It's Funny Cause It's....
Many years ago, with one of my high school boyfriends, I had an in-joke. It was a pretty you had to be there sort of thing. It revolved around, if we ever had a kid, and the kid ever became a born-again Christian, the techniques we would use to dispose of this kid's said body after killing him. Yeah, amazingly, I have not always been the shining bastion of cynical yet resigned tolerance for the varieties of human experience that I am today.
I'm thinking about this now because, having acquired it a while ago based on buymeaclue's intriguing review, I'm finally reading We Need to Talk About Kevin
. And my reaction to it has just shocked the hell out of me. The thing that is really blowing me away about this book is how, in a portrayal that many reviewers have alternate lambasted as whiny and self-indulgent and praised as a journey to the heart of incomprehensible, unlikeable, but edifying darkness, I see a portrait I so fiercely identify with that it kind of hurts to read. I make angry faces on the subway, absorbed in it; I'm tempted to gesticulate.
Eva's experience is exactly what I've always imagined marriage and motherhood to be like; a slow painful erosion of everything that makes life precious, chronic humiliations, unceasing physical grind and weariness, and the constant expectation to be unselfish, carving out your various important parts at moments when you're weak and can't fight and throwing them back to distract the wolves in a series of compromises that end with your enemy gloating over you anyway, claiming you love him after all because in the end you stumbled and fell. Combined with that little soupcon of irrational self-doubt that maybe you were being selfish, maybe you do need to give up more and more to pass for human, until the moment when you've given up too much and can never get back what was actually human about you in the first place. 1984, the relationship manual.
The resigned tolerance whispers that I should say that's what I imagine motherhood and marriage would be like for me. But it's not. I've never imagined marriage for me in any kind of serious way. To the extent that I've ever imagined motherhood for me, I've imagined the minutes it took me to recover from labor and retrieve a rock to bash the damned thing's unknit loosey-goosey skull in. And then we're back to the disposing-of-a-body problem. Nevertheless, reading this book I keep crying out in my heart, yes, that's marriage, that's motherhood, don't go up those stairs, don't look into that closet for god's sake Eva! And yet of course she does, for reasons I don't quite get so that it seems horribly plausible that it could sneak up on you when you should know better. My only real comfort is knowing via spoilers that the loathsome husband gets his; otherwise, I might have to crawl into the book and take care of him myself*.
Thus, at a hundred pages in, I'm declaring We Need To Talk About Kevin the most successful horror novel I've read this year so far.
Yes, yes. For me.
*this is why I love spoilers, by the way.
I'm thinking about this now because, having acquired it a while ago based on buymeaclue's intriguing review, I'm finally reading We Need to Talk About Kevin
. And my reaction to it has just shocked the hell out of me. The thing that is really blowing me away about this book is how, in a portrayal that many reviewers have alternate lambasted as whiny and self-indulgent and praised as a journey to the heart of incomprehensible, unlikeable, but edifying darkness, I see a portrait I so fiercely identify with that it kind of hurts to read. I make angry faces on the subway, absorbed in it; I'm tempted to gesticulate.
Eva's experience is exactly what I've always imagined marriage and motherhood to be like; a slow painful erosion of everything that makes life precious, chronic humiliations, unceasing physical grind and weariness, and the constant expectation to be unselfish, carving out your various important parts at moments when you're weak and can't fight and throwing them back to distract the wolves in a series of compromises that end with your enemy gloating over you anyway, claiming you love him after all because in the end you stumbled and fell. Combined with that little soupcon of irrational self-doubt that maybe you were being selfish, maybe you do need to give up more and more to pass for human, until the moment when you've given up too much and can never get back what was actually human about you in the first place. 1984, the relationship manual.
The resigned tolerance whispers that I should say that's what I imagine motherhood and marriage would be like for me. But it's not. I've never imagined marriage for me in any kind of serious way. To the extent that I've ever imagined motherhood for me, I've imagined the minutes it took me to recover from labor and retrieve a rock to bash the damned thing's unknit loosey-goosey skull in. And then we're back to the disposing-of-a-body problem. Nevertheless, reading this book I keep crying out in my heart, yes, that's marriage, that's motherhood, don't go up those stairs, don't look into that closet for god's sake Eva! And yet of course she does, for reasons I don't quite get so that it seems horribly plausible that it could sneak up on you when you should know better. My only real comfort is knowing via spoilers that the loathsome husband gets his; otherwise, I might have to crawl into the book and take care of him myself*.
Thus, at a hundred pages in, I'm declaring We Need To Talk About Kevin the most successful horror novel I've read this year so far.
Yes, yes. For me.
*this is why I love spoilers, by the way.