Starting with the obvious, it turns out that Lionel is not a guy, but a woman, born in North carolina as a Margaret Ann who in her teenage years decided to become Lionel. She’s in her fifties, married to a musician, no children and living in London. Lionel or Margaret Ann as I sometimes think of her is an exceptionally gifted writer.
And yet her novel We Need to Talk About Kevin (winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2005) is not a delightful, blissful read. Oh, au contraire. It’s hard and painful as nails.
I decided to read this novel because I was so intrigued by the previews of the upcoming movie based on Shriver’s book featuring Tilda Swinton (Eva), John C. Reilly (Franklin) and Ezra Miller (Kevin), directed by Lynne Ramsay. Well, even Lionel liked the film (I have the preconceived notion that she is very hard to please).
The book is about our psyche and our heart, dealing with those feelings which most of the time we shy away from and rather not name or discuss: the ones that we don’t socially accept, those difficult-to-name visceral reactions that we should not ignore no matter how disagreeable.
Eva gets pregnant with Kevin and their relationship is anything but what we know or acknowledge as the norm: there is no gushing adoration, no emotional attachment between the two. It actually seems like there is a mutual rejection between infant and mother, in spite of Eva wanting to and working so hard to reach the image of being good at being a “good mother.” When alone with his mom baby Kevin will not stop crying, rejects his mother’s breast and milk, and is just plain difficult to appease and please. Eva is sheer ambivalence not only as a human being, but most especially as a mother. She knows what society expects her to feel and she sees she cannot call forth that persona as it relates to her son. Her husband Franklin tries to pretend all is normal, after all they’re talking about a defenseless baby ,he thinks, so he plays down his wife’s concerns and ambivalence.
As the years pass Eva realizes that that first impression, her intuition of being disliked by her son from the very beginning is true; throughout his childhood and now adolescence, he goes out of his way to make his mom’s life as miserable as he can, while leaving his dad under the impression that he is just your typical teenage boy. Franklin continues feeding on the image of a them being a “normal family,” whatever that might be. Of course, I do not know how things will pan out in the movie, but from my reading of the book, I felt that Franklin was just in a long-term act of self-deception, a dad unwilling to admit that his son is an “evil” human being, a really “bad seed.” After all evil does exist, remember Manson, Bundy, etc.? We do give life to human beings capable of doing so much damage and hurt without us really understanding the why? It seems to me that Eva has a hard time and assimiliates the belief that somehow, some way, she is responsible and played a role in her son becoming a mass murderer. Was it because of her undeniable maternal ambivalence from the get-go, never able to be your lovey-dovey mommy, your baby-talk mommy and whatever one might think makes a woman a good mother?
In my mind the valuable learning from this novel is precisely the possibility of accepting ambivalence in our feelings toward our offspring. They are not necessarily likeable all the time (we know sometimes they don’t like us, but they’re innocent right?, we are not.) We must love them absolutely and instinctively all the time. I guess in the long run, love will beat indifference, but like in Eva and Kevin’s case, it painfully is not the case in every single instance.
As a mother I know I sometimes need to be alone to remember who I am and what I like, to recover the essence of Me. And sometimes, my husband and maybe even my daughter do not understand that. But they do respect it, something I deeply appreciate. They don’t frown upon that I need to go to the movies on my own, or that I hide in a Barnes and Noble to read my books. I think they've learned that after these brief parentheses of alone time I can be the more tolerant and loving wife and mother they expect and deserve.
Maybe that was what was amiss in the Kevin novel. Eva didn’t find the support and validation from neither Franklin or Kevin to share her burden and open up to maybe consider her husband's and son's. Maybe Kevin, astute as he is, was able to perceive his mother’s extreme ambivalence and decided to ultimately pay her with murder and hatred, and with no one talking about it or addressing it, it might have felt for him that his parents just plain sucked, when all is that they were all too human.
My botttom line: This book is definitely in line for a second read and Shriver is an author worth reading. She has several novels. Right now I'm reading The Post-Birthday World.
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