We Need to Talk About Kevin - Hardcover

Shriver, Lionel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1582432678 ISBN 13: 9781582432670

Publisher: Counterpoint, 2003

Synopsis

The inspiration for the film starring Tilda Swinton and John C. Reilly, this resonant story of a mother’s unsettling quest to understand her teenage son’s deadly violence, her own ambivalence toward motherhood, and the explosive link between them remains terrifyingly prescient.

Eva never really wanted to be a mother. And certainly not the mother of a boy who murdered seven of his fellow high school students, a cafeteria worker, and a much–adored teacher in a school shooting two days before his sixteenth birthday.

Neither nature nor nurture exclusively shapes a child's character. But Eva was always uneasy with the sacrifices and social demotion of motherhood. Did her internalized dislike for her own son shape him into the killer he’s become? How much is her fault?

Now, two years later, it is time for her to come to terms with Kevin’s horrific rampage, all in a series of startlingly direct correspondences with her estranged husband, Franklin.

A piercing, unforgettable, and penetrating exploration of violence and responsibility, a book that the Boston Globe describes as “impossible to put down,” is a stunning examination of how tragedy affects a town, a marriage, and a family.

About this title

About the Author

Lionel Shriver's fiction includes The Mandibles; Property; the National Book Award finalist So Much for That; the New York Times bestseller The Post-Birthday World; and the international bestseller We Need to Talk About Kevin, adapted for a 2010 film starring Tilda Swinton. Her journalism has appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. She’s a regular columnist for The Spectator in Britain and Harper’s Magazine in the US. She lives in London and Brooklyn, New York.

Reviews

A number of fictional attempts have been made to portray what might lead a teenager to kill a number of schoolmates or teachers, Columbine style, but Shriver's is the most triumphantly accomplished by far. A gifted journalist as well as the author of seven novels, she brings to her story a keen understanding of the intricacies of marital and parental relationships as well as a narrative pace that is both compelling and thoughtful. Eva Khatchadourian is a smart, skeptical New Yorker whose impulsive marriage to Franklin, a much more conventional person, bears fruit, to her surprise and confessed disquiet, in baby Kevin. From the start Eva is ambivalent about him, never sure if she really wanted a child, and he is balefully hostile toward her; only good-old-boy Franklin, hoping for the best, manages to overlook his son's faults as he grows older, a largely silent, cynical, often malevolent child. The later birth of a sister who is his opposite in every way, deeply affectionate and fragile, does nothing to help, and Eva always suspects his role in an accident that befalls little Celia. The narrative, which leads with quickening and horrifying inevitability to the moment when Kevin massacres seven of his schoolmates and a teacher at his upstate New York high school, is told as a series of letters from Eva to an apparently estranged Franklin, after Kevin has been put in a prison for juvenile offenders. This seems a gimmicky way to tell the story, but is in fact surprisingly effective in its picture of an affectionate couple who are poles apart, and enables Shriver to pull off a huge and crushing shock far into her tale. It's a harrowing, psychologically astute, sometimes even darkly humorous novel, with a clear-eyed, hard-won ending and a tough-minded sense of the difficult, often painful human enterprise.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

*Starred Review* In a series of brutally introspective missives to her husband, Franklin, from whom she is separated, Eva tries to come to grips with the fact that their 17-year-old son, Kevin, has killed seven students and two adults with his crossbow. Guiltily she recalls how, as a successful writer, she was terrified of having a child. Was it for revenge, then, that from the moment of his birth Kevin was the archetypal difficult child, screaming for hours, refusing to nurse, driving away countless nannies, and intuitively learning to "divide and conquer" his parents? When their daughter, loving and patient Celia, is born, Eva feels vindicated; but as the gap between her view of Kevin as a "Machiavellian miscreant" and Franklin's efforts to explain away their son's aberrant behavior grows wider, they find themselves facing divorce. In crisply crafted sentences that cut to the bone of her feelings about motherhood, career, family, and what it is about American culture that produces child killers, Shriver yanks the reader back and forth between blame and empathy, retribution and forgiveness. Never letting up on the tension, Shriver ensures that, like Eva, the reader grapples with unhealed wounds. Deborah Donovan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

We Need to Talk about Kevin

By Lionel Shriver

Counterpoint Press

Copyright © 2003 Lionel Shriver
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9781582432670

November 8, 2000

Dear Franklin,

I'm unsure why one trifling incident this afternoon has moved me to writeto you. But since we've been separated, I may most miss coming home todeliver the narrative curiosities of my day, the way a cat might lay mice atyour feet: the small, humble offerings that couples proffer after foraging inseparate backyards. Were you still installed in my kitchen, slatheringcrunchy peanut butter on Branola though it was almost time for dinner, I'dno sooner have put down the bags, one leaking a clear viscous drool, thanthis little story would come tumbling out, even before I chided that we'rehaving pasta tonight so would you please not eat that whole sandwich.

In the early days, of course, my tales were exotic imports, from Lisbon,from Katmandu. But no one wants to hear stories from abroad, really, and Icould detect from your telltale politeness that you privately preferred anecdotaltrinkets from closer to home: an eccentric encounter with a toll collectoron the George Washington Bridge, say. Marvels from the mundanehelped to ratify your view that all my foreign travel was a kind of cheating.My souvenirs -- a packet of slightly stale Belgian waffles, the British expressionfor "piffle" (codswallop!) -- were artificially imbued with magic by meredint of distance. Like those baubles the Japanese exchange -- in a box in abag, in a box in a bag -- the sheen on my offerings from far afield was allpackaging. What a more considerable achievement, to root around in theuntransubstantiated rubbish of plain old New York state and scrounge amoment of piquancy from a trip to the Nyack Grand Union.

Which is just where my story takes place. I seem finally to be learningwhat you were always trying to teach me, that my own country is as exoticand even as perilous as Algeria. I was in the dairy aisle and didn't needmuch; I wouldn't. I never eat pasta these days, without you to dispatchmost of the bowl. I do miss your gusto.

It's still difficult for me to venture into public. You would think, in acountry that so famously has "no sense of history," as Europeans claim,that I might cash in on America's famous amnesia. No such luck. No onein this "community" shows any signs of forgetting, after a year and eightmonths -- to the day. So I have to steel myself when provisions run low.Oh, for the clerks at the 7-Eleven on Hopewell Street my novelty hasworn off, and I can pick up a quart of milk without glares. But our regularGrand Union remains a gauntlet.

I always feel furtive there. To compensate, I force my back straight, myshoulders square. I see now what they mean by "holding your head high,"and I am sometimes surprised by how much interior transformation aramrod posture can afford. When I stand physically proud, I feel a smallmeasure less mortified.

Debating medium eggs or large, I glanced toward the yogurts. A fewfeet away, a fellow shopper's frazzled black hair went white at the roots fora good inch, while its curl held only at the ends: an old permanent grownout. Her lavender top and matching skirt may have once been stylish, butnow the blouse bound under the arms and the peplum served to emphasizeheavy hips. The outfit needed pressing, and the padded shouldersbore the faint stripe of fading from a wire hanger. Something from thenether regions of the closet, I concluded, what you reach for when everythingelse is filthy or on the floor. As the woman's head tilted toward theprocessed cheese, I caught the crease of a double chin.

Don't try to guess; you'd never recognize her from that portrait. Shewas once so neurotically svelte, sharply cornered, and glossy as if commerciallygift wrapped. Though it may be more romantic to picture thebereaved as gaunt, I imagine you can grieve as efficiently with chocolatesas with tap water. Besides, there are women who keep themselves sleek andsmartly turned out less to please a spouse than to keep up with a daughter,and, thanks to us, she lacks that incentive these days.

It was Mary Woolford. I'm not proud of this, but I couldn't face her.I reeled. My hands went clammy as I fumbled with the carton, checkingthat the eggs were whole. I rearranged my features into those of a shopperwho had just remembered something in the next aisle over and managedto place the eggs on the child-seat without turning. Scuttling off on this pretense of mission, I left the cart behind, because the wheels squeaked. Icaught my breath in soup.

I should have been prepared, and often am -- girded, guarded, often tono purpose as it turns out. But I can't clank out the door in full armorto run every silly errand, and besides, how can Mary harm me now? Shehas tried her damnedest; she's taken me to court. Still, I could not tamemy heartbeat, nor return to dairy right away, even once I realized that I'dleft that embroidered bag from Egypt, with my wallet, in the cart.

Which is the only reason I didn't abandon the Grand Union altogether.I eventually had to skulk back to my bag, and so I meditated onCampbell's asparagus and cheese, thinking aimlessly how Warhol would beappalled by the redesign.

By the time I crept back the coast was clear, and I swept up my cart,abruptly the busy professional woman who must make quick work of domesticchores. A familiar role, you would think. Yet it's been so long since Ithought of myself that way that I felt sure the folks ahead of me at checkoutmust have pegged my impatience not as the imperiousness of the secondearnerfor whom time is money, but as the moist, urgent panic of a fugitive ...

Continues...

Excerpted from We Need to Talk about Kevinby Lionel Shriver Copyright © 2003 by Lionel Shriver. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Counterpoint
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1582432678
• ISBN 13: 9781582432670
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 414