Every now and then I read a book that makes me wonder why I don\u2019t just give up trying to write the things myself, because I\u2019ll never get that much under the reader\u2019s skin or into their minds.<\/p>\n
The latest is\u00a0We Need to Talk about Kevin<\/a>\u00a0by Lionel Shriver.<\/p>\n One April in 1999, shortly before\u00a0Columbine<\/a>\u00a0(whose participants he regards as pathetically amateur, juvenile attention seeking losers), 15-year-old Kevin Khatchadourian joins the woefully long list of teenage perpetrators of high school massacres, taking out seven fellow students, a teacher and a cafeteria worker (who wasn\u2019t meant to be there in there) in the school gym. On that day, one way or another, his mother Eva loses everything \u2013 husband, daughter, company, house, livelihood; in fact, the one thing she doesn\u2019t lose is … Kevin himself.<\/p>\n The novel takes the form of a series of letters from Eva to her husband, chronicling their life together before and after Kevin\u2019s birth and the nearly 16 years since. It\u2019s a therapeutic exercise for her as she rhetorically asks all the inevitable questions, not really expecting an answer. Was it my fault? Was it ours? Did I\/do I love him? Could we have done anything different? This itself makes the book an interesting exercise in reading between the lines. We\u2019re getting Eva\u2019s point of view, she\u2019s writing with hindsight anyway, and in between all the clues and pointers towards what we know is coming, there must have been a lot of time in their day to day lives when life was relatively normal. Was Kevin\u00a0really\u00a0that bad? Was her husband\u00a0really\u00a0so blind? But even though we know what\u2019s coming, it never gets boring. There is still room for revelation and \u201coh, I see …\u201d moments, and when the massacre finally happens it\u2019s almost \u2013 in a very guilty way \u2013 possible to admire it. There is nothing random about this; Kevin knows exactly what he\u2019s doing, and by the end of the book, Eva and we know exactly why he did it. We have no excuses, because there are none; but we do have reasons and they make sense.<\/p>\n There\u2019s still room for humour, albeit very black; like, the simple description of Kevin\u2019s unsuccessful year in a Montessori nursery school, which is predicated on the basis that everyone is innately good and capable of self-improvement. Maybe it\u00a0was coincidence that all their plants started dying at the same as Eva absently notes the absence of a bottle of bleach she could have sworn was there. The obnoxious school bully that everyone lived in fear of\u00a0might\u00a0have had a very good, non-Kevin-related reason for locking himself in a closet and refusing to come out like that. And so on.<\/p>\n One of the few things Eva and Kevin can agree on is their disdain for a world where everything must be someone\u2019s fault, and when something goes wrong you find someone to blame and sue \u2019em. Where they differ is in how they tackle the problem … It sounds very posy to start quoting William Blake at this point, because believe it or not I don\u2019t have the complete works of Blake committed to memory, ready to be pulled out at a moment\u2019s notice, but is just so happens that Bonusbarn is studying \u201cAuguries of innocence\u201d and we were discussing it while I read the book. And so it reminded me:<\/p>\n \u201cMan was made for joy and woe; In their own ways, neither Kevin nor Eva rightly knew it.<\/p>\n My one fault with the book isn\u2019t the author\u2019s fault: it\u2019s that the kid on the cover is blond whereas we are oft reminded that Kevin has dark features inherited from his Armenian mother. However, I see there\u2019s going to be a film of it and he will be played by one\u00a0Ezra Miller<\/a>, who I’ve never heard of (hey, he’s a kid) but who looks perfect. Meanwhile Eva will be\u00a0Tilda Swinton<\/a>, who excels at vulnerable ice queens, and Kevin\u2019s dad is\u00a0John C. Reilly<\/a>, who was the lovable chump of a husband in\u00a0Chicago. It\u2019s almost a bit too perfectly cast, but I still look forward to it.<\/p>\n Probably watching it on my own, though …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Every now and then I read a book that makes me wonder why I don\u2019t just give up trying to write the things myself, because I\u2019ll never get that much under the reader\u2019s skin or into their minds. The latest … Continue reading
\nAnd when this we rightly know
\nThrough the world we safely go.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n