'Before you condemn me utterly, I beg you to understand just how hard I’d been trying to be a good mother.'
'We need to talk about Kevin' is one of my favourite books and I will never tire of talking about it. It is essentially about a teenager who commits an atrocity and his mother. It is written in the form of letters from the mother to her estranged Husband, whilst this reminds us that the narrator is not completely reliable it also adds a level of personality and emotion to an event that is sadly common in our society.
The key theme I felt was explored was the debate of nature vs. nurture. The struggle throughout is to decide if Kevin was born to commit his crime and his mother was right to treat him warily or if his mother's lack of love and conviction that he was somehow disturbed was the contributing factor instead.
In a society increasingly concerned with issues such as post-natal depression and estrangement within the home which have failed to reach the public forum previously. The novel is written is such a way as to bring these issues to the forefront whilst still allowing us to draw our own opinions. In order to feel sympathy for the protagonist we need to reform our cultural formed ideas about motherhood and the duties of a mother to a child. It challenges the emotive topic of motherly love and questions the impact of its absence on a child.
The book also covers the issue of isolation, particularly the isolation of suburbia and the stay at home mum. Eva becomes completely isolated through first quitting her job, the activity from which she derives her sense of self, and being outcast to a house which has no personality in a neighbourhood where she has no friends to look after a child she does not, or will not love. She is effectively removed from her ability to have a sense of self, everything she previously valued and relied on is taken away unthinkingly by her Husband.
I will not ruin the twist that makes the entire book so much more chilling, but the isolation of Eva towards the end of the book is made even worse by her alienation from all parts of her family apart from her mother whom she eventually accepts as an ally. This reversal of the usual relationship between them drives home the true damage to her life after the lawsuit and the 'event'.
This boo is a stark portrait of the remains of a family coping in the wake of a tramatic event and the truly impersonal nature of the suburbs, their deadening effect and the removal of peronality in an eotionally isolating vacuum. The emotion of parenthood is removed and what is left behind is the reality of how much people give up for children and the pressure of the mother to have the required emotional connection to her child.
