The Book Tower

I finished Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin with a sigh; I found it a disturbing, haunting and exhausting novel. It made me address a lot of difficult issues; mainly the huge and heavy responsibility of the parent. Who can justifiably hold their hand up and say that they are fully qualified for the job?

There is a point in the novel where Eva, the narrator, tells the story of a mother who leaves her small child in the bath for three minutes to answer the door. In that short time the child suffers a fatal accident; the mother – dutiful as a parent for all the other minutes in the day is now forever tortured by this terrible act of neglect. How many of us have been in a situation where this could have happened? How many of us make mistakes in the protection and nurturing of our children? How many of those mistakes are irreversible? Who do we blame when we get it wrong? What do we do when it really goes wrong? Let’s face it, “I blame it on the parents” is an often repeated cliché we’re all used to.

We Need to Talk About Kevin is composed of a series of letters by Eva to her estranged and unresponsive husband Franklin. Their son, now sixteen, has committed several murders in a single act of aggression which Eva sees in her resigned view as another instalment in the depressing series of similar events in the USA. Eva’s voice is an exhausting one because it drilled right into me, nagging away to make me decide whether or not I could or should condone her. Ever felt guilty about something and constantly gone over events trying to iron them out and persuade yourself that you’re blameless? This is what goes through Eva’s mind; she also picks over incidents in Kevin’s early childhood to discover clues to why he has turned out the way he has. The vandalism of Eva’s maps, the cycling accident of a neighbour, bugs in his sister’s backpack, even the failed attempts at potty training – are they all examples of a dangerous individual?

For me, We Need to Talk About Kevin was the literary equivalent of a hangover. It took a while to get over and it left an unpleasant taste in my mouth. It has a truly shocking outcome, but I’m glad I can now rid myself of Eva’s torment, a privileged position compared to the other tortured Evas of this world.