Improbable American psycho

FictionA mother attempts to make sense of the ongoing horror of a life perverted by her remorseless monster of a son. This book, certainly the most repellent and easily one of the least convincing I have ever read, could be seen as a cautionary tale about parents and children, and most specifically the ambivalence of motherhood, if it wasn't so crassly and aggressively presented.

Its sensationalism, as well as its theme, that of the high-school massacre phenomenon across the US, may grip some readers, but far more seriously, it will also exploit them. That such a book is on the longlist for this year's Orange Prize, the aim of which is to celebrate excellence, originality and accessibility in women's writing, galls.

So evil stalks well-heeled suburbia as relentlessly as it does the tenements of big cities. Sometimes the offspring of the wealthy are simply so satiated by all they have, they just have to rebel, or in the case of Kevin, insult and kill.

No doubt Lionel Shriver's grotesque narrative is intended as a profoundly candid exposé of US consumerist society's culpability in the creation of misfits. The concept that we reap what we sow has seldom, if ever, been presented quite as graphically.

After all, this is a family in which a little girl is given an exotic zoo animal as a pet and a dangerous boy is presented with his very own crossbow.

For all the praise that has been directed at the all-too-topical We Need To Talk About Kevin, which may well be a serious sociologically based satire presented in the form of a novel, the sheer viciousness of narrator Eva, a successful businesswoman who had been happily, nay smugly, married to Franklin before deciding to have a late first baby, dilutes the impact. Shriver is a wordy writer; Eva, her narrator, is equally wordy - and caustic with it. She is opinionated and intolerant, smart-alec but not funny - as her horrible son remarks: "Is there anything, or anybody, you don't feel superior to?" - and she is also rather taken with her confessional self-analysis.

All of which unfolds through contrived, retrospective letters written to her husband, a caricature doting father who can see no wrong with their obnoxiously insolent son. The ridiculous Franklin defends the brat child who develops into a dangerous adolescent and mass killer. Even more unbelievably, this same doting father consistently jeers at the couple's second child, the nervous little Celia, to whose birth he had objected.

The couple consistently divide on the subject of Kevin. Early in the book, it is obvious that Eva is not writing to her husband, she is writing to herself - and in this technical weakness lies the failure of Shriver's relentless narrative. Eva is the daughter of Armenian emigrants. She has made a fortune through writing travel guides; she may know the cheapest ways to travel the world, but such is her arrogance that she knows no one.

Kevin the problem baby does not like his mother, and remains in diapers until he is six years old. It is a form of protest. No childminder can tolerate him. His snide utterances belie his tender years and as he grows older he begins to express himself with the gutter eloquence of a hardened gangland veteran. He is also presented as a cunning genius who conceals his intelligence.

Nothing is believable. No man, not even a determinedly loving father weary of his arrogant, wealthy wife and her scathing anti-American rhetoric, could possibly tolerate a son like Kevin. The boy sneers, lies, dresses in clothes several sizes too small for him, and eventually takes to masturbating in full view of Eva. Then there is the blinding of Celia, left in Kevin's care because dad believes the young thug is sufficiently mature to mind her. Does Shriver honestly, albeit simplistically, reckon that mass killers are the products of weak dads and vain, ageing mothers possessed of too much mouth? Even as Kevin's crimes against other people multiply - the sabotage of a bike, which injures a boy; the rocks hurled from a bridge on passing cars; the harassment of female classmates; the accusations of sexual abuse against a female drama teacher - dad stands by his boy, accusing Eva of not loving poor little Kevin. It is sickening stuff. This is not due to Shriver's rather crude narrative skills but solely to the voyeuristic, conversational nastiness of her novel, which is far more offensive than Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho, an infinitely better book.

After 400 pages of abnormal recall, recalled at length, there are few answers and little feeling - just Kevin in prison, playing with his sister's glass eye. It is a repulsive story, as much for its "I kid you not" quasi-reportage narrative voice as for its content.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times

We Need To Talk About Kevin By Lionel Shriver Serpent's Tail, 400pp. £9.99