Sometimes you just know a book isn’t right for you. It might have received great reviews and/or won a literary prize or two but you have no desire to read it and the reason is the subject matter. The subject may seem uninteresting, or it may be downright disturbing to think about and you can’t imagine why you’d want to spend your Sunday afternoons with it. The novel could be about a kid who turns into a mass murderer, for instance. And then, for some reason, you end up reading this novel and after that, whenever you and your writer friends have one of those best-books-you’ve-ever-read discussions, this particular novel is one you always bring up.
It’s like that, for me, with We Need To Talk About Kevin, by Lionel Shriver. I really did not want to read this novel. So what if it won the 2005 Orange Prize for fiction? (A lot of novels that win literary prizes leave me wondering about the IQs of the judges, but that’s for another post.) Then an acquaintance, a short story writer I admire, convinced me to give the novel a try. So I took Kevin out of the library. I didn’t want to go out on a limb and buy it because I was positive I wouldn’t read more than a chapter or two. After all, even reviewers who praised this book called it “disturbing.”
And it is disturbing. Kevin is an epistolary novel in which a mother writes to her estranged husband about their son, Kevin, who has killed seven of his fellow high-school students shortly before his sixteenth birthday. In the letters, the mother relates the story of Kevin’s upbringing. She’s a reluctant new mom and never bonds with her son properly. But then Kevin is not exactly a rosy-cheeked cherub. I turned each page with a sense of dread. But the book is one helluva page-turner and I did read it, the whole damn thing, and it’s one of the most powerful things I’ve ever read.
Reading it reminded me of the Greek notion of catharsis, that purging of emotion that leaves you empty inside. The afternoon I finished Kevin, I felt in the mood to drink lots of wine while staring at a blank wall.
Post-Kevin, I tried another Shriver novel, The Post-Birthday World, but I ended up not finishing it. A Perfectly Good Family didn’t really grab me, either. There’s a coldness to Shriver’s writing that doesn’t fit every subject, I think. A writer can’t hit the ball out of the park every time.
Now Shriver’s come out with So Much for That, which purportedly tackles the U.S. health system, the cost of care and the question of whether or not we can (or should) put a price on human life. This sounds like a topic the cool pen of Shriver could take on in a way no other writer could. I’m looking forward to reading it, soon.
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I’m totally with you on We Need to Talk About
Kevin, and had the same reaction to the earlier Shriver books (which I also
read post-Kevin). I’ve just finished So Much for That, and yes, this is one
where the cool pen (I like that) does the subject justice. Hope you pick it
up soon!