Parenthood. Discuss.

We Need to Talk About Kevin

By Lionel Shriver

An outstanding novel powered by what so few novels manage to achieve: authenticity. Kevin’s detractors complain that they find it impossible to believe how a mother could feel so coldly towards her son, as does Eva in this novel. But I enjoyed the book precisely because I found that so believable.

It is perfectly reasonable that most mothers love their progeny (although I would argue that few love them unconditionally, which is almost always a tautology). But within the complexity of human nature and experience, let’s face it: there will be some parents who dislike their kids, who hate them, whose paternal relationship lacks love from both sides, and who feel distraught that their crime is among society’s unmentionables. Anyone who argues that it is unnatural for a mother not to love her son misunderstands nature, which is messy and experimental and never, ever immutable.

So I found Eva to be not just believable and authentic but utterly captivating for the way she represents a phenomenon (no matter how small) that must be true but is also vilified to the point of being ignored. This is the central reason why Kevin works so brilliantly. It is truly fresh and wonderful.

But there are a great many other things right with this book. The prose is lucid and witty. The plot is tightly controlled and delicately threaded – winning the effect of gripping the reader. I was lucky enough to read the novel while on a break; if I was supposed to be working, I would have had to fudge the time sheet.

Kevin is a stunning novel with a shocking dénouement. It’s one of the best books I’ve ever read.

It takes one to know one

Stuart: A Life Backwards

By Alexander Masters

One reason why the life of Stuart Shorter is so remarkable is down to the way it is told in this excellent biography. An apparently reluctant biographer, Alexander Masters tells Stuart’s life story in a self-reflexive style, in which the subject criticises the manuscript, and in a zigzagging chronology, as the subtitle suggests.

The form therefore sidles up to the content and seems to say, “I know what it’s like to be this messy, this discombobulated, this uncertain.” It’s a refreshing take on the biography and exercised perfectly by Masters.

I don’t think I’ll ever look at a homeless person in the same way again after reading this book, which does so much to show all the reasons why people end up on the streets and in prison. Masters performs a neat trick of explaining that there is not just one stereotypical route to the streets. The journey is neither absolute, nor for one time only. Taking in crime, drugs and violence, and many more themes from the underworld, Masters shines a light on the dispossessed. In fact, he shows how it’s not an underworld at all – it’s part of our ‘life on top’, with allegiances and cultural trappings. Only, through Stuart’s eyes it is fresh and depressingly complex at the same time.

Perfect for a quiet night in alone

Eleven Kinds of Loneliness

by Richard Yates

Richard Yates’s level of perception is so deep, and brought to the page with such grace, that even his most poignant and gloomy stories fill mewith joy. This collection of shorts is such a work. Each story in this remarkable little volume is carefully observed, each a study in loneliness. And yet Yates is able to lead the reader through them without feeling the same pain as his characters. His skill as an observer of the human condition is such that you feel connected to these sad characters, but able to sympathise from a distance at the same time. You feel like their psychiatrist: calculating a diagnosis, while understanding their character on every level.

And that does not mean that these stories come off as cold or distant. Just that Yates’s style affords you a kind of objectivity. It is not true objectivity – you still feel something for the lonely teacher who never quite hits it off with her class – but it is objective nonetheless. Yates has lifted the lid on these people’s homes so that you might look in on their lives. You can see and feel them with the professional detachment of a counsellor.

The collection is also a canny, if demographically narrow, perspective on twentieth century America, as is Yates’s Revolutionary Road. The intriguing social experiment of American modernity is portrayed with Yates’s characteristic pathos and clarity. For that alone, these stories are excellent.

A year at the zoo

Zoo Station

By David Downing

I haven’t read much from war-time Berlin, and I think this was a good introduction. Not because of the story, but because of Downing’s vivid evocation of the time and place.

Three-dimensional problem

One-Dimensional Woman

By Nina Power

Nina Power isn’t one to mince her words. In this provocative polemic, she’s assertive, combative and as sharp as a scalpel. Power’s slim book can be classed as an analysis of where feminism stands today. And it isn’t pretty. She is drawn again and again into how capitalism’s gains are equality’s losses.

Dreamy and trampy

Rafts and Dreams / Outside the Whale

By Robert Holman

I recently heard Holman described as a playwright’s playwright, so I wanted him. If only one could become a great writer just by reading the work of others. That is one trick, of course, but there are many more. Nevertheless, I can see why wannabe playwrights are recommended to read Holman. He is able to tell several sides of the same story without seeming to.

Suck it in

Breath

By Tim Winton

What a rush this book is. Winton has produced a novel that is exhilarating both emotionally and physically. This story of a young man’s adolescence spent surfing gives you the rush of the waves and hormones all at the same time.