reviewed by Grayson Perry … continued

The son Kevin is a brilliantly realised character who at first seems cartoonishly evil but I found a hard-won compassion for him towards the finish. I enjoyed his predilection for undersize clothes and his realisation that to care about nothing is a powerful position. He has the ultimate in cool: he hates all enthusiasms, all creativity. He is wracked by the big questions and senses life is meaningless apart from the meaning we give it but fails to find a way into making one for himself. Gradually Kevin comes across as the one who has the integrity even if it turns out to be destructively twisted.

I found myself drawing parallels between this work and Phillip Roth’s American Pastoral. Both are an indictment of the American dream. Shriver has smug liberal baby boomers in her crosshairs and Kevin is a chillingly good shot. Eva represents immigrant energy, feisty feminism and irony. Her husband Franklin is for down-home Norman Rockwell mom and pop Americana. Kevin’s soul is their battleground.

As a culture we all need to talk about ‘Kevin’, all the disaffected boys with an unfathomable grudge. How do we bring them up to be responsible happy men.? If some people think women’s literature is too focussed on domestic issues I say what if Kevin grew up to be Saddam and took out his filial fury on a whole people?

I would rank We Need to Talk About Kevin with its beautifully-dissected and moving account of a dysfunctional family alongside Jonathan Frantzen’s The Corrections. I truly felt I was reading the winner of this year’s Orange Prize.

This book struck particular chords for me. I’m glad I didn’t have easy access to serious weaponry when I was a teenager full of buried rage. I wondered did my mother ever think about me like Eva does about her son? The crackling silences across the dining table where very familiar to me. I cried in sympathy for their doomed relationship.

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