Customer Reviews

We Need To Talk About Kevin: A Novel

5 star:		(40)
4 star:		(22)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

Kevin Katchadourian is a parent's worst nightmare: a sullen child who abuses, manipulates, and controls everyone around him. Eva, his mother, seems to know something is terribly wrong with her son from the moment she gives birth, as he grasps for his father and turns a baleful eye towards his mother. As he gets older, Eva's maternal instincts about her dark child places him at the center of incident after incident: playgoups that are dismantled; misterious bike accidents; sexual precocity. As Kevin grows up and Eva bears a beautiful young daughter, the family dynamic becomes even more explosive as she and her husband Franklin take sides against Kevin and his malevolence.

The inorexible march towards the conclusion - Kevin's violent and methodical attack on his classmates - made my stomach tie itself up in knots. Eva is helpless as he controls the Katchadourians and eventually destroys everyone around him.

Taking the form of letters written to her husband, Franklin, Eva reflects on her marriage, her children, the nature of violence and hypocrisy in America, and what it feels like to be the mother of a disturbed and dangerous child. This is not a light book, but it is a necessary one. Her inability to mother Kevin is perhaps an insightful look at those women who bore the real-life School Killers, and Lionel Shriver should be congratulated on her brave and difficult work.

While all of Shriver's books grab me by the second page, despite some slight pretentions, this book is outstanding in its honesty and depth of character development. These fictional people are etched indelibly in my mind. Her unique style of making you hate her characters but wanting the best outcome for them is genius. This is not a fun read, by any measures, but one that won't disappoint. It is a vastly disturbing, devouring but strangely satisfying masterpiece fit for those greedy for darkly thematic literature.

I had never read Lionel Shriver before but her bio at the back of the book hooked me first - and the book did not dissapoint. If anything, it was the best book
I have ever read. The story is told by Eva, through letters to her husband two years after their son Kevin, who has been her nemisis since he was born, one day calmly kills a select few of his classmates, a teacher and an innocent. As Eva tries to dissect the tragedy and what role she may have played in it, she strips bare every facet of their lives together, scratching deep into every emotion until it bleeds with raw honesty.

The book is horrifying, in every way possible....while this is a work of fiction, the subject matter, and what it says about 'us' is not. It IS us.

I bought this book on impulse after reading about it on a '10 books you've never heard of, but need to read' list. Amazing book! The first few pages made me wonder what I'd gotten myself into but I soon forgot about that. It left me with more questions than answers ... but then I guess that's the point of a thought inducing book right? Anyways great read about what has become, sadly, an all to common occurance. Definately worth your time!

I found this to be a terrifying novel. I read this book a few years ago, and there are scenes described in it that I will never forget. Many people will say this book inspires debate on nature vs nuture in developing someone's character. While in general I believe this to be true, there was no question for me that the evil that is Kevin was due to 'nature' alone. No one, his mother least of all, made him this. The last bit, as the nature of Eva's communications with her husband are revealed was, as my title says, horrifying. Great read, it shook me to my core.

This book is well worth reading, but it does not take you to a happy place. The subject is disturbing and the struggle between mother and son very real. The outcome surprised me and left a lasting image. This is not a book you will easily forget.

I had picked up this book with high hopes but rather ended up being disappointed. Shouldn't Kevin's name really Damian (from The Omen)? Such a bad seed...I do not buy Eva's lack of bonding with him. I am not sure what she was suposed to bond with. There was not a single moment anywhere in the story where Kevin acted like a regular little boy. Not one moment of niceness anywhere. To say she rejected him when he rejected her breast, is trite. If as a baby he had moments of cuteness, I am sure she would have felt better about him, like she was with Celia, her daughter. Her husband, Franklin, was a big boob. His gee wiz Daddy-O routine was over the top and not believable. Also, Eva would have received some support from the community. After all, she found her daughter impaled on the arrow target and her husband murdered. I would have been interested in the aftermath of her discovering the bodies - who did she call, who came to investigate? What about that funeral? She says she called the victim's families to see if it would be okay for her to go what what her little' girls's or husband funerals? Also, why in the world would she devote Saturday's to Kevin? He murdered her little girl in such a barbaric way that how could you even want to talk to him, especially after the eye thing? Just because he is her son? Not reasonable. Kevin clearly was born with some misallignment in his brain, some defect, that the blame can not be Eva's alone.

The novel's back-cover blurb makes no secret of the horror shown only at its climax -- a 1999 New York school shooting perpetrated by 15-year-old Kevin, the son of successful tourbook writer Eva Khatchadourian and advertising location scout Franklin Plaskett. There's nothing to spoiler in the bare facts. Nearly two years later, Eva struggles to make sense of her intensely problematic relationship with her now-imprisoned son in a series of letters to her "estranged husband" (so the blurb also tells us).

If it matters to the reader, Lionel Shriver is a woman -- she changed her first name in her late teens, as she hated her given name. The school shooting in the novel takes place 11 days before Columbine, and this does get repeatedly mentioned in the novel, as do a number of other real-life school shootings from the 1990's.

Anyway, it's the details of this detail-oriented novel that shouldn't be spoiled: Eva's lacerating and self-lacerating evaluations of herself and others drive the book. Is she a reliable narrator? Was Kevin born bad, made bad, or resulted from a combination of the two? Well, that's the novel, isn't it?

I note that some reviewers have referred to this novel as a "thriller," though there's nothing thrilling about it: I found it difficult to put down, but not because I was having a wild romp. You're stuck inside Eva's head for the entire novel, and that's going to be trying for a lot of readers. She isn't instantly sympathetic. I'm not entirely sure that she's even finally sympathetic, a judgement I'd extend to the two other main characters of the novel, her husband Franklin Plaskett and the eponymous Kevin.

Plaskett needs desperately to believe in the possibility of the American Dream's happy nuclear family. This desire plays out in the novel as an escalating series of what seem to be willfully ignorant (or deludedly optimistic) evaluations of Kevin's escalatingly awful actions as a child and as a teenager. But Eva's also evaluating how much these evaluations are 'real' and how much they're feigned as part of a desperate need to believe in normalcy. But Eva's also the only window into the text we've got. So we return to reliability.

Kevin himself is a marvelous creation, a Bad Seed who seems fully realized without at any point being explained. Is his growing darkness a matter of biology, upbringing, society, or all three? Is Eva's belief that there's something more recognizably and sympathetically 'human' beneath his facade of apathetic cynicism, a belief based on only a couple of incidents from Kevin's entire life, 'real' or just wishful thinking? But Eva doesn't indulge in wishful thinking in her narrative. Or doesn't appear to. Much. So we return to the evaluations the reader must make.

If Shriver hadn't already been an established mainstream novelist when she delivered this novel, I'd imagine it could only have been marketed as horror. Some reviewers seem to believe that the novel is 'useful' as part of a national (American) conversation about school shooters and what creates them. I don't think so, really, except as a warning against moral and psychological reductionism, and a warning to tread carefully when attempting to assess blame. This is real horror: unnerving, nonexploitative, harrowing, anti-cathartic for the most part, built painstakingly through the accumulation of telling, closely observed and minutely portrayed detail. Highly recommended.

I am a counsellor, so the dynamics of a relationship are always of interest to me, but the story told in this novel would appeal to anyone who has ever had a child or has ever been interested in children. The characters were believable, and you cared about them. Although you knew going in how the story would end, the author built in some surprises for the reader. I had taken it to a resort holiday thinking it would be light reading, but I could not put it down. I have no intention of seeing the movie because the most important parts, in my opinion, were the dialogues in the narrator's head and I fear Hollywood would dramatize those thoughts. I cannot say enough how much I enjoyed reading this book and I have recommended it to several friends who read.

I have to give props to the author for going out of her way to write on a subject that is "Taboo". Its not very often that I as a reader venture out of my comfortable genre of historic novels but the minute I read the back of this book I knew I just had to read it. I am so glad that I did I loved every page of this book it kept me intrigued and left me thinking "What would it be like to be in her position." In the last few pages of the copy I got it there's a PS part where she talks about getting the book published she says "She preposed several editorial remedies. "Allude to" but never stage the very climatic murder scene toward which the entire novel progressed." I myself know that the book would have probably felt incomplete had that scene near the end not been added, I learned a lot more about him in that scene and the way she wrote it was just perfect.

All in all this has got to be one of the best books I have read in a long time! I cannot express enough praise or recommend this book enough to my fellow readers. Do yourself a favour order a copy now!