Lionel Shriver talks about Kevin

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We look forward to welcoming prize-winning novelist Lionel Shriver on Wednesday 11 January at 19h30. In this essay, Shriver talks about how it feels to have her widely rejected manuscript become a best-selling, prize-winning novel, then a book-club favorite and the toast of the Cannes film festival.

It has now entered the cultural canon that, on completion in 2001, the manuscript of Lionel Shriver’’s seventh novel was widely rejected by publishers and literary agents alike. In retrospect, this incidental fact being widely known is alone a little weird. After all, every day writers numbly receive curt, dismissive rejections of work they’ve slaved over for years. Writers should have some grasp of publishing’s brutality, and this morose process of having your beloved creations stepped on and pissed over comes with the territory. Hence people in my occupation are routinely expected, as Kevin would say, to suck it up.

Sorry, did I say “Kevin”? That’s what’s truly weird: the large number of fiction readers who know exactly who Kevin is, and that number is set to swell once a cinema audience joins the mix. Yet “Kevin Katchadourian” is just a name I picked after combing through the phonebook on an ordinary afternoon.

The premiere of Lynne Ramsay’s film of We Need To Talk About Kevin at the Cannes film festival provides an apt juncture at which to celebrate the miraculous power not of film but of fiction. Lo, I have created a monster.

Tilda Swinton, Ezra Miller, Lynne Ramsay, John C Reilly and his wife Alison Dickey on the red carpet at Cannes Photograph: Ian Langsdon/EPA

Kevin is a dark book, and many of those initial rejections objected that its narrator, Eva, is “unattractive”: a woman uneasy about pregnancy, who feels alarmingly blank after childbirth, and fails to form the bond with her boy that we like to imagine is as instinctive as closing the epiglottis when we swallow. The novel breaks one of the last taboos (and how amazing that at such a late date I found a taboo still standing): a mother disliking her son. Rife with difficult characters and climaxing in a high-school massacre of the sort Americans are rightly ashamed of, Kevin was a poor commercial bet from the get-go.

More, my timing was mythically crap. I submitted the final draft to my New York literary agent right after 9/11, in that hilarious little window when everyone thought Americans would never read or watch anything violent again. Waiting for her response, I recorded in my journal that my new novel “abruptly seems irrelevant and, more dangerously, dated”. (Indeed, the week the twin towers fell, New York Times columnist Frank Rich listed Columbine among a catalogue of national issues from “before” that suddenly didn’t matter.) Ominously, my usually responsive agent went silent for weeks. Finger-drumming, I wrote presciently to myself: “Should this day, too, pass, with no comment from NY, I have vowed to break my silence and press her for a response. But the responses you have to ask for you don’t want.”

Xan Brooks gives his verdict on We Need to Talk About Kevin, while assorted bloggers, buyers and blaggers share their thoughts Link to this video Quite. Finally I got an email – a long, unparagraphed, associative wail of dismay of which I’ve kept a copy: “For the life of me, I don’t know who is going to fall in love with this novel . . . People in the industry are so thin-skinned right now – I just don’t think anyone is going to want to publish a book about a kid doing such maxed-out, over-the-top, evil things, especially when it’s written from such an unsympathetic point of view.” She worried the plot might invite copycat killings. She suggested a rewrite with “a lot more humour (in that way which ONLY YOU can do) instead of one kid from hell who will make people sick just reading about the things he does. Don’t make him a mass-murderer . . . And have him actually have a soft spot for his sister because she is easily humiliated and poses no threat.” She demanded I pay my photocopying bill.

I paid the bill. I spent the next eight months shopping in vain for a new agent. Finally in desperation I sent the manuscript directly to an editor at a small house who’d published me before. She read it over the weekend, made an offer on the Monday, and that’s where the fairytale starts. Offer in hand, I got a wonderful new agent whom I retain today.

Nevertheless, Kevin was a slow burn. The book went to 30 different British houses before the Little Publisher That Could, Serpent’s Tail, picked up the title with a tiny advance but great compensatory enthusiasm. Meanwhile, three months after its hardback publication in America – publicity budget: near-zero – an article appeared in the New York Observer describing all these women on the Upper East Side biking a little-known novel to each other and convening coffee klatches to discuss it. “Word of mouth” had begun.

Word of mouth, far more than critical acclaim, is what elevated Kevin to the enduring status he appears to enjoy today, for the novel hit the London Times bestseller list before it won the Orange prize in 2005. Oddly, for a book to do well merely because people like it is surprisingly rare. This novel has been driven from the off not by advertising and publisher hype, but by individual readers who passed it on to friends. Its success is therefore a populist tribute. Even Lynne Ramsay bid for the film rights well before the novel was a commercial hit. She was simply one more reader who discovered the book for herself.

Book clubs have also powered Kevin as he went viral, and I’ve visited a few, where groups cleave into ferocious camps: one convinced that the boy was evil from day one, the other just as convinced that his mother’s coldness was criminally culpable. A fine spectator sport in which I never participate, since what the book means is no longer up to me.

The novel passed the signal sales mark of 1m copies worldwide some years ago, and I’ve stopped keeping track. It has secured 25 translation deals, including Estonian, Serbian, Arabic and Russian; I collect foreign editions because I enjoy comparing covers. My favourite is the Chinese version: a belligerent, deranged-looking teddy bear. The title has so installed itself in the British cultural lexicon that it’s given rise to books such as We Need To Talk About Kevin Keegan and the wittily christened science primer We Need To Talk About Kevin. And now the movie.

What has it felt like, watching a novel travel from pariah manuscript to Cannes? Obviously, publishing the novel at all was a relief. Finally hitting a bestseller list when six previous novels had lost money was satisfying, though in general my experience of “success” has been surprisingly mild; I couch that word in inverted commas out of superstition, and also from dubiety that ever regarding one’s self as having summarily arrived is good for one’s character. My life is not so different, really, and though I’m less prone to depression I hardly leap out of bed every day bursting with disgusting go-get-’em-girl vim and vigour. (Any writer still wallowing in self-congratulation over the popularity of a novel written a decade ago should be shot.) I’ve travelled from amazement to incredulity to bewilderment, and at last to bemused detachment.

Yet underpinning all these emotions is gratitude. I owe thanks to a thoughtful, sophisticated readership hungry for challenging subject matter, for honest portrayals of parenthood, and for fiction whose meaning is neither obvious nor morally pat. This peculiar, tortured novel was an unlikely bestseller, and has benefited from numerous individual readers with independent tastes who have hand sold it. I’ve met many of these readers, and they’ve confirmed my view that the publishing industry routinely underestimates book buyers, especially women, who don’t all want to read girly pap. I’m sometimes asked if I get bored with talking about Kevin, and of course the short answer is yes. Nevertheless, after a long slog in the literary trenches I never take a single reader for granted, and always remind myself that for new readers the unfolding story is fresh.

Most of all, Kevin as a phenomenon long ago ceased to have anything to do with me. I’ve published two novels since, and I’m stuck into another; fortunately, many Kevin fans have moved on to other novels of mine as well. Meanwhile, Kevin can continue to suck a lychee sadistically in front of his mother after her daughter has lost an eye without any further help from me.

My starkest realisation that this novel has achieved a life of its own was while watching Ramsay’s riveting adaptation of the book. Mind, I’ve been lucky, because Ramsay’s version is excellent: well cast, beautifully shot, and thematically loyal to the novel. Settings such as Eva and Franklin’s slick, ghastly suburban house in fictional Gladstone look almost unsettlingly close to the way I saw them in my mind’s eye.

Before the premiere in France, meeting Ezra Miller, who plays Kevin as an adolescent, was particularly surreal. In social circumstances, he still exudes a seductive eroticism you instinctively want to resist, a beguiling exterior disguising you’re-not-sure-you-want-to-know-what, and a subtle manipulative sleaziness that I recognised instantly from the novel. Talking to Ezra in Cannes was so eerily like having a conversation with Kevin himself that at the premiere’s after-party I turned to him with narrowed eyes. “You little shit,” I said. Rationally I knew better, but something in me truly believed that this kid had killed seven students, a teacher, and a cafeteria worker at his high school, and still thought rather well of himself for pulling the atrocity off.

Tilda Swinton in We Need to Talk About Kevin. Photograph: Nicole Rivelli photography

Allowing herself to look washed-out and haggard, Tilda Swinton is brilliantly cast as Eva, and seems already to have replaced my own flickering image of my narrator. Though the script is sparse, her silences exude an overload of conflicting emotion – a dismay, anguish, loneliness, and fury too dangerously combustible to express. John C Reilly brings to the role of Eva’s husband Franklin a weight, presence and warmth that rescues the father from seeming simply a dupe in the face of his son’s sunny pretence of being a normal, rambunctious boy. And the two child actors who play Kevin when younger both capture the exasperation with the meaningless adult world that I tried to impart to the novel’s character, as well as providing Kevin a seamless physical contiguity as he grows up.

The film’s literal manifestations of impulsive, near arbitrary decisions at my computer I found a riot. I picked the dorky name of Eva’s squalid place of employ out of the air one day, yet the production team had to carefully paint a real sign over a real shop premises reading “Travel R Us”. I snatched the name of the walk-on who runs that shabby travel agency with equal flippancy, yet there she is, in all her three-dimensional glory, with “My name is Wanda” pinned to her dress. Both comical and a little scary, my apparent capacity to conjure the solid from mere caprice suggests a power I’m not sure anyone should enjoy.

The film is an interpretation of the novel, of course, and Ramsay was obliged to edit out multiple scenes, lest the film run to 10 hours. But here’s what’s fab: the book still exists, inviolate. All the dialogue Ramsay eliminated is still in the book. All the scenes she couldn’t dramatise are still in the book. All the literary reflections that have evaporated into a wordless interplay of colour and space are still in the book.

I’ve often marvelled at the ability of visual artists to let things go – to craft unique objects, to which they surely become attached, yet which they sell off and may never see again. By contrast, the medium in which I work allows simultaneously for generosity and piggy hoarding. I’ve given my book away to a director, producers, and cast; to dozens of translators whose skills this unilingual moron has to take on faith; and to countless readers, who have breathed their own life into the story and brought their own analyses to bear on the characters. Yet no matter how many copies my publishers sell, I get to keep mine, filed by chapter on my hard drive.

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