We Need To Talk About Kevin: Book Review

I finally finished reading We Need To Talk About Kevin, by Lionel Shriver. It took me about two months of scattered reading to get through the first quarter of the book, and then I finally got the audiobook and burned through the rest in the course of three days. I've definitely found that syntax can really mess with my ability to read prose, given my predilection to analyze and pick things apart. The sentence structure in this novel was so difficult that it was a chore to read, even if the story were engaging.

This story is about a mother coming to terms with the fact that her son committed a mass shooting. She never loved her son, Kevin, and so she decides to send a series of messages to her estranged husband in order to sort out her place in the events, even considering the possibility that she might have played a role.

Overall (No Spoilers)

I did not plan on writing a review to this book because I was not entirely sure what I wanted to write about. Paradoxically, this is the kind of thing that happens when I come across stories like these. As a student of the craft, myself, the authorial hand is obviously . . . absent, in a way that is ingenious. This is not an insult to the author. This is a praise, in fact. The fundamental question of the book is whether Eva, the narrator, is responsible for the actions of her son—so you naturally want to ask yourself whether you think she is responsible or not. Personally, I am too busy wondering about the story construction and consciously understanding that the story is not meant to have an answer.

This is part of the reason I was not going to write a review. There's an interview with the author where she is talking about how book clubs are divided over whether the mother is to blame or not, and then she is asked to settle the disputes, and she smirks and says that she is content to sit on the sidelines and watch the fireworks. So it goes.

But once I finished the book and went to watch reviews, I was convinced to write this anyway, if only because I think some people missed the point. Not everyone, though. There are some excellent reviews out there that I loved, and I will link them below.

Epistolary

The book is written in the form of letters that Eva is sending to her estranged husband, as I noted before, so this provides a very important framing device for the story. Namely, the story is told entirely within the perspective of a particular character. From the outset, the author does not hold back in letting the reader know just how abrasive this character can be. She is imperious, selfish, confident, and both self-aware and lacking in self-awareness all at once. All of these characteristics just leak through the pages, and I honestly consider this to be a masterclass in storytelling, particularly character writing.

We basically have two stories happening at the same time, in a way. There is one story on the surface that is being told to us by Eva, and then there is the more subtle story that is being told to the reader under the surface that is hinted at by the mere fact that this is an epistolary novel. Because of who Eva is, because she hates Kevin, she can attribute motives, select events, omit events, and functionally craft a narrative of her own to fit her vision of who Kevin is. She did not like Kevin from the moment he was conceived, let alone the moment she realized he had killed all those people. Shriver manages to craft the story that creates a powerful impression on the top level, while also undercutting it just enough with the epistolary format and the specific events to make you wonder.

As I mentioned, some reviewers did miss the point. They missed the nuance, and maybe this constitutes a critique of Shriver. They came away thinking that Kevin actually was portrayed a certain way from birth. And when I closed out the novel, I was left mulling things over, as well, but that only lasted for a short while. Once you actually begin to pick apart the specifics and think about the story format, you are forced to make concessions. Kevin is definitely psychopathic by the time he commits the atrocity. The real question is whether Eva turned this into a reality. There is also the power of narrative voice. Once you step away from Eva's perspective and really think about the events, the absurdities really seem stark.

Non-Linear

Because this is a literary fiction novel, the story has little plot structure to it. We know from the cover page what Kevin has done, and the letters are somewhat non-linear in how they deliver the information to the reader. What I do appreciate about these kinds of stories is how they deliver information to the reader; it is like filling in a picture bit by bit. Instead of drawing a straightforward line, it scatters dots across the page until they start to fit together into a whole picture that you can see. And through it all, there is some linearity so our brains don't go insane.

Twist (Spoiler)

For the ending, I guessed what the twist might be ahead of time and I was hoping that it wouldn't be the case. It was not that I cared too much for Franklin and Cecelia. Indeed, I like nasty twists, as you should all know. Further, Franklin was an idealist, and I don't like idealists, so I ironically liked him less than I did Eva. I was just hoping that the twist would be related to the unreliable narrator, rather than to Franklin's death. My thinking at the time was that Eva could realize that Kevin didn't actually have a hand in Cecelia's eye, which would tie into a wider realization about her skewed perspective and how that fed into his decision regarding the school shooting. By having the twist be about Franklin, instead, I was disappointed, and was left thinking that the narrative was simplistic. Kevin really was a psychopath all along. I also wanted to see Franklin get a fistful of reality as he hears the news in real time, but that's admittedly more petty.

Based on what I said above, I no longer think this way anymore. Shriver still did an amazing job crafting this parallel story narrative, where Kevin is both a psychopath from birth and Eva is an unreliable narrator that cannot be trusted. Even though it was never explicitly revealed that Kevin had no hand in Cecelia's loss of eye, we still know we can't trust her as a narrator. Her absolute confidence, the manner in which she delivers the information, is so convincing—but that is precisely the problem. I swear to the gods, I almost wanted to believe that Kevin, as a baby, was actually shitting himself on purpose to spite her. Reviews were actually criticizing Shriver for this, citing the cartoonish nature of it. This is the skill of Shriver as an author.

How the twist ended up turning out is another reason I wanted to write the review. I wanted Shriver to bring the unreliable narrator aspect of the story out into the open, when she opted to keep it in the peripheries. And I cannot understate the risk. When I write, I usually feel compelled to balance out character perspectives so that people don't get any ideas. This is the utility of writing multiple points of views. In fact, looking through reviews, I saw multiple people talk about whether Shriver's own perspective was leaking through, especially given that she has no children of her own, and especially given that Shriver mentioned that her choice to have no children is bound up with this novel in particular.

The novel is personal, in a way, with the darker aspects all dialed up to the extreme. I have had ideas like this, myself. But the time for that isn't now. (Now that I think about it. I already have done this, in a way).

Either way, the novel cut against my intuitions on how to write a story, and I think it turned out even better for it, so I want to rate it even better than I otherwise would have (if it's possible for me to do that).

Ending

Another implication of the unreliable narrator not being brought out into the open is that Eva doesn't fully grasp her flaws, even at the end of the book. She is still convinced that he was feuding with her right out of the womb, even as she concedes that she should have given him warmth and love in the beginning. She still thinks that he was trying to spite her as a baby. She decides that she does love her son in the end, and this love is viewed through the lens of acquiescence in a war. "[A]fter three days short of eighteen years, I can finally announce that I am too exhausted and too confused and too lonely to keep fighting, and if only out of desperation or even laziness I love my son."

Additionally, she realizes that she has no idea if she is responsible for his actions. She simply concludes that she was wrong for being so cold, regardless of what she did to him in the long term.

An ending like this is twisted beyond bittersweetness. There is wisdom to the idea that the nature/nurture debate being a red herring; she should have loved him regardless of whether it's actually her fault. But her mindset about the past has not changed. What has changed is how she will approach the future.

Finally, what I find to be the most damning part against Eva is the fact that she is able to reconcile with Kevin at all—and not even from her perspective, but from his. After he has carried out the killings, the readers see that she is visiting him regularly, and that he is reciprocating. Not only that, but they actually manage to find a way to communicate. There is one important passage at the end of the book regarding Cecelia's eye that I think helps recast the whole story in a new perspective. It starts with Kevin holding her eye and taunting Eva with it, which causes her to freak out on him. She threatens to not return, if he shows it to her again. And as she notes, he does not show it to her again. He does not simply hate her. And then he later returns the eye to her, so she can bury it.

Eva does not make this connection, but the first reviewer linked below points out that this shows that connection actually is—and was—possible between the two. The fact that they can do it now implies that they could have done it in the past. She viewed him as a void that hurt people for no reason other than amusement, but this is another reason to doubt that.

Conclusion

Overall, this was a stunning work of character fiction. I was amazed by the craftwork, and I am inclined to give this book a coveted 9/10.

Interview: https://youtu.be/e5dMMBuWEn0?si=2re4GKXOeyegorN-

Reviews:

KirkpattieCake: https://youtu.be/3iJBElfaPdA?si=WRzKMjy11MmqgDKz

Jason Fuhrman: https://youtu.be/mC69AEykNDs?si=95Vr0uht_twksFch

Video: https://youtu.be/52HtTmFLmhQ