BOOK REVIEW: WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN

I will start by saying that this book was, to use a much overused but totally apt in this case word: amazing. I’d never read anything by Lionel Shriver before, and often had the feeling of, "Why isn’t this woman touted as one of the best living writers at work today?" And then I’d remember that just because I, myself, haven’t heard of or read a certain writer doesn’t mean they haven’t already been absorbed by the world at large. She is considered one of the greatest writers working today, and won the Orange prize, for, you know, female writers. As an extra bonus, she seems like a kind of nutcase, judging by some of the supplementary material in the back of the book I bought. She changed her name to the name she wanted when she was a kid. (Good thing I didn’t do that, or my name would now be either Crystal or Robyn or Charlie Rathbone).

Anyways. So the book, or prose was, by and large, and from an antiseptic, clinical viewpoint, outstanding. But it was also very difficult to read. I mean, actually, it was a page turner. I read it in about three days and was totally swallowed up. By difficult to read I mean that it was dark. Very incredibly awfully dark in a way that seemed to permeate my regular life. The sticky atmosphere of doom in WNTTAK seemed to become the atmosphere of my days, and that’s not something I was psyched about.

It’s about a young man who goes on a Columbine-esque killing spree at his high school with a crossbow. It’s written in the form of letters from the young man’s mother, Eva, to her now estranged husband after the whole thing has taken place. We hear about Kevin as a baby, a toddler, an adolescent, all the while displaying the kind of sociopathic, run for the hills qualities befitting one fucked up devil baby with a cold streak of sadism. In the letters Eva talks a lot about her original ambivalence about having a child. She wasn’t sure she wanted it in the first place and feels nothing when it’s born. She has to really try to form a connection to it. It’s a whole nature versus nurture, chicken before the egg type of deal where you wonder if the kid is crazy because he sensed his mother’s ambivalence from the get go, or if the mother’s ambivalence stemmed from an inate understanding that the kid is crazy.

So there’s all of that, but the thing that I liked most about this book, what most struck my soul gong, was Shriver’s high altitude insight into being a mother, into other people, into relationships, just about anything. I feel like I could listen to her talk about post-it notes and come away shattered by some new world unlocking perception. There is contained in this novel a rare ore that many books don’t have (although I don’t think a book necessarily needs this to be good): actual wisdom.

So yes. I definitely recommend WNTTAK. But be prepared to go into a not very pleasant head space for a while. And also, if you are, like me, a woman who thinks it might be nice to have a baby one day, be prepared to shelve that idea for the time being and start swallowing birth control by the fistful.