The Books: “We Need To Talk About Kevin” (Lionel Shriver)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

We Need to Talk About Kevin, by Lionel Shriver

I read We Need To Talk About Kevin last year. I remember the brou-haha when the book was first published – a book like this was never going to be a quiet unassuming little book. I was haunted by it and I also read it like a bat out of hell. I was very busy at the time, and had no business spending 6 hours STRAIGHT finishing a book but I just couldn’t put it down. It was horrifying. I remember overnighting a copy of it to my friend Beth – who is a teacher – I NEEDED her to read it so we could talk about it. I needed her input and response! It was great to talk about it with her.

All I can say is: read it. Read it.

It tells the story of a mother whose kid killed a bunch of people at his school. I won’t go into too many more details because much of the book unfolds in a horrifying way – and I, for one, was surprised by much of it. I did not see the end coming. The true journey of the book is, yes, the journey of Kevin, the kid – but it is also the journey of his mother … trying to figure out what she did to create such a horrible person capable of such evil. The book really takes an unblinking look at that primary relationship – mother-child – and it might make some people very uncomfortable. It messes with your assumptions. But it also taps into the anxiety that most mothers seem to feel – at least that’s what I’ve heard from most of my girlfriends. Am I a good mother? If I don’t/can’t breastfeed – does that make me a failure? Will I be judged if I tell the La Leche nazis that I don’t need the guilt trip? Life is hard enough without all that freakin’ GUILT. There’s a cookie-cutter version of pregnancy/motherhood that is foisted upon people – and make no mistake: it is indeed a controlled attack, there is nothing accidental about it … and if, for whatever reason, you do not “fit in” to that norm – you are judged. People will stop you on the street to scold you. Mommy drive-bys. It is designed to make you lose confidence in your own decisions. Awful!!

What if motherhood doesn’t come naturally to you? We Need to Talk About Kevin is not about a “bad” mother, meaning: abusive, or neglectful. But it is about a mother who doesn’t really “take” to motherhood, shall we say – and since the entire book is told in first-person retrospective – she knows that her lack of attachment to her children – an attachment that never really formed for her – must have SOMETHING to do with who her son became. It is still disturbing to read some of this book and much of that has to do with my own assumptions and preconceived notions … and that’s exactly what Shriver is going after. Shriver is interested in looking at those assumptions – about parenthood, about children – staring at them relentlessly, being with them, not coming up with answers or reasons … but just staring at the assumptions we have. And wondering what on earth went so wrong. This is not an easy book. It is not easy to take. If you need to “like” or be able to relate to the characters in a book, then We Need To Talk About Kevin will drive you up a wall. But I would say that you would be missing out on an unforgettable reading experience. Nobody is neutral about the book. People love it or hate it. Or they’re freaked by it. Nobody is like, “Whatever, it was okay …”

It was great to talk to Beth – because we had different responses to Franklin, the husband. The whole book is written in letters to Franklin – the wife, Eva, writes to him – it is obvious, from what she divulges, that they have separated in the aftermath of the tragedy – and that Kevin, their son, is in a juvenile detention center, or whatever the equivalent of jail is for a minor. Eva has moved out of their nice house and lives in a terrible apartment complex with very few amenities – but she has not moved out of the town, even though she is now Enemy #1 to the people there, because her son killed so many people. Anyway, Eva writes these letters almost to plead her case to her husband … but she also doesn’t defend herself too much. She knows she was no good at mothering. It bored her tremendously. But even before that – even when she was pregnant with Kevin … there was a resentment in her towards the unborn baby … and Franklin, her husband, tried to joke, jostle her out of it. Everything will be fine, you’ll see .. you’re just nervous … everything will be fine … Beth and I had a great conversation about the book and Beth had a VIOLENT response to Franklin. She hated him desperately. She sees parents like him in Parent-Teacher meetings all the time – parents who refuse to look at the fact that their child may be a bit “off” – “no no no, nothing’s wrong with him, it’s just a phase … he’s actually gifted…” That was why I wanted Beth to read the book – to hear her thoughts on these people! It made me look at my own assumptions and responses … To me, at first reading, Franklin seemed like a man trapped in a life he didn’t think he was choosing at the time – He thought he would have a good life, he assumed he would have a good life. He and Eva had a great marriage. They were a great pair. She was an independent person, he was a traditional kind of guy – she was surprised she would like someone like that, someone who would well up at “The Star Spangled Banner” and stuff like that, but she did. She loved him. It’s just that maybe she should never have been a parent. Eva tries to tell Franklin this about herself, and he will not hear it.

What’s interesting about the book is that so much of what is said in it is unspeakable. To talk about mothers who might have ambivalence about motherhood … well, that’s completely taboo. It causes much grief (at least I know this from my friends who are mothers. The expectation that everything is going to be wonderful and suffused with a maternal glow is so intense, and so imposed from above, that I think much of that contributes to the intensity of depression that can so often come after childbirth. It’s the expectation that you should NEVER EVER COMPLAIN and also: that everything should be awesome and fun and glorious … There’s an assumed agreement about how you should feel … and that is a recipe for disaster for some.)

And so the story of a horrible school killing – and the story of the development of Kevin, the son … is told in tandem with Eva’s story – and she’s the one telling it, so she is inherently unreliable, and we know that. That’s part of the horror of the story. How many times do kids shoot up schools and suddenly, in the aftermath, all sorts of people come forward saying, either: “I can’t believe he would do something like that … He was such a nice kid …” or “He was always a weirdo … it doesn’t surprise me at all …” People looking back into the past for clues … how could this happen?? What confluence of events came together to allow this?? School officials torment themselves. Guidance counselors quit in despair. Other parents point fingers. It’s a big deal. We come to recognize all the stages now – because, sadly, it happens so often. But when there is a school killing, it is never a cliche to the people involved, of course!! All those questions must be asked. And woe to those with kneejerk judgmental answers. There is a place for that, of course – but it should never be the stopping point. Because someone had better ask “Why?” Someone better!!

Lionel Shriver does not write a cookie-cutter book – this is the story of Kevin, specifically – not a “cliche” who kills people in his school. And Shriver dares to look at what might have been there in the parents to create such a monster. Someone capable of looking at his fellow human beings as targets. If you read the reviews to this book, and reader responses – you find very little consensus – it’s that kind of book. It pushes people’s buttons. It’s still taboo – a mother without the “motherhood gene” – it still seems wrong, off. But let’s talk about it, let’s look at it! AND – let’s look at Franklin, and his role in all of this. Not to let Kevin off the hook – and God, what a nasty little person Shriver has created in Kevin. He is just a terrific character – fully drawn, in all of his unforgiving contempt – and Shriver is somehow able to suggest that Kevin looks around, looks at his mother, and knows: She’s just not into this. He can sense it from when he is first born.

But this isn’t a book about placing blame fully on one person’s head so I don’t want to make it sound that way. It’s a more difficult book than that. It’s not about a “bad mother”, it’s not about A plus B equal C. There is something in Kevin, from the start, that seems to resent life. He was never a happy baby, never carefree or giggly. He always seemed pissed. (But again, we hear all of this from Eva – who is inherently unreliable when it comes to her own son). It’s not an easy book and for those who want easy answers it will be a terrible book. The book should piss you off – Beth was basically screaming about Franklin on the phone with me – “I hate parents like that – I fucking HATE THEM!!” Ha ha – it’s a great conversation-starter, this book.

The language of the book is not warm or welcoming. It’s rather forbidding. Eva is not likable in the slightest. Your heart aches for her – you don’t know where Franklin left to – why he couldn’t “hack it” – what happened to their marriage … but at the same time, hanging out with her is pretty awful. You need to keep going.

At the time that Eva writes the letters to her husband, she is beyond the pale, in terms of pretending. She spent her entire marriage “pretending” to be someone … well, no, that’s not true. Before the kids came, she wasn’t “pretending” – she liked being married, she loved Franklin, their peripatetic life suited her … it was the move to the house in the suburbs, the pregnancy, the sudden settling of traditional roles – that fucked her up. But now, in the aftermath of the tragedy, she is no longer interested in protecting herself. She doesn’t feel she deserves it, first of all … she deserves all the condemnation she gets. That’s why she doesn’t move out of the town where the “incident” happened. The hatred that she faces every day she leaves her house seems to be right to her, it seems to be just. They should hate her. Because she did create Kevin. And she knew from the start that he was evil.

But … is he? Did he not understand, from even within the womb, that his mother was someone not to be trusted? Who would not love him? Did she create him? Or was he born that way?

Is he someone like Cathy, from East of Eden – a character who has haunted me from the first moment I met her, in 10th grade when we had to read the book. Here is Steinbeck on Cathy:

I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents. Some you can see, misshapen and horrible, with huge heads or tiny bodies; some are born with no arms, no legs, some with three arms, some with tails or mouths in odd places. They are accidents and no one’s fault, as used to be thought. Once they were considered the visible punishment for concealed sins.

And just as there are physical monsters, can there not be mental or psychic monsters born? The face and body may be perfect, but if a twisted gene or a malformed egg can produce physical monsters, may not the same process produce a malformed soul?

Monsters are variations from the accepted normal to a greater or a less degree. As a child may be born without an arm, so one may be born without kindness or the potential of conscience. A man who loses his arms in an accident has a great struggle to adjust himself to the lack, but one born without arms suffers only from people who find him strange. Having never had arms, he cannot miss them. Sometimes when we are little we imagine how it would be to have wings, but there is no reason to suppose it is the same feeling birds have. No, to a monster the norm must seem monstrous, since everyone is normal to himself. To the inner monster it must be even more obscure, since he has no visible thing to compare with others. To a man born without conscience, a soul-stricken man must seem ridiculous. To a criminal, honesty is foolish. You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous.

It is my belief that Cathy Ames was born with the tendencies, or lack of them, which drove and forced her all of her life. Some balance wheel was misweighed, some gear out of ratio. She was not like other people, never was from birth. And just as a cripple may learn to utilize his lack so that he becomes more effective in a limited field than the uncrippled, so did Cathy, using her difference, make a painful and bewildering stir in her world.

There was a time when a girl like Cathy would have been called possessed by the devil. She would have been exorcised to cast out the evil spirit, and if after many trials that did not work, she would have been burned as a witch for the good of the community. The one thing that may not be forgiven a witch is her ability to distress people, to make them restless and uneasy and even envious.

As though nature concealed a trap, Cathy had from the first a face of innocence. Her hair was gold and lovely; wide-set hazel eyes with upper lids that drooped made her look mysteriously sleepy. Her nose was delicate and thin, and her cheekbones high and wide, sweeping down to a small chin so that her face was heart-shaped. Her mouth was well shaped and well lipped but abnormally small — what used to be called a rosebud. Her ears were very little, without lobes, and they pressed so close to her head that even with her hair combed up they made no silhouette. They were thin flaps sealed against her head.

Cathy always had a child’s figure even after she was grown, slender, delicate arms and hands — tiny hands. Her breasts never developed much. Before her puberty the nipples turned inward. Her mother had to manipulate them out when they became painful in Cathy’s tenth year. Her body was a boy’s body, narrow-hipped, straight-legged, but her ankles were thin and straight without being slender. Her feet were small and round and stubby, with fat insteps almost like little hoofs. She was a pretty child and she became a pretty woman. Her voice was huskily soft, and it could be so sweet as to be irresistible. But there must have been some steel cord in her throat, for Cathy’s voice could cut like a file when she wished.

Even as a child she had some quality that made people look at her, then look away, then look back at her, troubled at something foreign. Something looked out of her eyes, and was never there when one looked again. She moved quietly and talked little, but she could enter no room without causing everyone to turn toward her.

She made people uneasy but not so that they wanted to go away from her. Men and women wanted to inspect her, to be close to her, to try and find what caused the disturbance she distributed so subtly. And since this had always been so, Cathy did not find it strange.

Cathy was different from other children in many ways, but one thing in particular set her apart. Most children abhor difference. They want to look, talk, dress, and act exactly like all of the others. If the style of dress is an absurdity, it is pain and sorrow to a child not to wear that absurdity. If necklaces of pork chops were accepted, it would be a sad child who could not wear pork chops. And this slavishness to the group normally extends into every game, every practice, social or otherwise. It is a protective coloration children utilize for their safety.

Cathy had none of this. She never conformed in dress or conduct. She wore whatever she wanted to. The result was that quite often other children imitated her.

As she grew older the group, the herd, which is any collection of children, began to sense what adults felt, that there was something foreign about Cathy. After a while only one person at a time associated with her. Groups of boys and girls avoided her as though she carried a nameless danger.

Cathy was a liar, but she did not lie the way most children do. Hers was no daydream lying, when the thing imagined is told and, to make it seem more real, told as real. That is just ordinary deviation from external reality. I think the difference between a lie and a story is that a story utilizes the trappings and appearance of truth for the interest of the listener as well as of the teller. A story has in it neither gain nor loss. But a lie is a device for profit or escape. I suppose if that definition is strictly held to, then a writer of stories is a liar — if he is financially fortunate.

Cathy’s lies were never innocent. Their purpose was to escape punishment, or work, or responsibility, and they were used for profit. Most liars are tripped up either because they forget what they have told or because the lie is suddenly faced with an incontrovertible truth. But Cathy did not forget her lies, and she developed the most effective method of lying. She stayed close enough to the truth so that one could never be sure. She knew two other methods also — either to interlard her lies with truth or to tell a truth as though it were a lie. If one is accused of a lie and it turns out to be the truth, there is a backlog that will last a long time and protect a number of untruths.

Since Cathy was an only child her mother had no close contrast in the family. She thought all children were like her own. And since all parents are worriers she was convinced that all her friends had the same problems.

Cathy’s father was not so sure. He operated a small tannery in a town in Massachusetts, which made a comfortable, careful living if he worked very hard. Mr. Ames came in contact with other children away from his home and he felt that Cathy was not like other children. It was a matter more felt than known. He was uneasy about his daughter but he could not have said why.

Nearly everyone in the world has appetites and impulses, trigger emotions, islands of selfishness, lusts just beneath the surface. And most people either hold such things in check or indulge them secretly. Cathy knew not only these impulses in others but how to use them for her own gain.

It is quite possible that she did not believe in any other tendencies in humans, for while she was preternaturally alert in some directions she was completely blind in others.

Brilliant. Terrifying.

Is Kevin a Cathy? Is there something “missing” in these people? Or were they created by the circumstances surrounding their birth and their early years? It’s a question that fascinates me to my core. Why else am I obsessed with serial killers and Stalin and cults? And I am highly suspect of those who come back with answers too quickly. To me, that means an inherent discomfort with the question itself. I’ve experienced that time and time again on my blog when I discuss Stalin, or the Columbine killers or the Manson murderers. People don’t like to ask questions. They want answers. I’m not one of them. Not with a topic as big as evil.

Notice in the excerpt below how Eva (ie: Shriver) assigns knowing and malevolent meanings to her baby’s behavior. It’s a symbiotic relationship – and I don’t know, I was truly disturbed by it. The book scared the shit out of me, frankly – and I’m in awe of Shriver’s writing. It’s a bit cold, a bit off-putting – but that seems to me to be absolutely right for this story.

EXCERPT FROM We Need to Talk About Kevin, by Lionel Shriver

In the end, mastitis put an end to my desperate search for whatever foodstuff was putting Kevin off my milk. Poor nutrition may have made me susceptible. That and fumbling to get Kevin to take the breast, which could have lacerated the nipples enough to transmit infection from his mouth. Inimical to my sustenance, he could still introduce me to corruption, as if already at year zero the more worldly party of our pair.

Since the first sign of mastitis is fatigue, it’s little wonder that the early symptoms went unobserved. He’d worn me out for weeks. I bet you still don’t believe me about his fits of pique, though a rage that lasts for six to eight hours seems less a fit than a natural state, from which the tranquil respites you witnessed were bizarre departures. Our son had fits of peace. And this may sound completely mad, but the consistency with which Kevin shrieked with precocious force of will the whole time he and I were alone, and then with the abruptness of switching off a heavy-metal radio station desisted the moment you came home – well, it seemed deliberate. The silence still ringing for me, you’d bend over our slumbering angel who unbeknownst to you was just beginning to sleep off his Olympian exertions of the day. Though I’d never have wished on you my own pulsing headaches, I couldn’t bear the subtle distrust that was building between us when your experience of our son didn’t square with mine. I have sometimes entertained the retroactive delusion that even in his crib Kevin was learning to divide and conquer, scheming to present such contrasting temperaments that we were bound to set at odds. Kevin’s features were unusually sharp for a baby, while my own still displayed that Marlo Thomas credulity, as if he had leeched my very shrewdness in utero.

Childless, I’d perceived baby crying as a pretty undifferentiated affair. It was loud; it was not so loud. But in motherhood I developed an ear. There’s the wail of inarticulate need, what is effectively a child’s first groping after language, for sounds that mean wet or food or pin. There’s the shriek of terror – that no one is here and that there may never be anyone here again. There’s that lassitudinous wah-wah, not unlike the call to mosque in the Middle East or improvisational song; this is creative crying, fun crying, from babies who, while not especially unhappy, have failed to register that we like to constrain weeping to conditions of distress. Perhaps saddest of all is the muted, habitual mewl of a baby who may be perfectly miserable but who, whether through neglect or prescience, no longer anticipates reprieve – who in infancy has already become reconciled to the idea that to live is to suffer.

Oh, I imagine there are as many reasons that newborn babies cry as that grown ones do, but Kevin practiced none of these standard lachrymal modes. Sure, after you got home he’d sometimes fuss a little like a normal baby that he wanted feeding or changing, and you’d take care of it, and he’d stop; and then you’d look at me like, see? and I’d want to slug you.

With me, once you left, Kevin was not to be bought off with anything so petty and transitory as milk or dry diapers. If fear of abandonment contributed to a decibel level that rivaled an industrial buzz saw, his loneliness displayed an awesome existential purity; it wasn’t about to be allayed by the hover of that haggard cow with her nauseating waft of white fluid. And I discerned no plaintive cry of appeal, no keen of despair, no gurgle of nameless dread. Rather, he hurled his voice like a weapon, howls smashing the walls of our loft like a baseball bat bashing a bus shelter. In concert. his fists sparred with the mobile over his crib, he kick-boxed his blanket, and there were times I stepped back after patting and stroking and changing and marveled at the sheer athleticism of the performance. It was unmistakable: Driving this remarkable combustion engine was the distilled and infinitely renewable fuel of outrage.

About what? you might well ask.

He was dry, he was fed, he had slept. I would have tried blanket on, blanket off; he was neither hot nor cold. He’d been burped, and I have a gut instinct that he didn’t have colic; Kevin’s was not a cry of pain but of wrath. He had toys dangling overhead, rubber blocks in his bed. His mother had taken six months off from work to spend every day by his side, and I picked him up so often that my arms ached; you could not say he lacked for attention. As the papers would be so fond of observing sixteen years later, Kevin had everything.

I have theorized that you can locate most people on a spectrum of the crudest sort and that it may be their position on this scale with which their every other attribute correlates: exactly how much they like being here, just being alive. I think Kevin hated it. I think Kevin was off the scale, he hated being here so much. He may even have retained some trace of spiritual memory from before conception, and glorious nullity was far more what he missed than my womb. Kevin seemed incensed that no one had ever consulted him about turning up in a crib with time going on and on, when nothing whatsoever interested him in that crib. He was the least curious little boy I’ve ever encountered, with a few exceptions to that rule that I shudder to contemplate.