The Advertiser, Australia
June 25, 2005 Saturday
A child is torn
by Katharine England
THIS year’s winner of the Orange Prize (for fiction written in
English by a woman) is chilling, challenging and utterly compelling.
Written by London/New York journalist and novelist Lionel Shriver, We
Have to Talk About Kevin (Serpent’s Tail, $22.95) debates the ethos
behind the rash of high-school massacres that have overtaken the U.S.
in the past couple of decades.
The novel takes the form of a series of letters from Eva
Khatchadourian to her estranged husband. It is almost two years since
their son slaughtered seven of his schoolmates, a popular English
teacher and a cafeteria worker in a meticulously organised bloodbath
timed to occur a few days before his 16th birthday, with all its
adult legal implications.
While it is never in doubt who is to blame for the atrocity, his
mother feels a desperate need to work out who is to blame for the boy
who could commit it.
Her letters to Franklin Plaskett take a scalpel to their contented
marriage and to their decision to have a child.
Eva is consciously of immigrant stock, proud of her Armenian heritage
and fully briefed on a history of suffering and genocide.
Her attitude to her middle-America homeland is far more equivocal, so
that she marvels at falling for a down-home Norman Rockwell clone
with his own cosily idealised image of the country he inhabits.
Eva’s feelings about motherhood – and about tampering with what she
already has in such fullness – are deeply ambivalent, and Kevin is
conceived after a night of high anxiety as a talisman against the
loss of Franklin. Almost immediately, Eva feels invaded and nothing
improves when the baby is born.
Kevin is an angry, unresponsive infant; Eva suffers from postnatal
depression, antipathy and jealousy at what seems to be a far more
satisfying relationship between Franklin and their son.
Eva reveals in searing detail the feelings and fears she had
previously kept buried. As Kevin grows, apparently uninterested in
the world, refusing toilet-training until he is over six, getting his
few rewards from mimicking and manipulating his parents, Eva takes
refuge in education, parading numbers, letters, facts before the
resistant child who learns as he eats – secretly, so that none but he
shall garner the least satisfaction.
Eva also schools Kevin in her prejudices, which he astutely
assimilates and will use against her indefinitely.
Shriver is uncomfortably brilliant at conveying the consciously
superior anti-American/anti-homeland repudiation of mass-market
culture that she admits to sharing and which readers like myself,
proud of our acuity and interesting, well-developed tastes will
guiltily recognise.
Meanwhile, Franklin pours his hokey all-American dad-speak into
Kevin’s other ear, and propels the boy chummily around folk museums
and Civil War battlefields. The reader cringes at both, and can’t
stop reading.
Eva’s letters are long, dense, beautifully written and cunningly,
suspensefully structured. They combine family history with the
fallout from Kevin’s monstrous act and with his present life in the
juvenile detention centre where his mother faithfully, hopelessly,
questioningly visits him.
They take us in cool, gut-wrenching detail through the massacre and
on to devastating information we have failed to intuit on our way
through the book, and they make us look at ourselves and our society
from an angle we may not have occupied before. This is a shocking,
moving, wise book and one that should be read for all those other
young people who experience life, consciously or unconsciously, as a
spiritual vacuum, who, like Kevin, feel that “the glorified loitering
that passes for a fruitful existence” is simply inane.