Improbable American psycho

Irish Times
Apr 02, 2005

Eileen Battersby

Fiction A mother attempts to make sense of the ongoing horror of a
life perverted by her remorseless monster of a son. This book,
certainly the most repellent and easily one of the least convincing I
have ever read, could be seen as a cautionary tale about parents and
children, and most specifically the ambivalence of motherhood, if it
wasn’t so crassly and aggressively presented.

Its sensationalism, as well as its theme, that of the high-school
massacre phenomenon across the US, may grip some readers, but far more
seriously, it will also exploit them. That such a book is on the
longlist for this year’s Orange Prize, the aim of which is to
celebrate excellence, originality and accessibility in women’s
writing, galls.

So evil stalks well-heeled suburbia as relentlessly as it does the
tenements of big cities. Sometimes the offspring of the wealthy are
simply so satiated by all they have, they just have to rebel, or in
the case of Kevin, insult and kill.

No doubt Lionel Shriver’s grotesque narrative is intended as a
profoundly candid expose of US consumerist society’s culpability in
the creation of misfits. The concept that we reap what we sow has
seldom, if ever, been presented quite as graphically.

After all, this is a family in which a little girl is given an exotic
zoo animal as a pet and a dangerous boy is presented with his very own
crossbow.

For all the praise that has been directed at the all-too-topical We
Need To Talk About Kevin, which may well be a serious sociologically
based satire presented in the form of a novel, the sheer viciousness
of narrator Eva, a successful businesswoman who had been happily, nay
smugly, married to Franklin before deciding to have a late first baby,
dilutes the impact. Shriver is a wordy writer; Eva, her narrator, is
equally wordy – and caustic with it. She is opinionated and
intolerant, smart-alec but not funny – as her horrible son remarks:
“Is there anything, or anybody, you don’t feel superior to?” – and she
is also rather taken with her confessional self-analysis.

All of which unfolds through contrived, retrospective letters written
to her husband, a caricature doting father who can see no wrong with
their obnoxiously insolent son. The ridiculous Franklin defends the
brat child who develops into a dangerous adolescent and mass
killer. Even more unbelievably, this same doting father consistently
jeers at the couple’s second child, the nervous little Celia, to whose
birth he had objected.

The couple consistently divide on the subject of Kevin. Early in the
book, it is obvious that Eva is not writing to her husband, she is
writing to herself – and in this technical weakness lies the failure
of Shriver’s relentless narrative. Eva is the daughter of Armenian
emigrants. She has made a fortune through writing travel guides; she
may know the cheapest ways to travel the world, but such is her
arrogance that she knows no one.

Kevin the problem baby does not like his mother, and remains in
diapers until he is six years old. It is a form of protest. No
childminder can tolerate him. His snide utterances belie his tender
years and as he grows older he begins to express himself with the
gutter eloquence of a hardened gangland veteran. He is also presented
as a cunning genius who conceals his intelligence.

Nothing is believable. No man, not even a determinedly loving father
weary of his arrogant, wealthy wife and her scathing anti-American
rhetoric, could possibly tolerate a son like Kevin. The boy sneers,
lies, dresses in clothes several sizes too small for him, and
eventually takes to masturbating in full view of Eva. Then there is
the blinding of Celia, left in Kevin’s care because dad believes the
young thug is sufficiently mature to mind her. Does Shriver honestly,
albeit simplistically, reckon that mass killers are the products of
weak dads and vain, ageing mothers possessed of too much mouth? Even
as Kevin’s crimes against other people multiply – the sabotage of a
bike, which injures a boy; the rocks hurled from a bridge on passing
cars; the harassment of female classmates; the accusations of sexual
abuse against a female drama teacher – dad stands by his boy, accusing
Eva of not loving poor little Kevin. It is sickening stuff. This is
not due to Shriver’s rather crude narrative skills but solely to the
voyeuristic, conversational nastiness of her novel, which is far more
offensive than Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, an infinitely
better book.

After 400 pages of abnormal recall, recalled at length, there are few
answers and little feeling – just Kevin in prison, playing with his
sister’s glass eye. It is a repulsive story, as much for its “I kid
you not” quasi-reportage narrative voice as for its content.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times

We Need To Talk About Kevin By Lionel Shriver Serpent’s Tail,
400pp. GBP9.99