Sometimes We Need to Break the Rules

I am reading We Need to Talk About Kevin, a haunting novel told in a series of letters from a wife to her husband (they are separated), almost two years after their son and only child went on a rampage at his high school and killed nine people—seven students, a cafeteria word and a teacher. The boy now sits in a correctional facility, where she dutifully visits him every two weeks.

The book, by Lionel Shriver, was already in my reading stack, but the recent shooting in Aurora, Colorado, prompted me to move it to the top.

I am not a quarter of the way through the book, but it is dark and hard to put down. The narrator had mixed emotions about her impending motherhood from before conception, and from what I can determine, her son was a difficult child from the very beginning. Added to this, for me the mother is an unreliable narrator who sees the situation only through her guilt-colored glasses. She cannot help but blame herself for what happened. It seems as if everyone else does, except for maybe her husband. On that one I am not sure yet.

What I find interesting, though, is the story behind the novel, which is told by the author in the P.S. section. Lionel Shriver had already published six novels, none of which had realized a profit, although at least some received good reviews. She finished We Need to Talk About Kevin just in time to watch almost 3,000 people die in the World Trade Center attack on September 11, 2001. Her agent assured her that no one wanted to read her doggie downer of a novel, and they parted ways.

Shriver shopped twenty more agents, all with similar results. Then she broke one of the Ten Commandments of How Things Are Supposed to Work and approached a publisher directly. My guess is she went through the query letter-synopsis-first-three-chapters dance, or something similar. She doesn’t say. What she does say is that the editor read the novel over a weekend and made her an offer on Monday. It was published in 2003 and quickly found a home on a number of book club lists, including Good Morning, America and Barnes & Noble. It has been published in a dozen languages and was the recipient of the Orange Prize in the UK.

The movie version, starting Tilda Swinton and John C. Reilly, comes out in November (see trailer here).

So what’s the deal? Shriver broke the rules and the result was wild success. Is this further proof that the agent-editor-publisher formula is wildly out of touch, hopelessly hung up on vampire and zombie novels and the next big genre. Probably not. This story has happened many times before, and most of them before the advent of self-publishing. What it is an indicator of is that sometimes you have to be persistent and break the rules.

See ya later.

WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com by Tim Sunderland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.