Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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104 of 110 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Brilliant And Sensitive Psychological Study- A Great Novel, November 28, 2004
"We Need To Talk About Kevin" is a disquieting, provocative, and brilliantly written novel about a mother, desperately attempting to understand why her son, 15-year-old Kevin, brutally, with premeditation, murdered seven of his fellow classmates, a cafeteria worker and his English teacher in a Columbine-style school massacre. There have been nationwide discussions on the cause of events like these - especially during the 1990s when it seemed like school shootings ran rampant throughout the US. In Pearl, Paducah, Springfield, Littleton, seemingly normal kids, kids who had almost everything a child could want, became terribly derailed. Some argue that the proliferation of and easy access to guns is the cause; others that the excess of violence in movies, TV programs and video games induce violent behavior in children and adolescents. The one question almost everyone seems to have in common is, "What were these murderous kids' parents like?" "Didn't they recognize symptoms of violence in their own children?"
Eva Khatchadourian, Kevin's bereft mother, narrates this novel through a series of compelling letters to her estranged husband, Franklin. She examines her son's life, from conception to his terrible act of violence, trying to understand the why of it. What becomes clear early on is that Eva tortures herself with blame. She is guilt-ridden that her shortcomings as a parent might have caused Kevin's evil act, his violent behavior, his very nature. She must have failed, she must have been deficient as a mother, for her boy to commit such a chilling crime. She also considers that neither nature nor nurture are solely responsible for shaping a child's character. Her honest, introspective correspondence to her beloved husband causes the reader to consider that some children just might be born bad. How and when are psychopaths created? The reader is pulled back and forth between empathy and blame, anger and grief, and perhaps, ultimately to forgiveness.
Through Eva's perspective we watch a story unfold. A happy, almost idyllic marriage to Franklin; a brilliant career in a business which she, herself, created; her ambivalent feelings when she became pregnant, an event which interfered with her career; the indifference she felt when she held her son for the first time; Kevin's difficult infancy - he refused his mother's milk and didn't like to be held by her; his total manipulation of his father, who believed Kevin could do no wrong, putting a permanent strain on the marriage; Kevin's lack of empathy and cruel streak, which he blatantly flaunted in front of his mother and hid from his Dad; and Eva's fear that her dislike for her son, which she went overboard to conceal, would damage him - further escalating his already violent nature.
"We Need To Talk About Kevin" examines how a heinous event can impact a town, a marriage, a family and an individual. It also causes the reader to reflect on the concept of unconditional love. Lionel Shriver's clear, crisply crafted prose builds tension throughout her novel, ultimately leading to a stunning conclusion. Her narrative is almost perfectly paced. This is an extraordinary psychological study that gripped me, riveted me, from the first page to the last. And the author ably portrays the complexity and the horror of the act and the consequences. I was seriously left breathless and horribly saddened after finishing the book. This is most definitely not an "up" novel or a light read. However, it may be my favorite book of 2004 and I cannot recommend it highly enough. I have purchased 2 more of Ms. Shriver's novels as a result of reading this one.
JANA
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72 of 79 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Terrifying and brilliant, April 16, 2003
This is one of the most chilling and compulsively readable books Ive opened in a long time. As you read Eva Khatchadourians letters to her estranged husband you think this is what it must be like for parents whose child has just murdered classmates and a popular teacher.As Eva reveals in her letters, she knew something was wrong with Kevin from the moment of his birth when he turned away from her breast snarling and screaming. The anger does not wane, even though outwardly he was a passive, disinterested child. She blames her own mixed feelings toward him, but her beloved husband Franklin fiercely defends the boy whenever she asks why babysitters never come back for a second time and other families go great lengths to keep Kevin away from their own children. And Eva doesnt like him. No matter how hard she tries--and she does try very hard, moving to the suburbs, staying home, none of which she wants to doshe does not like her son. Since you know from the beginning that Kevin is in juvenile prison for killing his classmates, you might think that the suspense in the story will come from finding out how he planned his spree and carried it out. You would be very, very mistaken. Very late in We Need to Talk About Kevin Lionel Shriver introduces a twist that is completely unexpected and totally shocking. These are words too frequently used in describing thrillers which rarely deliver the unexpected or the shocking. Believe me, in this book, those words do not begin to describe the wallop Shriver packs in the last quarter of the novel. I was unfamiliar with Lionel Shriver, and will (after a recovery period) look for her other novels. She digs fearlessly into the back of her characters minds and the bottoms of their hearts. Read this book.
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50 of 59 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
compelling at times, too long, flawed characters, March 17, 2005
Kevin is one of a recent series of "Columbine" books--those that try and plumb the characters of young boys who plan high school massacres. Some are just bad (Vernon God Little), others are great (Project X). Kevin falls in the middle.
Its major strength is the compelling nature of the premise--just what is it that caused young Kevin (in prison at the time of the novel's present) to kill several of his classmates and some school staff? It's the sort of question we all know there is no real answer for, and yet we feel the need to ask it anyway. Both the question and the need to ask it are examined through the course of the narration--structured as a series of letters from Eva, Kevin's mother, to her estranged husband and Kevin's father, Franklin.
While the structure allows for a lot of introspection and detail, it also feels a bit gimmicky in places. On the one hand, it's seems self-evidently clumsy when she spends so much time telling Franklin things he already knows, having lived through those same scenes. On the other hand, that self-evident clumsiness eventually too obviously hints at what is supposed to be, as Publisher Weekly puts it, "a huge and crushing shock." Without giving much away, I'll say it didn't seem all that shocking by the time it happened and somewhat worsened the contrived feel of the structure.
The other negative aspect of Shriver's choice of structure is that it locks us into a single voice, that of the mother, and over the book's 300+ pages, that voice starts to wear on the reader. Actually, it began to wear on this reader pretty early and Eva's voice was one of the major stumbling blocks to continuing the book. She is not a likable character through much of it and though I give Shriver credit for taking such a risk, Eva is also at times not a particularly interesting person which makes reading her for pages and pages tough to do at times. Worse than uninteresting or unlikable, she can be downright annoying (whiny, self-interested, self-deluded, passive, unbelievable) which makes it even harder to follow her for so long.
Character in general is a flaw in the book. While Eva is tough to swallow at times, there are enough times of sharp insight (into people or society in general), of incisive humor, of complexity (a woman truly torn over motherhood) that one can sort of ride those moments over the rougher sections. The other characters, unfortunately, almost never offer such redeeming moments. The father, Franklin, is mostly a dolt, almost a caricature of one, and is simply too hard to believe. There is denial, there is delusion, there is a reader's suspension of disbelief, and there is "I just don't buy a real person would be this dumb this often". Franklin falls into the last category. The sister, Celia, is far too shallow, far too docile, too clearly Kevin's opposite, and therefore comes across as more plot contrivance than character. And what happens with her ratchets up the suspension of disbelief to the stretching point and then beyond. Other characters are barely felt, though even some of these are hard to believe (especially in a plot involving a school teacher and district board).
The plot, as mentioned above, does have some major flaws of believability, especially as Kevin ages and his behavior becomes more serious. The book's strengths I think lie more in the pre-Kevin descriptions of Eva's honest ambivalence over motherhood and in Kevin's early, pre-vocal years. After that his precociousness becomes more difficult to believe, as does his parents' passive response to his behavior and language. His father is portrayed as more dumb and deluded and other adults as more clueless. And there's simply too much plot. One of the reasons Project X is so good is that Shepard knew to keep it tight. There is at times in Kevin agonizingly unnecessary detail. And so much time detailing Kevin's behavior only makes it all the more unbelievable that nobody does anything about it.
As mentioned before, the big "surprise" at the end wasn't really all that surprising. The murders itself, when finally shown, are somewhat anti-climatic, partly because it's so hard to believe Kevin's set-up actually worked and partly because not only have we spent almost 400 pages aimed at them and being exposed to lots of smaller but similarly evil acts from Kevin, but also because we've also been given in some detail many of the well-publicized actual killings such as Columbine etc. But if the big shocker and the murder scene aren't all that successful, the ending is. One just wishes it would have come sooner and cleaner. There's are some real gems in We Need to Talk about Kevin, but they would shine a lot more clearly and powerfully if the book had been cut by at least a third and if a few of the side characters had been more fully dimensional. It's an interesting read, at times a compelling one, but also a slow and eventually disappointing one. It's much, much better than Vernon God Little, nowhere near as spot-on or compelling as Project X. Slightly recommended for its good parts and its close, with forewarning that it has a lot of flaws, any one of which might make you put the book down well before the end.
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