We Need to Talk

We Need to Talk About Kevin - Lionel Shriver (Harper Perennial, 2003)

Do you believe me that I picked out this book to read next before Aurora happened? The idea of reading a novel about the aftermath (ish) of a mass shooting seemed a little much to handle, but I pushed on. And was in the thick of it when the Oak Creek shooting occurred. All of which could send me off on a diatribe about violence and weapons and cavalier disregard for the sanctity of human life and and and.

But no. This novel has too much to say on its own. The Post-Birthday World is one of my favorite novels - although no one I've foisted it on has enjoyed it as much as I did - but this one is the award-winner. And it was time to tackle something difficult.

It's November 2000, about 18 months after Eva's son changed their worlds forever by murdering a handful of classmates and two school staff members, about a week before Columbine. And Eva shares her story in epistolary fashion, in a series of letters to her estranged husband. The result is three narratives that unfold over about six months, with the final letter in April 2001. The first is world events; remember that election? and how it dominated everything? The second takes us back in time, as Eva details the couple's decision to have a baby, and the child's early years. The third is also current, about her ongoing relationship with Kevin, her visits to him in the juvenile prison upstate, as she strives to come to terms - to the extent such a phrase even makes sense - with his horrific acts, and her part in them.

Never has anything made me so scared about the prospect of having a child. From even before his birth, Eva was uneasy about Kevin. And Kevin made everyone uneasy except her husband, who desperation to adore his own son is so touchingly naive as seen through Eva's eyes. Whether or not Kevin was really a sociopath from Day One, how terrifying to consider not loving your own child.

And then some sort of trigger switched inside me. Eva does this complicated dance, of assuming all the responsibility for Kevin and his actions, and simultaneously abjuring it in favor of an argument that sort of runs, "I tried to warn you about him." It made me uncomfortable, which I can only assume was Shriver's intent. As are the growing signs that maybe Eva really is to blame, that maybe Kevin has always, desperately, sought his mother's love and affection. That maybe his malicious attacks on people's passions were both a way of destroying what he didn't have and couldn't abide in others. And even more so, a cry for his mom to notice and love him.

I feel terribly inarticulate trying to get at what I mean. Besides, did I really just place the responsibility for all these murders on this poor woman's shoulders? Plenty of people have awful parents who they fear don't really love them, and the vast majority of these people do not become killers at age 15. It's pretty much bullshit to absolve Kevin of any responsibility. And yet, I fear he just wanted to impress her. Although impress isn't quite the right word.

Before I fall too deeply down a rabbit hole, let me just say what I probably should have said in summary from the very start: this novel disquieted me in ways that few novels have. I will be thinking about Kevin for a long time to come.

The wisdom of young fools

The Two Lives of Miss Charlotte Merryweather - Alexandra Potter (Plume 2010)

I've mentioned enough times my complete adoration for parallel universes and the ability to be able to see the paths not taken, to measure out opportunity costs. I, for one, will probably always wonder about the Erin out there who went not to DC, but to Toronto, and where she is now. But Sliding Doors and The Post-Birthday World and now Potter's novel serve as a good reminder that it's the little moments, not the big decisions, that have the biggest impact.

And this isn't actually particularly Sliding Doors. This book came across my desk at the library, and I was charmed by the cover, so I kept an eye on it, and as soon as I finished my last final, snagged it the second it came back in the door of the library. It seemed light, refreshing, set in London, and fun - everything I needed at the end of the semester.

So Charlotte. Is on the verge of 32 and a total stressball. A successful stressball, but still. And then a traffic detour shoots her through a wormhole (I guess?) and back to 1997, where her 21-year-old expat self is a happy-go-lucky bundle of Id. Young Charlotte doesn't recognize the now-blond, thinner (stressball) Charlotte as herself, and so Older Charlotte decides to impart some life lessons. (Lessons that she has apparently learned over 10 years, but I guess she wants to speed up the process?) And quelle surprise, it turns out Charlotte has a lot to learn from her younger self, especially about love.

It's a consummate beach read, and really quite charming. (And Potter - who incidentally has an adorable website - has also written the obligatory Mr. Darcy novel, so I'm sure I'll have to check it out too.)

Best of the 00s

(Reposted, a bit late, from Facebook, b/c clearly I have my priorities straight.)
This list was impossible to put together. In the end, I just went back through my blog, which only covers the second half of the decade. So it's my favorite books that were published 2000-09 that I read in 2005-09, with one exception, which was my favorite book of the decade and thus had to be included. It ended up being a slightly surprising list, because some of these I didn't particularly seem to like that much when I first read and posted about them. Who knows how favorites are made?

10. Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Marisha Pessl
9. Consider the Lobster, David Foster Wallace (which prob benefited from an Infinite Jest bounce)
8. The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion
7. The Abstinence Teacher, Tom Perrotta
6. Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
5. The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger
4. Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen
3. The History of Love, Nicole Krauss
2. The Post-Birthday World, Lionel Shriver (2)
1. My Name is Red, Orhan Pamuk (no review, but here are a couple other posts...)

I have no self-control

Books that I have acquired on or since Christmas:

Fire in the Blood, Irene Nemirovsky
Man Walks Into a Room, Nicole Krauss
The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
We Need to Talk About Kevin, Lionel Shriver
Lady Chatterley's Lover, D.H. Lawrence
The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton

I have already read Bros K, so this is only for my library, but for the other five, any bets on how many will actually get read in 2008?

You can't always get what you want...

... but you just might find, you get what you need.

Shriver's The Post-Birthday World continued to delight me. It was so honest. That there are no perfect choices. That when two paths diverge in a wood, both have their merits. And we get to inspect the ramifications, on both sides, of a fateful kiss (or not).

Since I've already shared some thoughts on the book, I thought I'd just do special quotes instead.

She theorized that for everyone there was that one high you couldn't refuse, for which you'd sell your soul - and anyone else's. [...] Thus the only protection from yourself in this instance was never to try it [...] Yet here was Ramsey Acton, the one substance on earth that Irina Galina McGovern could not resist. She'd had fair warning in July, sniffed a few heady grains from a split vial, just enough to know that this was the drug that she had been avoiding her whole life.

Haven't we all felt like that? And a comment on 9/11 that is so easy to forget, and yet so true:

Much as it's worth recalling that for whole years of World War II no one knew whether Hitler might win, it would soon behoove Americans to remember that for a few hours on that eleventh of September no one knew if more plans might be out there [...] Now that the spinning globe on which we hurtle was clearly not standing still, anything could happen, and anything did

But here's a line, from a description one of Irina's children's books, that sums it all up:

Because when he looks back on his life, Martin realizes that he has spent his life doing something that he loves, and that, to him at least, is beautiful.

We don't only have one destiny. And lucky us, we get to see two of Irina's.

Sliding Doors

This 1998 Gwyneth Paltrow film is one of my favorites. It's a reminder of how little it takes sometimes to send life hurtling down another path entirely. And reinforces my childhood belief in parallel universes. (Do I believe in them still? I couldn't tell you.)

Anyway, the conceit of Lionel Shriver's The Post-Birthday World is roughly the same. Although this time the choice the protagonist makes is hers alone, not forced upon her by a girl with a Barbie doll. And the setting - late 90s London - is also the same. Oddly enough. Maybe London is an epicenter of parallel lives? Irina has dinner with her partner Lawrence's friend, continuing a long-standing tradition while Lawrence is out of town. She's not particularly excited about her charge, but as the evening wears on, she is drawn inexorably toward Ramsey and is about, unless she can stop herself, to kiss him.

Then, in alternately chapters, the way life unfolds depending on her decisions. So many parallels. So similar, and yet utterly different. I'm not quite half-way through yet, but I am so drawn to the story. So fascinated. And surprisingly invested in the characters.

An early passage, from before the big choice:

At its most torrid, your love life was merely titillating to others, and the done-deal nature of established couples like Irina and Lawrence was doubtless a big bore. Romantic devastation occasioned, at most, an onlooker's tinny sympathy or schadenfreude. Romantic delirium was even worse. Newly inlove, you expected to draw envy or admiration, but were far more likely to attract a finger-drumming impatience for you to get over it. [...] Some friends regarded Irina-and-Lawrence as a factual matter, like the existence of France. Others relied on the couple as a touchstone, proof that it was possible to be happy; the role was a burden.

This rang so true to me. And yet, it's so strange that while we often feel this way about the people we know, we are able to invest so much of ourselves into these same situations when they occur for characters in a book, a film, or even a tv show. Any thoughts on why?