'We Need to talk about Kevin' by Lionel Shriver

Here is an excerpt of an interview from a very interesting website on Lionel Shriver talking about her book.

http://www.identitytheory.com/interviews/birnbaum118.php

Lionel Shriver's latest novel, We Need To Talk About Kevin, is her seventh. Her previous novels are Double Fault, A Perfectly Good Family, Game Control, The Bleeding Heart, Checker and the Derailleurs and The Female of the Species. She attended Columbia University and has lived for many years in Belfast, Northern Ireland and has written for the Wall Street Journal, The Economist and the Philadelphia Enquirer. Currently she lives in New York and is, as one might expect, working on her next novel.

We Need to Talk About Kevin is the story of Eva Khatchadourian's retrospective account of her son's life up to and beyond the day he went to his high school and began shooting his classmates. As Suzy Hansen writes at Salon.com: "What we get … is an interesting, thoughtful, and surprisingly credible thriller. We Need to Talk About Kevin is about motherhood and the possibility that one's ambivalence about breeding might influence the growth and development of a child. Eva, in her scathingly honest and often witty recollections of her relationship with Franklin, her agonized decision to give up a life of traveling for motherhood, and her painful years with (the truly hideous and apathetic) Kevin, faces the question head on: Am I responsible for what my child has done?"

I loved this thought provoking book. Shriver's writing style is articulate and very detailed but her exploration of human thought is very real. As an Aussie I couldn't really relate to the issues of schoolyard crime, nor that of possession of handguns as our life seems so remote from the spine chilling phenomena of schoolyard massacres that we hear on the news from Amercia all too often. I guess the issues are still the same - if you wake up one day and realise that your son is a potential killer, what steps do you take, whose side will you take, and will you defend your own even though they have committed a henous crime. Will you blame yourself?