotion or maternal feelings, which must seem to her to be reciprocated when her newborn refuses to feed from her. This bad start never seems to be overcome.
Eva documents events from Kevin’s early childhood in which she apportions motives that are hard to reconcile with his developmental stage. We are asked to believe that he is capable of a high degree of manipulative behaviour and that this is planned solely to irritate and confound his mother. Sometimes we can see that she may possibly be right, but in other scenarios it seems unclear. Eva admits “To me he was never “the baby”. He was a singular, unusually cunning individual who had arrived to stay with us and just happened to be very small.” Perhaps through these lenses there is much that will be distorted.
Franklin, in Eva’s account, can see no wrong in their son and will support him over her at every opportunity. Eva believes that Kevin puts on an act with his father, that he never gets to see “the real Kevin”, but it seems that his mother is also never seeing “the real Kevin” either, and that maybe this is what Kevin wants the most of all. When a child can do no right in the eyes of his own mother there may be very little to gain through revealing all.
There are points where Eva tries very hard to get the relationship with her son back on track. She gives up her job to stay at home with him but this only brings more opportunities for Kevin to show that all of her motherly efforts are futile. He will not appreciate her handcrafted story books, he refuses to be taught anything by her, preferring to pick up knowledge “on the sly” so that he can show her just how redundant she is.
Eva questions her own behaviour throughout the retelling of the history in an attempt to tease out who exactly is to blame for the horror of Thursday (the day Kevin goes on a killing spree at his school) when the lives of her family are turned upside down. There are some shocking revelations of cruelty from two of the main parties in the equation (Kevin and Eva) and some questionable decisions on Franklin’s part (he buys Kevin a crossbow for a Christmas present). At various times it is easy to feel sorry for each family member, at others it is all too easy to begin to point the finger of blame. The reader is left wondering every bit as much as Eva herself how much responsibility lies with her and how much with her son. Was Kevin born bad or did he turn out bad? If he was born bad then Eva cannot blame herself. If he turned out bad that means there were reasons and that it was preventable. Is Eva remembering events clearly, or does she retell them with a slant that makes the “born bad” scenario seem more compelling? The reader is left to decide.
The book is an intelligent and challenging exploration of what appears to be a particularly American phenomenon – the high school massacre. Nature, nuture, the working mother, the cold distant mother, the non-supportive parenting relationship between Eva and Franklin, sibling rivalry – all are thrown into the blame pot. When it comes to talking about Kevin we are all probably like Eva and see him through our own set of lenses and in relation to our own life choices.
I find it hard to accept that Kevin was “born bad” and events at the end of the book suggest to me that Kevin always desired to be known and loved by his mother but was aware that his mother did not love or seek him out. His father, a model dad from the outside, whilst loving his son did not ever truly know him either. Kevin is never loved for simply who he is, which I believe makes him all the more likely to turn out unlovable.
The book is an uncomfortable read for parents and (I imagine) non-parents to read. For a parent it is a jolting reminder that we are shaping our children’s future selves (a huge responsibility). Non-parents may read it and understand more clearly why they never wanted to have children (too risky? too uncertain? too much like hard work?) or seriously consider their motives for wanting them. Which is a shame, for the chances of raising a Kevin can surely be made very small indeed.
I’m happy to mail the book to anyone who would like to read it.
Biskie reviews “We Need To Talk About Kevin” by Lionel Shriver
Posted by: gordy | June 3, 2008 | 3 Comments |Responses - Create a free edublog to get your own comment avatar (and more!)
Thank you, Biskie.
This Greek tragedy poses all sort of fascinating questions.
Firstly, are any of us capable of seeing the world, and particularly that bit closest to us, anything like objectively, even if we are searingly honest about our own desires and motives?
The frightening thing here is that (and why it is a Greek tragedy) one seemingly tiny misjudgement rolls inexorably, fatalistically and inevitably towards the ghastly conclusion. And there is nothing anybody can do about it.
Matt Ridley, the excellent human biologist and failed banker, makes lots of interesting points in his several books on the nature/nurture debate. My own feeling is that genetics plays a much bigger role in our adult behaviour than we would like to admit.
The mother here seems to be playing some sort of emotional game with the father via the son and it is hardly a surprise, I suppose, when the son does likewise through the father. There seems to be an emotional power struggle happening with no rules of engagement to keep the fallout within bounds.
How this genetic inheritance and early deprivation of love from the mother (and, perhaps, the father?) leads to mass murder, rather than, say, just unhappiness or cynicism seems to be the nub of thing.
None of us, I suppose, had a perfect childhood and yet few become murderers. Was there a hint of a genetic propensity for mental illness that manifested itself in the extreme emotional stress which was apparent in the home from the moment of Kevin’s birth? Accidents usually need a conjunction of two or more unlikely events to coincide.
One of the morals of the story is that it supports Hume’s dictum that reason should be a the slave to the passions. If Eva had followed her instinct not to have children rather than listen to her (flawed) reasoning…
Do you know how close the events in the novel followed the actual events (or what we know of them) that resulted in ‘Columbine?’
By: boltonian on June 4, 2008
at 8:32 am
In my time working at the shop (last three and a bit years), this has been one of the most popular books. (Working there also furnishes you with a horrible snobbery about such things). But you’ve made me more eager to get round to reading this one!
One of the most challenging people I’ve ever met was a prison chaplain. (He wasn’t challenging in his demeanour. He had an unthinking, enchanting gentleness about him). Speaking of his various experiences ministering to men, often young men, who have committed some terrible things, I was struck by his emphasis on ‘locating’ them in their own (often familial) struggles. He emphasised that this was neither to gloss over the gravity of what they had done nor to exculpate them from responsibility. (He was also an advocate of arranging, if possible, for prisoners to come face to face with those whom they have transgressed, whether directly or otherwise, which he directly related to conflict resolution and justice administration he had encountered in some – East? – African communities).
There’s a series on channel four whose name I forget. Each ‘episode’ is a mini film lasting a couple of minutes, in which a death-row inmate is interviewed (through thick glass and over a telephone). The conceit is that the final question will be what they’ll request as their final meal. But in the course of it, they reflect on being on death row. One stands out in my mind. He was the member of a gang. A young woman had witnessed them do some (unspecified) crime, so he was given the task of killing her. In carrying this out, he murdered three other women (who were in the same car as her at the time). Anyhow, he began to speak plaintively of his own family – his mother, his wife, his children – and said something v interesting about his booked execution. For him, it was an injustice. He was living with the scale of what he had done dawning on him. He accepted this. (He seemed – even if not in the way we might wish him to be – remorseful). But, his execution meant an end of this for him. His struggle, as he put it, would be over. But this wasn’t so for his own family. (This does not go into the families of those he murdered, of course). Nonetheless, he finished quite eloquently by noting that the execution, in a sense, punished other innocents (his own family) more than it did him, the guilty one. This is an insight, I think, into the nature of ‘evil’ (or whatever one wishes to call it). It has a ’staining’ quality, which inevitably spreads beyond the control of the perpetrator. It profoundly affects others, and more than the most obvious and central victims. (The mother of a recently murdered teenager in south london spoke, a day after he was murdered, of feeling sorry for the parents of her son’s murderer: they would have to grapple with what their own son had done for the rest of their lives). Anyhow, I’d also be interested to read Shriver’s book from this sort of angle.
By: ChooChoo on June 7, 2008
at 10:34 am
Boltonian –
“Was there a hint of a genetic propensity for mental illness that manifested itself in the extreme emotional stress which was apparent in the home from the moment of Kevin’s birth?”
Following the birth of a child is one of the most high risk times for women to suffer from a mental illness. Eva did not appear to suffer from postnatal depression, though that would be one reason why a mother would find it difficult to bond with her baby.
“One of the morals of the story is that it supports Hume’s dictum that reason should be a the slave to the passions. If Eva had followed her instinct not to have children rather than listen to her (flawed) reasoning…”
I totally agree. Though you do of course love your own child more than any other you should definitely be sure you like children in general before deciding to have your own. Children need socialising so you are going to be around other people’s a lot. Maybe Kevin missed out on this early socialisation.
“Do you know how close the events in the novel followed the actual events (or what we know of them) that resulted in ‘Columbine?’”
It is a purely fictional account of this type of massacre. I don’t know much about what happened at Columbine but there is a long wiki page on it that I’ll read later.
Choochoo –
It’s not the sort of book that I’d normally go for, but it’s worth a read.
By: Biskie on June 8, 2008
at 6:24 pm
