We Need to Talk About We Need to Talk About Kevin

Sam and Crystal recently made me read a book. By made me read a book, I mean that they hurried me through the book I was reading (Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie) with questions about how long it would be until I started the other book and then, once I'd started this other book began demanding progress reports on it. That other book is We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver.

Today I finished it. And the first thing I said as I put it down was, "I feel harassed by this book." And that harrassment has nothing to do with my two overenthusiastic book clubbers. It has to do with the book itself.

People in fiction rarely do what you think they should do. Sam always says this to her classes. If they did what they should do, what you can see is best for them, there would be no plot. The story would not exist because, as the titular Kevin points out, nobody wants to read a book or watch a movie about someone who does what they ought to, flosses and gets an A in geometry. Still, it's rare that I'll pick up a book with things so obviously and already out of the realm of good behavior. We Need to Talk About Kevin is about a boy who commits a school shooting.

Or, really, it's about his mother. It's written from her point of view and is one of the few very successful epistolary novels that I've read. Shriver seems to make a point of avoiding the obvious heart-wrenching, the sappy tear-jerking that could have made the book a weak, ripped-from-the-headlines template for a Lifetime movie. Still, it is the book's harshness, its lack of wallowing that make it instead harrowing. Eva Katchadourian doesn't spare herself in her own portrayal. She paints her decision to have Kevin as the whim of a diletante whose reasons are couched in ideological drivel. But this kind of enthusiasm for her son is wiped away soon after his birth, and she's forced to become a sort of 20th century Cassandra in the face of her husband's obstinate obliviousness about their son's lack of affect.

And that may be the most horrifying thing about what I can only label a horror novel. From his birth, Kevin is uninterested in everything. Shriver crafts a caustic and infuriating tale of a mother striving to punish for his misdeeds a child who has no attachment to anything. Who will not admit to liking anything in particular. Who has no favorite toy. No favorite TV show. Who will not eat in sight because he dislikes having anyone witness the fact that he needs to do so. I don't think I've ever quite realized how absolutely scary a sociopath is.

But I guess the part that feels most like harrassment is the tight arc of the plot. From the minute you begin the book, no tangent or memory or prison visiting room scene strays far from Kevin's magnum opus, Thursday. By the time you get there, inevitability is almost a tangible thing. And yet there are surprises. That sense of foreboding throughout the book is not just rewarded by the things you are certain are coming.

And I guess that is my recommendation for this book. Having finished it feels like what I imagine emerging from a sensory deprivation room must feel like. It is gripping and insightful. Shriver's discussion of Americanism takes on the lofty liberal pose of detachment and delves into questions of why these things happen and why they happen here. It is a great book and like most great books is both hard to read and hard to put down.

I guess I should say thanks to Sam and Crystal. Thanks a lot.