we need to talk about kevin by lionel shriver

#We need to talk about kevin by lionel shriver series#

In times past, I was inoculated against that anxiety because I sold any number of options to previous books and they never turned into films. Is it difficult to turn your work over to someone else for adaptation? But you never know, whether in opening a window, it suddenly closes again because people think we've now done that. The Big C, might make it a little easier to sell the rights to my novel So Much For That to film, because suddenly it's okay to do stories that involve cancer. For example, I have hopes that a comedy like 50/50, or. Do you think these are emotions we wall off as much as we can, and when we're forced to deal with them, cope with them all at once as Eva seems to in her letters to her husband Franklin?īy and large, when films, or for that matter books, break new ground or go into territories that previously other people have avoided, it makes it a little easier for others to come along and explore those same things. We Need to Talk About Kevin is coming near the releases of two other movies about shame and disgust, Steve McQueen's Shame and Diablo Cody and Jason Reitman's Young Adult. We spoke to Shriver about what it's like for a novelist to hand her work over for adaptation, why you can leave your country of origin but not transcend it, and why anyone has children in an era of widely available birth control. The novel is an unflinching look at a set of emotions that are often considered unacceptable for polite conversation, including the failure of mothers to bond with and to love or trust their children. The movie, based on a 2003 novel by Lionel Shriver, follows Eva (Tilda Swinton), the mother of Kevin (Ezra Miller), who committed a massacre at his high school, as she tries to decide if she was responsible for turning him into a monster-or if he was one all along. (May)įorecast: The subject, unfortunately, is nearly always timely, and this by no means sensationalist account can be confidently sold as the best novel of its kind in fact, the extent of the author's insights should make her very promotable.We Need to Talk About Kevin expands to more theaters this week. It's a harrowing, psychologically astute, sometimes even darkly humorous novel, with a clear-eyed, hard-won ending and a tough-minded sense of the difficult, often painful human enterprise. This seems a gimmicky way to tell the story, but is in fact surprisingly effective in its picture of an affectionate couple who are poles apart, and enables Shriver to pull off a huge and crushing shock far into her tale.

#We need to talk about kevin by lionel shriver series#

The narrative, which leads with quickening and horrifying inevitability to the moment when Kevin massacres seven of his schoolmates and a teacher at his upstate New York high school, is told as a series of letters from Eva to an apparently estranged Franklin, after Kevin has been put in a prison for juvenile offenders. The later birth of a sister who is his opposite in every way, deeply affectionate and fragile, does nothing to help, and Eva always suspects his role in an accident that befalls little Celia.

From the start Eva is ambivalent about him, never sure if she really wanted a child, and he is balefully hostile toward her only good-old-boy Franklin, hoping for the best, manages to overlook his son's faults as he grows older, a largely silent, cynical, often malevolent child. Eva Khatchadourian is a smart, skeptical New Yorker whose impulsive marriage to Franklin, a much more conventional person, bears fruit, to her surprise and confessed disquiet, in baby Kevin. A gifted journalist as well as the author of seven novels, she brings to her story a keen understanding of the intricacies of marital and parental relationships as well as a narrative pace that is both compelling and thoughtful. Counterpoint, $25 (416p) ISBN 1-58243-267-8Ī number of fictional attempts have been made to portray what might lead a teenager to kill a number of schoolmates or teachers, Columbine style, but Shriver's is the most triumphantly accomplished by far. WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN Lionel Shriver. A review with a blue-tinted title indicates a book of unusual commercial interest that hasn't received a starred or boxed review.

A starred or boxed review indicates a book of outstanding quality.