We Need to Talk About Kevin - by Lionel Shriver

This is a remarkable book. It basically tells the story from Kevin's birth up until a while after he committed the massacre. The mechanism of telling it by means of a series of letters is not totally original, but is very effective and, by the end of the book, seems the only way that it could have been told.

The book is beautifully written and well deserved the Orange Prize.

The author is very observant and puts things into words that one may have thought, but never been able to express, for example:

We have explicit expectations of ourselves in specific situations - beyond expectations: they are requirements. Some of these are small: If we are given a surprise party, we will be delighted. Others are sizeable: If a parent dies, we will be grief-stricken. But perhaps in tandem with these expectations is the private fear that we will fail convention in the crunch. That we will receive the fateful phone call and our mother is dead and we feel nothing. I wonder if this quiet, unutterable little fear is even keener than the fear of the bad news itself: that we will discover ourselves to be monstrous.

Her descriptive prose is very evocative:

As ever, I marveled at your appetite, recently revived; you may have been the last WASP in America who still regularly breakfasted on two eggs, bacon, sausage, and toast. I could never manage more than coffee, but I loved the sizzle of smoked pork, the fragrance of browning bread, and the general atmosphere of relish for the day ahead that this ritual fostered. The sheer vigor with which you prepared this feast must have scrubbed your arteries of its consequences.

Her skill with metaphor is outstanding. Instead of using them for effect, they are always used to say something that would be harder in "straight" text, for example:

For about five minutes no one said anything, and then we gradually resumed the pretense of an ordinary morning, making no mention of Kevin's outburst the way polite people are meant to pretend they didn't notice the release of a load fart. Still the smell lingered, if less of gas than of cordite.

This book has the key elements that make me enjoy reading: it has a beginning, middle and end; the characters are well drawn; the pace is just right and keeps me turning the pages; there is a very unexpected twist at the end that really makes you draw breath.

Although this is a shocking story, it is not the stuff of nightmares. It's a tale which will stay with me for a long time.