Hello, welcome back to Chari, my name is Charlotte and today we are going to talk about we need to talk about Kevin by Lionel Schreiber. This came out in 2003. It tells a story of Ava Eva, writing letters to her estranged husband Franklin about their son Kevin, who three days before he turned 16, murdered nine people in his school. It alternates between Ava's present day, two years after the fact and her going back from before Kevin was even born to talk about her reasons for having children, her relationship with her husband and like Kevin's life leading up to this moment. One of the biggest and most important themes in this book is motherhood. Eva doesn't really want to have a child but her husband Franklin, who she absolutely adores, does want to. So she relatively agrees to have a child and then is really deeply unhappy with how having a child has affected her life. Both in the fact that she runs a successful travel guide company and she has to give up all of that travel and give up working in the company when she has Franklin. Franklin is a very missanthropic child who doesn't make life easy for either as a first-time mother. Reading the acknowledgments of the book were quite illuminating because Schreiber wrote the book while she was considering and feeling ambivalent towards motherhood in a hope to kind of drive a yes or no out of her. She in fact decided not to have children and applaud people that do because they're so courageous but this is it's kind of like an embodiment of all of her fears of becoming a mother and becoming so detached from all of the things that she held dear before and also just like a deep fear of not connecting to your child and not really having much control over that. There's definitely a lot of ruminating on why to have children and if you don't have children what is the purpose of your life. To answer one's life or the successive life is simply to transfer the onus of purpose to the next generation. The displacement amounts to a cowardly and potentially infinite delay. That's quite a nihilistic view on procreation but it holds true that even in Franklin neither of them could think of an answer to the big question as they call it. I think it's in that small crack of either not really feeling sure that she does have a deep purpose that she gives into Franklin and has this child. We see this played out in the traditional family structure that's developed at the start of the book. Even Franklin, living in New York City, madly in love, she travels for like four months of the year, booming business but then when they have Kevin Franklin convinces her to move to the suburbs for a better life, better schools, etc. into this enormous modern house that either hates entirely. It's not only hating the house for its architectural wherever it's hating what it represents that she's become this middle-aged, funny, duddy, nuclear family kind of person who can't go and explore Africa at her whim. Her dissatisfaction with living this like traditional American middle-aged lifestyle is sort of brought into like how and why Kevin would act the way he acted. There's a bit where he was talking to one of Franklin's teachers and the teacher said he rebels by doing everything he's supposed to. It's very clever but I look in his eyes and he's raging why? Maybe he's mad that this is as good as it gets. Your big house, his good school, I think it's very difficult for kids he says in a way. The country's very prosperity has become a burden, a dead end. Everything works, doesn't it? At least if you're white in middle class. So it must often seem to young people, they're not needed in a sense is as if there's nothing more to do. And you can see how that sentiment actually really resonates with Eva because she also feels like she's been pulled back into this white suburban middle-class life where there isn't any passion left anymore. And in many ways it's strange to see her throughout the book sympathise with Kevin because she actually has the same frustrations. Another big theme of the book is the differing perspectives of Eva and Franklin. From birth, Eva has always seen Kevin as a tormentor, as pure evil and some of the things he does are purely spiteful but Franklin says no he's just a totally normal boy, he is totally normal with me. I don't know what you're seeing or saying. Sure he's done some silly things but that's just what kids are like they mess up. I think for a lot of the book until like obviously the climax where he kills lots of people it's left really ambiguous as to who is right and who is wrong in that regard. There are a few times where Eva accuses Kevin of having done something and she's proven wrong. He actually hasn't done the bad thing and all of the really, really evil things that do happen in the book are left so ambiguous as to maybe not have been Kevin's fault. And you don't want to believe Kevin is pure evil because you don't want that to be a possibility for you to give birth to something that is pure evil. The book doesn't really give you license to describe Kevin as anywhere but the fine ends of that spectrum where he is pure evil or he is a completely normal child. Obviously the things that happen at the end of the book do really validate either and you can say that Franklin's been naive or been gaslighting but one of the things I found really interesting when I was discussing this book with my book club is that I had a lot of sympathy for Eva. I could see that she had some errors but I don't I do think that Kevin was evil but they were more of the opinion that Eva threw her relentless belief that Kevin was evil and like fostered that within him and that encouraged him to act out but I just don't see that at all and I think that's one of the biggest flaws in the book it's the thing I liked the least it's that I don't I don't buy that there are pure evil children. From the age of zero that is what the narrative is espousing. I just don't think people kill senselessly. I don't think they foster household that would be conducive to that sort of evil thinking um Kevin didn't seem to have any actual like mental health issues. He just went and killed a bunch of people purely to spite his mother, purely to spite his mother and I don't believe that but in many ways that doesn't really matter because the book isn't about the murders. The killings are almost kind of incidental and that means that when you get around to the bit where it's describing this like horrific set of events it feels very torture-poony because by that time you really understood that the book is about motherhood and the fears of motherhood and not about Kevin. There's a wonderfully self-referential bit towards the end where Kevin has done an interview from his juvenile detention center um about why he killed everyone and although either doesn't buy this one lick um he explains that the reason he did it is because it's the natural passage in America for there to be villains and there to be heroes and that the public needs some sort of spectacle to watch and that he did it for the spectacle which is markedly ironic because a lot of people including myself would have picked up this book not because it's about a relationship between and mother and his son but because it it's about murder and it talks a lot about school shootings and that's the draw um in fact Eva says I was struck despite myself by what a sizeable proportion of our species feeds off the depravity the handful of reprobates and that's definitely the pull to this book without actually being the content I'd say I definitely went into it thinking that it would be about school shootings it would be about Kevin's psychology rather than his surroundings and therefore when I was like halfway through and Kevin was only six years old and we spent so much time talking about um about motherhood the decision to have children and all you get up through that um I was slightly disgruntled because I it wasn't what I expected so if you're looking for a book purely based on that morbid curiosity um I feel like it sort of gets satisfied in here but that is not the main content of it I have to say I like it because it's a weird thing to enjoy but it's definitely prompted a lot of thoughts and actually a fantastic book club discussion um and it was well written did I like it I don't think I liked it especially towards the end it feels like all of the content in the book happened in the last hundred pages um it was very interesting so this has been a video on we talk about Kevin by Lionel Shriver um let me know your thoughts about my thoughts down in the comments and I'll catch you in another video soon thanks a lot for watching bye