Death comes in many forms. It can be slow and painful, devouring our loved ones with the mercilessness only the unfeeling can summon; or It can be swift and savage, a wrecking ball that smashes through our carefully constructed lives, leaving behind nothing more than the shattered remnants of our hopes and dreams. It can be sent into motion by the thoughtless actions of others, or it can arise from our own stars, our own careless words. Death's only certainty is that it will come for all of us eventually. How we face that reality, or how we endure being the ones left behind, is the only thing we can control. Lionel Shriver has penned a wonderful story about love, motherhood and the limits of what the human soul can endure, but it's the prospect of death that stalks every page, injecting the work with a quiet, dreadful intensity.
Kevin Katchadourian has everything a western teenager could want. His wealthy parents have furnished him with a beautiful home, the latest gadgets, the finest schools and limitless options for a bright future. But Kevin Katchadourian wants none of these things. In fact, he loathes all of them in equal measure, heaping contempt upon them with the same indolent smirk he's worn for most of his fifteen years. Kevin Katchadourian has never wanted anything; he has never felt that pleasure. There is only boredom, boredom and the game of life.
Kevin's puzzled parents try, in their own ways, to fix their son. Eva, his mother,attempts to overcome her maternal ambivalence by showering her first-born with attention and education. But when her years of effort and career-sacrifice are met with the same affectless cynicism, the same harsh apathy she's always received from him, she soon surrenders to her fear and dismay, emotions she deploys as a shield to protect her from the thing she bore. Franklin, his father, rejects his wife's fears for their son. Deeply protective of the strange boy, he chooses to overlook the dozens of sinister incidents that plague their years together, earnest in his unrealistic desire for a normal American family. The more Eva attacks out of fear, the more Franklin defends out of anger until that fateful day, in 1999, when their marriage and family are shattered forever. For Kevin has taken matters into his own hands and, for his family and his victims, nothing will ever be the same.
We Need to Talk About Kevin is exquisite torture. Lionel shriver seduces her readers into offering themselves up to her emotional rack where she shackles them and forces them to endure the darkest, most authentic conception of what it would be like to be the parent of a sociopath. Step by step, anecdote by anecdote, we watch as Kevin ruthlessly and masterfully plays off his mother's suspicions against his father's biases until his parents are tearing themselves apart, leaving Kevin to quietly go about the business of murder. From the beginning, we know full well the extent of Kevin's crimes. Nonetheless, we must journey back with Eva as, through her expository letters to Franklin, written in the wake of this darkness, we learn just how it came to be that a loving and successful couple fell to such ruin.
Though, here, Ms. Shriver's eye for detail is as sharp as her ear for language is sound, these virtues are secondary to the novel's foremost asset. In compelling us to read Eva's own meticulous reconstruction of her shattered life, we are exposed to the plight and the mindset of a parent whose son is a murderer. The guilt, shame and self-recrimination pour forth from Eva in a tide of emotion for which we can only feel sympathy. For only the cruel and the abused set out to raise monstrous children. The Katchadourians are good, honest, successful Americans who gave their son everything he could want. It wasn't their fault that he was born an emotionless sociopath. And yet, society, in need of someone to blame for the murderer's harmful ways, strings up the parents for the sins of the offspring, confident in their belief that ugly must have a root cause.
We Need to Talk About Kevin is an unmatched portrait of parents struggling with a child gone bad. Though Ms. Shriver imagines, here, an extreme case, we can all remember incidents in which our parents, or the parents of those we know, out of fatigue, or shame, or an unwillingness to see, looked the other way while their children wronged themselves, their friends, or even their parents. Once that pattern is set, it cannot be unmade. And in this, Franklin, the father, is perhaps Ms. Shriver's most successful character. For his stubborn desire to believe the best in his monster of a son provoked in this reader storms of anger and despair the likes of which I've rarely experienced with literature. He is, writ large, the symptom of a problem that plagues all modern, western families, that peculiar desire to believe the best in our flesh and blood despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
A work as devastating as it is pitch perfect. Expect to have only the tattered remains of a soul left when it is over. (5/5 Stars)
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