In the novel's first sentence, Eva tells her husband that she is unsure why she is writing to him We must accept that she would have the time to write so copiously and so eloquently. you want to hear about the visit itself - what his mood's like, how he's looking, what he said."įor all its resources, the epistolary form is awkward. "I know you, my dear, and you're impatient. "I know I wrote only yesterday, but I now depend on this correspondence to debrief." There is also some reason why she has to describe their son's demeanour exactly to him. After visiting the sardonically unrepentant Kevin in his detention centre, Eva even apologises for her addiction to epistolary record. Her letter-writing acquires a purpose in itself. "I am superstitiously convinced he was foot-dragging even in the womb - that he was hiding." Her narrator even toys with the idea that her son's late delivery signified his sullen disgust for life. Shriver gives a devilish twist to the narrative unreliability of all parents, glibly discovering in their children's early years the signs of later traits. After all, she admits that she finds it hard to reconstruct the past "without contaminating the memories with the outsized regret of later years". Even if we do not doubt specific events, her discovery in her child of cunning and malevolence might be thought the wisdom or the illusion of hindsight. Many readers have commented on Eva's unreliability. "You blame him for everything that goes wrong around this house," complains Franklin. Richardson called such correspondence "familiar letters" - confidential, but also therefore self-critical. ", Eva concedes, as she confesses to her husband that she always hated the suburban house he chose to be their happy family home. "I do hope you're not feeling sorry for me it's not my intention that you do." "I know I sound ungrateful. In the wake of the massacre, the antagonism becomes the narrator's guarantee that she is not appealing for sympathy, nor playing the victim. The father continually exonerates the son, who ingratiatingly plays up to paternal expectations of masculine matiness. There is antagonism because husband and wife might naturally quarrel over responsibility for their son's actions. "Before you get your back up, I don't mean that as a criticism." When Eva remembers her inability to feel tender towards Kevin as a small baby, she also remembers Franklin's "generic" adoration of their new son, his responses undimmed by the howling, unresponsive baby. "I won't go on, because you know exactly what I'm talking about." This narrator understands her reader almost too well. You can hear it clearly when the letter form is used for conversational retort. Shriver has rediscovered the combination of intimacy and antagonism that comes when the narrator is writing to a person she knows and loves. "On this point I'm brooking no argument, and I intend to take ruthless advantage of the fact that this is my account, to whose perspective you have no choice but to submit." When she recalls how their daughter Celia, seven years younger than Kevin, adored her brother even while he sadistically manipulated her, she characteristically senses Franklin's response. She knows that he would tell a different story. Eva is not, as it were, writing for us she is writing for Franklin, and continually rebutting his different ideas about their son. Partly it is for the letter-writer's self-consciousness about explaining herself. Why does Shriver choose it for her modern nightmare? Some of the pioneers of the English novel in the 18th century, notably Samuel Richardson, used the novel-in-letters to explore human psychology, but the highly artificial form was abandoned in the 19th century. ", writes Eva to Franklin in the book's first letter. These letters are written by Kevin's mother, Eva, to her apparently estranged husband, Kevin's father, Franklin. It is also an "epistolary novel": a narrative composed entirely of letters. It is the story of Kevin, a boy who has shot dead seven fellow pupils and a teacher at his suburban high school. The strangest thing about Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin is that this thoroughly contemporary tale employs an old-fashioned fictional form.
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