![]() ![]() When she recalls how their daughter Celia, seven years younger than Kevin, adored her brother even while he sadistically manipulated her, she characteristically senses Franklin's response. She knows that he would tell a different story. Eva is not, as it were, writing for us she is writing for Franklin, and continually rebutting his different ideas about their son. ![]() Partly it is for the letter-writer's self-consciousness about explaining herself. Why does Shriver choose it for her modern nightmare? Some of the pioneers of the English novel in the 18th century, notably Samuel Richardson, used the novel-in-letters to explore human psychology, but the highly artificial form was abandoned in the 19th century. ", writes Eva to Franklin in the book's first letter. ![]() These letters are written by Kevin's mother, Eva, to her apparently estranged husband, Kevin's father, Franklin. It is also an "epistolary novel": a narrative composed entirely of letters. It is the story of Kevin, a boy who has shot dead seven fellow pupils and a teacher at his suburban high school. T he strangest thing about Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin is that this thoroughly contemporary tale employs an old-fashioned fictional form. ![]()
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