Lionel Shriver: "We Need to Talk About Kevin"

We Need to Talk About Kevin is a novel by an American-born writer currently living in London, Lionel Shriver, who assumed a male name to match her tomboy personality. The novel won the Orange Prize in 2005. The book is written in the form of letters (though the adjective "epistolary" somehow sounds too 18th century here) from Eva to her absent and mute husband Franklin. The narrator states that it is not co-respondence but respondence. 

As the name suggests, Eva is the mother of the titular hero, who is currently in jail for staging a school massacre and murdering a dozen or so people with... a cross-bow (so, the novel is not a statement against the American law respecting citizens' right to possess guns). It is not even about Kevin - its dense, psychological prose would resemble patient's discourse if the letters to Franklin weren't so methodically written. The letters do function as therapy - Eva tries to understand why the tragedy happened. It is actually tempting to try applying a Freudian interpretation here. (I found a nice set of questions which might serve as discussion points )

The novel is considered to be feminist but - given such popular series as "Desperate Housewives" or "Sex and the City" - I wonder if the topic of maternal ambivalence is still controversial enough to earn the label for the book. Well, true, the conclusion that being a mother... turned my days  into an unending stream of shit and piss and cookies that Kevin didn't even like, or (this one is a diamond) that the real love shares more in common with hatred and rage than it does with geniality or politeness justly deserves the blurb motherhood gone awry. But then: really?

Eva narrates a situation from the prison, where she is waiting to pay the weekly visit to her son and starts talking to another delinquent's mother, Loretta. When Eva blames herself for the crime by admitting that she wasn't a very good mother, Loretta squeezes her hand, saying: It's always the mother's fault, ain't it? That boy turn out bad cause his mama a drunk, or a she a junkie. She let him run wild, she don't teach him right from wrong. She never home when he back from school. Nobody ever say his daddy a drunk, or his daddy not home after school. And nobody ever say they some kids just damned mean.  This is a very important moment - two women, victimized by their sons, blamed for the catastrophe by society, supporting each other by just being together and understanding. Maybe that is why the novel deserves to be called feminist? 

Anyway, though not an easy read, the book is definitely worth the effort, especially that the discovery at the end comes as a shock. The novel at times reminds me of Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child, which I wish I had not almost completely forgotten. Shriver's narrative will surely stay in my memory much longer.