{"id":8,"date":"2012-09-20T10:05:22","date_gmt":"2012-09-20T10:05:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/clc.sllf.qmul.ac.uk\/?p=8"},"modified":"2023-11-17T10:23:18","modified_gmt":"2023-11-17T10:23:18","slug":"post-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/clc.sllf.qmul.ac.uk\/?p=8","title":{"rendered":"We Need to Talk about Kevin"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Extract<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u2018When I brushed on the last rectangle by the window, a topographical map of Norway stitched with fjords, I climbed down the ladder and surveyed the results with a twirl. It was gorgeous! Dynamic, quirky, lavishly sentimental. Interstitial train ticket stubs, museum floor plans, and hotel receipts gave the collage an additionally personal touch. I had forced one patch of this blank, witless house to mean something. I put on Joe Jackson\u2019s Big World, lidded the paste, furled the canvas covering my six-foot rolltop desk, rattled it open, and unpacked my last box, arranging my stand of antique cartridge pens and bottles of red and black ink, the Scotch tape, stapler, and tchotchkes for fidgeting \u2013 the miniature Swiss cowbell, the terra-cotta penitent from Spain.
\nMeanwhile, I was burbling to Kevin, something all very Virginia Woolf like, \u2018Everyone needs a room of their own. You know how you have your room? Well, this is Mommer\u2019s room. And everyone likes to make their room special. Mommer\u2019s been lots of different places, and all these maps remind me of the trips I\u2019ve taken. You\u2019ll see, you may want to make your room special some day, and I\u2019ll help you if you want\u2013 \u2019
\n\u2018What do you mean special,\u2019 he said, hugging one elbow. In his drooping free hand drizzled his squirt gun, whose leakage had worsened. Although he was still slight for his age, I\u2019d rarely met anyone who took up more metaphysical space. A sulking gravity never let you forget he was there, and if he said little, he was always watching.\u2018So it looks like your personality.\u2019\u2018What personality.\u2019I felt sure I\u2019d explained the word before. I was continually feeding him vocabulary, or who was Shakespeare; educational chatter filled the void. I had a feeling he wished I\u2019d shut up. There seemed no end to the information that he did not want.<\/p>\n

\u2018Like your squirt gun, that\u2019s part of your personality.\u2019 I refrained from adding, like the way you ruined my favourite caftan, that\u2019s part of your personality. Or the way you\u2019re still shitting in diapers coming on five years old, that\u2019s part of your personality, too. \u2018Anyway, Kevin, you\u2019re being stubborn. I think you know what I mean.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018I have to put junk on the walls.\u2019 He sounded put-upon.<\/p>\n

\u2018Unless you\u2019d rather not.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018I\u2019d rather not.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018Great, we\u2019ve found one more thing you don\u2019t want to do,\u2019 I said. \u2018You don\u2019t like to go to the park and you don\u2019t like to listen to music and you don\u2019t like to eat and you don\u2019t like to play with Lego. I bet you couldn\u2019t think of one more thing you don\u2019t like if you tried.\u2019
\n\u2018All these squiggy squares of paper,\u2019 he supplied promptly. \u2018They\u2019re dumb.\u2019 After Idonlikedat, dumb was his favourite word.<\/p>\n

\u2018That\u2019s the thing about your own room, Kevin. It\u2019s nobody else\u2019s business. I don\u2019t care if you think my maps are dumb. I like them.\u2019 I remember raising an umbrella of defiance: He wouldn\u2019t rain on this parade. My study looked terrific, it was all mine, I would sit at my desk and play grown-up, and I could not wait to screw on my crowning touch, a bolt on its door. Yes, I\u2019d commissioned a local carpenter and had added a door.<\/p>\n

But Kevin wouldn\u2019t let the matter drop. There was something he wanted to tell me. \u2018I don\u2019t get it. It was all gucky. And it took forever. Now everything looks dumb. What difference does it make. Why\u2019d you bother.\u2019 He stamped his foot. \u2018It\u2019s dumb!\u2019 \u2019<\/p>\n

From Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Commentary<\/strong><\/p>\n

Schriver\u2019s We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003) is as widely read across the world as its narrator and central protagonist, Eva, is well travelled. In addition to its popular appeal, the novel has also received considerable critical acclaim. It reached an even wider audience thanks to the 2011 film adaptation of the novel starring Tilda Swinton and Ezra Miller. Adopting an epistolary form (with a twist), the novel presents the troubled relationship between Eva and her son, Kevin, who commits seemingly unmotivated mass murder. The episode of decoration and destrution from which this extract is taken is highly significant as an early instance of what Eva will later refer to as \u2018character assassination\u2019 \u2013 the desecration and annhiliation by Kevin of what a person holds dear, of who a person is. Ostensibly we see here Kevin as criminal, as malicious deviant who uses a water gun to cover his mother\u2019s labours in ink. But there are also hints here towards Kevin the victim, more sinned against than sinning.
\nBy this point in the novel, the family have moved from Manhattan to the suburbs and Eva has stopped working at the head of her own travel guide company. She is a fish out of water in suburbia, and this is compounded by her intense dislike of the open-plan house chosen by her husband.
\nThe pasting of maps onto the walls of her study is an effort to feel more at home, and to make a bold statement about her identity. In this dialogue-dominated extract we see the contrasting initial reactions of Eva and Kevin to this cartographic endeavour, as well as the mother\u2019s response to that of her son.
\nEva\u2019s pleasure and delight is firmly established in the first verb- and noun-heavy paragraph. Her cosmopolitan character and impeccable taste is crystal clear in the objects displayed against the backdrop of the maps. She unreservedly praises her own achievement and presents herself as capable, determined and powerful, having \u2018forced one patch of this blank, witless house to mean something.\u2019 Although an intensely personal and idiosyncratic process, she nevertheless makes an effort to reach out to Kevin, to include and involve him I what she has done.
\nBut Kevin\u2019s response is as negative as his mother\u2019s is positive and his very short interjections contrast with her extended babble and reflections. What is meaningful and beautiful to Eva is \u2018junk on the walls\u2019 to Kevin. Shorn of a question mark, the ambiguous interjection, \u2018What personality\u2019, suggests that he doesn\u2019t understand the word or that he\u2019s wilfully playing dumb (Eva\u2019s interpretation), or perhaps that he is struggling to apply to himself this process of representing one\u2019s identity via things held dear. Underlying the latter possibility is the chilling suggestion that he has understood the process but can find only a void where his personality should be. The dismissive and disparaging attitude towards the room reaches a crescendo in the final outburst which constitutes his longest dialogue but which is still made up of a series of short staccato phrases. The negativity continues (cf the repetition of \u2018dumb\u2019), but there is also a clear sense of perplexity and frustration, of futility and even nihilism. As before, the absence of interrogation marks renders what would normally be questions as mere observations instead, suggesting a blunt lack of interaction. Kevin\u2019s strangeness is strongly emphasised here, making it hard to spontaneously sympathise with him.
\nEva\u2019s response to the continual negativity is highly revealing. She dismisses his dismissal, refuses to let his response bring her down, just as in a few pages she will destroy his water gun in response to his destruction. There is perhaps more complicity between mother and son than first meets the eye. At the same time, there is also a sort of role reversal going on. Eva is defiant, an attitude frequently associated with children rather than mature adults, while Kevin demonstrates a more adult world-weariness. Similarly, it is children who \u2018play grown-up\u2019, an expression typical of Eva\u2019s sardonic sense of humour, but which also suggests her sense of having been deprived her adulthood along with her freedom. Eva is clearly longing for isolation, for distance (from Kevin) and self-immersion. It\u2019s as though she wants to pretend she isn\u2019t a mother at all, to escape and return to her former life. She may invite Kevin to follow her lead and get involved, but the act she undertakes, the way in which she decorates her room, is basically a gigantic billboard advertising everything she\u2019s lost and given up. Perhaps Kevin\u2019s deflationist response, his bursting of his mother\u2019s bubble of joy, isn\u2019t as unreasonable and disturbing in its lack of enthusiasm as it at first seems… or as Eva \u2013 our narrator \u2013 makes it seem.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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