19.10.2011

Leaving your front door unlocked

Claire Fisher reviews Lionel Shriver, We need to talk about Kevin (Serpent's Tail, 2005, pp496,

L ionel Shriver, the author of the literary (and now cinematographic) blockbuster We need to talk about Kevin, is an American. And, like many Americans in the post 9/11 era, she is fearful.

In the afterword to the book which was first published in America in 2003, she admits that her biggest fear is children, or rather, parenthood. Reflecting on pregnancy, she remarks: “Since just about any stranger could come knocking nine months later, coitus without contraception is, as Eva [her central character] observes, ‘like leaving your front door unlocked’.” The novel is a testament to this, and what many people would describe as a seemingly irrational, immature or specifically female response to what should be the most natural thing in the world.

But, as with all texts, there is a subtext. This review will try to argue that what seem to be irrational fears such as Shriver’s are largely the offspring of a system that is corrupted, broken and fundamentally in decline.

Constructed through letters written by Eva, a liberal American with an Armenian heritage, to her estranged husband, a bastion of Republican certainties, it reveals the intensely personal journey of a middle class couple conceiving, giving birth to and raising a child, Kevin Khatchadourian, who becomes the sole perpetrator of a high-school massacre in 1999. The plot itself is a mother’s worst nightmare, but Shriver’s use of it does not intend to insinuate that her personal fear is justified; it is used to explore the ‘what if’ syndrome that most parents must secretly foster.

Kevin has ballooned as a word-of-mouth phenomenon across the world - translated widely in Europe, as well as in the Middle East and China. However, for the purpose of this review I will solely concentrate on its position within America, where the story is set, and where, in my opinion, it currently holds the greatest weight and social significance.

The public’s response to Kevin, Shriver remarks, was twofold. Firstly there was the liberal response, which chalked Kevin up to be a bad seed, evil from birth, suggesting nothing that his mother could have done would have changed his maniacal trajectory. Secondly came the more conservative, Republican reaction, which finger-wagged that parents only get the children they deserved. Shriver remarks that she is happy with these two responses, as they cover the full ‘nature versus nurture’ argument she intended to provoke.

However, both arguments are limited. The family unit is a symptom of wider society; the nuclear family itself has been crafted over centuries by an increasingly paranoid ruling class and is in itself ‘unnatural’. By this I mean it does not allow humans to develop and grow in a positive, upwards spiral; rather it imprisons them in a cage crudely hewn by those desperate to control them. Eva’s sickly guilt, mixed with a stubborn craving for maternal redemption, and Kevin’s own destructive actions are both desperate responses to this societal abomination. Lynne Ramsay, the director of the film adaptation, sees this perhaps more clearly than the book’s author: “One of the subtexts is the façade of the functioning American family.”[1]

The story behind the publication of the book is rather telling in terms of America’s obsession with high-school killings. Shriver submitted the manuscript to her New York agent “right after 9/11, in that hilarious little window when everyone thought Americans would never read or watch anything violent again”. Consequently, it remained ‘unpublishable’ until 2003, after which the New York Observer printed an article “describing all these women on the Upper East Side biking a little-known novel to each other and convening coffee klatches to discuss it”. And from there it grew, and grew.

It is interesting to see how it was first picked up by what one would presume were middle class mothers - not that this novel is in any way what one could call in a derogatory manner ‘Hampstead ladies lit-fic’; rather it panders to a specifically middle class, American paranoia which, when targeted towards women, seems to have been irresistible to these ‘yummy mummies’. It is also likely that in liberal New York its message would have seemed more palatable than down in the southern, overwhelmingly Republican and Christian states, for reasons discussed above. Eva must appear to be the ultimate demon to them - and reading and talking about Kevin might even be considered ‘sinful’ to some.

The specific paranoia of the American government, presiding over the most recent capitalist superpower to begin to find its political and economic (if not cultural) hegemony slipping, has resonance within its wider society, and more specifically amongst its middle classes, who have more to protect than the lower echelons, and more to lose. This is another reason for the enduring popularity of Kevin, as Shriver toys with the empty shell middle class life has become.

Kevin, through his words and actions, sheds the harshest light on his family’s paranoid and vacuous nature. Of his father, Franklin, Kevin remarks, “Mister Plastic? … It was all cheery chirpy, hot dogs and Cheez Whiz. A total fraud, you know?” As is notable amongst Republican families, “the patriarch often [teaches] his children unconditional obedience to the existing civic authorities”,[2] and Kevin rebukes this ritualistic attitude that many (commonly middle class) parents employ, which, rather than allowing the child to learn, grow and feel loved, is usually seen by the child for what it is: an expression of the state’s stifling ideology imposed upon the family unit. “Their ‘patriotism’ has little to do with the founding fathers, the constitution or any of the other symbols they happen to evoke. It is rather a public affirmation of the kind of people they happen to be.”[3] And, as Eva remarks, “I did warn [Franklin] that children are unusually alert to artifice”.

If we move from the context of Kevin’s massacre, which contains problems which affect the majority of American families, and on to the ‘what if?’ scenario that affects the unfortunate minority of families, the high school slayings, it will become clear how the two are intrinsically linked. If we take a society that is in decline, we can only but find its symptoms.

The American school system itself has become a symptom of the infamous proliferation of high-school shootings, which began in the mid-90s. Virginia Tech, site of a famous real-life massacre, has been described as a “gigantic warehousing-cum-policing operation”[4] in response to the societal paranoia surrounding the killings, and in fact nearly every US college has its own dedicated police force. Kevin’s fictional school, Gladstone High, is no exception: “Gladstone High had taken on a battened-down, military atmosphere, except the McCarthyite presumption ran that the enemy was within,” Eva shrewdly comments. Kevin ironically states that if “they keep this up they’re just gonna give kids ideas.”

Chillingly, now it seems that, with the decline of America, and despite the desperate attempts of the government to create an external evil in the guise of the Taliban as a replacement for the communist threat of the 70s and 80s, American (specifically middle class) society is now mostly afraid of itself. This could be one explanation for the popularity of teenage TV shows such as Buffy the vampire slayer and Roswell High, which espoused the notion of the evil monster/alien, who gradually becomes interchangeable with the good/human characters.

In a deadly combination, this perceived threat exists alongside an increasingly dehumanising method of education, designed to produce well-rounded business men/women, as well as young adults who are ill-equipped to look at their society as a whole, and therefore unable to challenge its hegemonic capitalist structures. Bertell Ollman, an American Marxist lecturer, finds the root of modern childhood alienation to be the recent proliferation of exam culture in high schools: “Exams mediate all social relations in the educational system in a manner very similar to the way money - that other great mystifier and falsifier - mediates all relations between people in the larger society, with the same dehumanising results.”[5]

Kevin, it seems, is aware of, and antagonistic towards, this method. As Eva discovers, “Kevin’s papers always follow the assignment excessively to the letter. Whenever they are marked down, it is usually for being too short. There is nothing wrong with them. They are factually correct. Their spelling is accurate. On those rare occasions his teachers jot vague notes about how he might ‘take a more personal approach to the material’, they are unable to pinpoint in his essays this is precisely lacking.” In obviously reducing and dehumanising his schoolwork, Kevin is mocking the educational establishment.

It will not be obvious to many people how these problems in an American child’s life could actually create mass murderers. Indeed, many people would actively oppose the idea that the state could influence a person to such a violent end. The key to grasping the link lies in the concept of alienation. As Hegel comments, “By alienating the whole of my time … and everything I produced, I would be making into another’s property the substance of my being, my universal activity and actuality, my personality.”[6]

It is clear that alienation is more than the bourgeoisie claim it to be - put more plainly, if a human is exposed to a society that treats them as a resource to be exploited or controlled, then they will react negatively and unpredictably - sometimes, as in Kevin’s case, through an attempt to destroy the world that surrounds them. Interestingly, however, the liberal-minded Eva does not see it this way: “I certainly had no interest in an explanation that reduced the ineffable enormity of what he had done to a pat sociological aphorism about ‘alienation’ out of Time magazine.”

Finally, we come to the controversy surrounding American gun culture. Michael Moore would have you believe that the Columbine massacre was all Charlton Heston’s fault, that the pro-gun culture espoused by the National Rifle Association is chiefly to blame. Of course, it does not help, especially when the association visited Columbine directly after the shooting in an uppity ideological attack on the anti-gun movement.

However, the easy availability of guns only aids, and does not cause, violent crime in America. Over four in 10 households in America now have a gun, which amounts to 59.1 million people. But in Shriver’s novel, Kevin uses a crossbow. Eva believes that “his choice of weapon was meant to ensure to the best of his ability [the massacre] would mean nothing at all”. But she is incorrect in saying so - it in fact perfectly shows that the removal of guns from American houses will not abolish murder.

We need to talk about Kevin is a brilliant novel, and the film is equally tense and full of loaded questions. Shriver herself gives no answers to them, and neither does Ramsay. It is only through placing the texts within the disintegration of their culture - a society where the Tea Party appear to be the logical conclusion to an ever darkening American Dream, where the supposed source of strength and enlightenment, the family and the school, become hollow shells that create “monstrous” fears and actions - that its questions begin to be answered.

This review first appeared at Red Mist.

Notes

1. The Observer October 2.

2. J Creegan, 'Tea Party tempest' Weekly Worker March 18 2010.

3. Ibid.

4. E Ford, 'Right to bear arms, not commit murder' Weekly Worker April 19 2007.

5. B Ollman, 'Why so many exams? A Marxist response': www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/why_exams.php.

6. GWF Hegel, 'Philosophy of right' (1920): www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/prindex.htm.