I finished We
Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver this morning. I’ve talked about
it in a few blog
posts. Very good novel about a very dark subject. The novel is
told through letters from a wife to her estranged husband as she rehashes the story
of their son, who killed nine people in a high school massacre about 20 months
earlier.
It was told from a single point of view, the mother, a narrator whose motivations I was second-guessing throughout the book. Mrs. WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com and I share six sons, a few of which have caused us some heartache through the years (not rising to the level of a high school killing spree, although it’s taken me down a few roads I did not think I would ever travel). My own experiences allowed me to identify with the narrator’s emotions.
I had a few problems with Lionel Shriver’s writing style for the story. This is the only novel of hers I have read, so I cannot speak for her other works. There was a lot of backstory, so much so that it was easy to lose track of some of the minor characters and I would have to go back and re-acquaint myself with them. On a few occasions the author would open the letter (each letter was a chapter) with a short paragraph about a present issue and then evolve into two or three pages of backstory. Then out of nowhere she was back to her original reference. I had to scramble to keep up.
Was the backstory necessary? Most of it. Not sure how I would have handled it otherwise.
There were a few details I found unrealistic. The narrator kept a photo of herself taken during a short-lived relationship she had when traveling in Europe before she was married. In the novel the photo had a prominent place on a table near the front door, even though by this time she has a husband and a seven-year-old son. I wonder how many spouses would stand for that? Not mine.
Other parts were very realistic. Kevin was an expert manipulator. He drove a wedge between his parents and they fell for it. I’ve had kids do that to me. Took me years to catch on.
Shriver’s use of obscure words was frustrating, too. It has been a while since I’ve had to read a novel and keep a dictionary next to me. I scrolled through twenty or so reviews of the novel from Amazon.com and this was a frequent complaint. Here are some of the words cited by one of the reviewers-- gimcrack, lassitude, laconic, diffidence, ascetic, nascent, anodyne, parvenu. I know about half of these. It interrupts the flow of the novel if you have to look up words on a regular basis.
Still, We Need to Talk About Kevin was a good novel and I think worth the read. Were I to rate it on Amazon, I would give it a solid four stars. There were several unanticipated surprises, one of which I probably should have seen coming. Raising children is not easy, and if you have a nightmare kid, it is your nightmare, too.
Did Shriver answer the big question at the end? Did Kevin come out of the womb damaged, and headed to his destiny from the start, or was he a product of his environment?
You have to read the novel.
See ya’ later.
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