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  • Improbable American psycho

    Improbable American psycho

    Irish Times
    Apr 02, 2005

    Eileen Battersby


    Fiction A mother attempts to make sense of the ongoing horror of a
    life perverted by her remorseless monster of a son. This book,
    certainly the most repellent and easily one of the least convincing I
    have ever read, could be seen as a cautionary tale about parents and
    children, and most specifically the ambivalence of motherhood, if it
    wasn't so crassly and aggressively presented.

    Its sensationalism, as well as its theme, that of the high-school
    massacre phenomenon across the US, may grip some readers, but far more
    seriously, it will also exploit them. That such a book is on the
    longlist for this year's Orange Prize, the aim of which is to
    celebrate excellence, originality and accessibility in women's
    writing, galls.

    So evil stalks well-heeled suburbia as relentlessly as it does the
    tenements of big cities. Sometimes the offspring of the wealthy are
    simply so satiated by all they have, they just have to rebel, or in
    the case of Kevin, insult and kill.

    No doubt Lionel Shriver's grotesque narrative is intended as a
    profoundly candid expose of US consumerist society's culpability in
    the creation of misfits. The concept that we reap what we sow has
    seldom, if ever, been presented quite as graphically.

    After all, this is a family in which a little girl is given an exotic
    zoo animal as a pet and a dangerous boy is presented with his very own
    crossbow.

    For all the praise that has been directed at the all-too-topical We
    Need To Talk About Kevin, which may well be a serious sociologically
    based satire presented in the form of a novel, the sheer viciousness
    of narrator Eva, a successful businesswoman who had been happily, nay
    smugly, married to Franklin before deciding to have a late first baby,
    dilutes the impact. Shriver is a wordy writer; Eva, her narrator, is
    equally wordy - and caustic with it. She is opinionated and
    intolerant, smart-alec but not funny - as her horrible son remarks:
    "Is there anything, or anybody, you don't feel superior to?" - and she
    is also rather taken with her confessional self-analysis.

    All of which unfolds through contrived, retrospective letters written
    to her husband, a caricature doting father who can see no wrong with
    their obnoxiously insolent son. The ridiculous Franklin defends the
    brat child who develops into a dangerous adolescent and mass
    killer. Even more unbelievably, this same doting father consistently
    jeers at the couple's second child, the nervous little Celia, to whose
    birth he had objected.

    The couple consistently divide on the subject of Kevin. Early in the
    book, it is obvious that Eva is not writing to her husband, she is
    writing to herself - and in this technical weakness lies the failure
    of Shriver's relentless narrative. Eva is the daughter of Armenian
    emigrants. She has made a fortune through writing travel guides; she
    may know the cheapest ways to travel the world, but such is her
    arrogance that she knows no one.

    Kevin the problem baby does not like his mother, and remains in
    diapers until he is six years old. It is a form of protest. No
    childminder can tolerate him. His snide utterances belie his tender
    years and as he grows older he begins to express himself with the
    gutter eloquence of a hardened gangland veteran. He is also presented
    as a cunning genius who conceals his intelligence.

    Nothing is believable. No man, not even a determinedly loving father
    weary of his arrogant, wealthy wife and her scathing anti-American
    rhetoric, could possibly tolerate a son like Kevin. The boy sneers,
    lies, dresses in clothes several sizes too small for him, and
    eventually takes to masturbating in full view of Eva. Then there is
    the blinding of Celia, left in Kevin's care because dad believes the
    young thug is sufficiently mature to mind her. Does Shriver honestly,
    albeit simplistically, reckon that mass killers are the products of
    weak dads and vain, ageing mothers possessed of too much mouth? Even
    as Kevin's crimes against other people multiply - the sabotage of a
    bike, which injures a boy; the rocks hurled from a bridge on passing
    cars; the harassment of female classmates; the accusations of sexual
    abuse against a female drama teacher - dad stands by his boy, accusing
    Eva of not loving poor little Kevin. It is sickening stuff. This is
    not due to Shriver's rather crude narrative skills but solely to the
    voyeuristic, conversational nastiness of her novel, which is far more
    offensive than Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho, an infinitely
    better book.

    After 400 pages of abnormal recall, recalled at length, there are few
    answers and little feeling - just Kevin in prison, playing with his
    sister's glass eye. It is a repulsive story, as much for its "I kid
    you not" quasi-reportage narrative voice as for its content.

    Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times

    We Need To Talk About Kevin By Lionel Shriver Serpent's Tail,
    400pp. GBP9.99
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