Read Book, Haven't Seen Movie: We Need To Talk About Kevin

This is the most disturbing book I have read in a long time, not so much for its subject matter, but for how the author, Lionel Shriver, approaches it. She jettisoned her given name (Margaret Ann) at fifteen she tells us in an afterword in my Harper Perennial paperback, and perhaps her masculine chosen name presages a temperment and disposition quite removed from motherhood. In an attempt to provide a fictional framework for the family life of a student who "goes postal" in the cafeteria or schoolroom, she tells a story that could also be the biography of a mother who believes her child a disciple of Satan.  Most of the time while reading this I had an image in my head of Gregory Peck holding a knife at his son's throat in "The Omen."

To be fair, I think Shriver meant to illustrate a particular childhood alienation that simply can't be breached by normal parenting, but it seems to me that she stacked the deck for her own purposes, rather than have the story evolve as it may have with real people living it. It's hard to get inside a family, but this family-without-a-family-name is contrived from the get-go.

We have a couple who love each other and marry, but each keeps her/his own name. The woman loves the man more than he loves her. He wants a child (becuase it's the next step), and she doesn't (she wants him all to herself.) She decides, after perceiving that he will not be happy without a child, to become pregnant. Her pregnancy is not easy, and she has visions of her child emerging from her belly as the monster bursts from John Hurt's chest in "Alien." When the baby is born, he will not suckle, and he cries all the time. She cannot bond with him, and her clinical analysis of every emotion, thought, feeling, is laboriously chronicled in a series of letters to her husband Franklin.

Then begin the disquieting references to Kevin's interior and ulterior motivations and behaviors as perceived by his mother. These begin when he is an infant. Is she paranoid? She takes pains to indicate that she has tried to be objective, she examines herself for post-partum psychoses and pronounces herself sane though embattled and put upon by this recalcitrant being thrust into her care. While this mother sees only maleficence and detachment in her son, his father sees only placidity and goodness. The extremes are too pronounced. As Kevin grew, it seems to me, a mother would search for clues to disprove her son's apparent evil nature, and a father would not so easily dismiss, as he does consistently and fervently, evidence that his son may have done evil things.

Shriver is good at building tension and suspense. We know that she is leading us inexorably and implacably toward a violent climax. We even know what it is.[Spoiler alert!]  Throughout the letters, she recounts the individual cases of students who have taken guns to school and killed classmates, teachers, etc. I was shocked that there have been so many. So we know what Kevin, evil-from-the-cradle Kevin, is going to do. What we don't know is why the mother is now separated from the father, and her much-beloved daughter Celia, Kevin's younger sister. But we can smell tragedy, can't we? The only questions are how, what, when and where. We know who. Who has been a given since page one.

But here is where I take issue with Shriver, and the literary veracity of her tale. Say I have a son who I believe is evil incarnate. I believe that he was born this way, and that he has a particular disregard for me. I witness or suspect several evil acts on his part, although he always feigns complete innocence. His guileless father believes him incapable of evil acts, in part because I am always suspicious of the boy, the father believes, unjustly. Do I, against the emphatically declared wishes of my husband, and against my own misgivings about motherhood, and against my own beliefs about my son's evil or amoral nature, do I bring another child into this family?  No. I do not.

All along, as the mother is writing these letters, we are presented with her fierce intelligence, her particular insight, her penetrating analysis of all she witnesses, her belief that her son is evil, that he is capable of anything. And yet. And. Yet. Are we to believe that she has suddenly, due to advanced hormone levels or some such out-of-mind deus ex machina, jettisoned all common sense, all caution, all belief in what she has witnessed for seven years?

In reading the afterword, I discovered that Shriver is, by choice, childless, and while it may seem pat and predictable and way too easy, I think therein lies the rub that makes swallowing this tale whole near impossible. I am the mother of four, and therefore speak from  my experience. No mother who believed of her son what this mother believed, and she really did believe it, would ever bring another child into his orbit. Babies in their cribs; helpless, adorable infants in need of constant care. What mother in her right mind, what mother as thoughtful and probing as this one (we have been led to believe--down the garden path, I say), would do that?  Not this one.  Maybe some other mother, some clueless dimwit who resembles this woman's husband maybe. But not this woman.

So from that point in the novel, I couldn't suspend my disbelief anymore. I knew what was coming. Every scene in which Kevin was anywhere near Celia, I held my breath. What fantastically creative torture would he plan for her? And the deck just kept getting stacked: Celia isn't very smart, and therefore never intuits malice. She's a bright-eyed sweetheart who loves Kevin, and therefore never arms herself against him. At some point I knew what was really going on with those letters.

Maybe the book is profoundly successful because I found it very haunting. It's one of those books that will walk around in my head for some time, not in a welcome way. I want that feeling of a helpless, headlong rush toward doom to go away. I want Celia and her parents, and even Kevin, to be a family. I want Shriver to understand that this is too facile a portrayal of loss. The last paragraph leaves so much unsaid, and I think, unfelt by the mother. Was she simply the coldest woman on earth, or a flawed portrait of a mother?  I think the latter.

When I watch the movie, I'll add an addendum here, but in advance of seeing it, I think the casting of Tilda Swinton as the mother is very telling.