Sing you Home - Jodi Picoult

Sing you Home by Jodi Picoult, Hodder & Stoughton, 424 pages

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

There was no room in my marriage for me anymore, except as genetic material. (p. 44)

Zoe, a music therapist, and Max, who has his own landscaping business, have been trying to conceive for years, but to no avail. Zoe is desperate to have a baby, but Max is close to giving up and feels that trying to get pregnant has taken over their marriage. As the costs of IVF treatment spiral and tensions between them mount, the situation comes to a head when Zoe miscarries and Max, buckling under the strain, leaves the relationship. Max moves in with his married, successful brother, and founders in a fog of self-loathing and alcoholism. When his uncontrolled drinking leads to a car accident, Max experiences an epiphany of sorts, quits drinking and joins his brother’s evangelical Christian church which is led by the smooth, populist Pastor Clive.

In music, perfect pitch is the ability to reproduce a tone without any reference to an external standard. (...) In life, perfect pitch is the ability to know someone from the inside out, even better maybe than she knows herself. (p. 135)

In the meantime, Zoe does her own grieving over the miscarriage and reels from blow after blow from life: her divorce, the diagnosis of a thromboembolism, and finally endometrial cancer, which necessitates a hysterectomy. Zoe finds help and friendship in Vanessa, a school counsellor. Completely compatible, they eventually find their relationship has blossomed into love, and decide to get married. Much as she loves Vanessa, Zoe is hesitant to come out to anyone about their relationship – she feels it should be no one’s business but her and Vanessa’s. Luckily, she realises that coming out for her is not so much about identifying as a lesbian but about showing loyalty to her partner. Zoe finds a great deal of support in her mother, who is thrilled to see her in a supportive, functional relationship for a change.

I open my mouth, but nothing comes out. There is no language to describe a betrayal this big. (...) ‘He’s trying to take away our baby.’ (p. 238)

Max, however, shares the bigoted views of his church, and sees Zoe’s relationship with a woman as an affront to his own masculinity. It is no surprise, then, that when Zoe asks his permission to retrieve one of the frozen embryos left over from their IVF treatment so that Vanessa can give birth to her baby, he allows his church leaders to escalate the couple’s disagreement to a highly publicised court case.

The church argues that being a lesbian couple makes Zoe and Vanessa unfit to become parents, and Zoe and Vanessa point out that Max – a very recently recovered alcoholic living in his brother’s basement – is in no position to be a father. The couple’s lawyer forces Max to reveal that he actually intends to give the embryo his brother, who is infertile like Max, so that he and his wife can raise the baby. Their argument is that this is even more of a non-traditional family model and, what is more, the biological mother would not be allowed access to the child because of Max’s homophobic views. With a conservative, nearly retired judge presiding, the scales of justice could tip either way, and drama mounts when we learn about Max’s affair with his sister-in-law and an accusation of sexual harassment from Zoe’s patient who also happens to be Pastor Clive’s daughter.

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel and would recommend it as the discerning reader’s light read J As in other books by Jodi Picoult, weighty and relevant issues are explored with arguments from both sides being given voice. The Biblical rationale for the church’s disapproval of gay adoption is explained well, and it’s clear that although Pastor Clive and his cronies are far from the true spirit of Christianity, the rank and file of the congregation – people like Libby, Max’s sister in law – are mostly good people who try to follow scripture and love their neighbour. Zoe and Vanessa’s relationship, in turn, is fairly portrayed as a healthy, stable partnership where both women can thrive and depend on one another; it stands in stark contrast with Max’s needy, immature behaviour as a husband. It is clear where the author weighs in on the issue of equal rights for LGBT couples, and I hope most readers will also feel the same way, but the opposing side in the argument is given generous and fair treatment.

I have only two complaints. For one, I’ve always been uncomfortable with the ‘homosexuality is not a choice’ argument. Whether or not sexual orientation is genetically determined, it should not be viewed in the same light as cancer or disfigurement. The novel focuses very strongly on this argument, and the author comes close to saying that being gay is not Vanessa or Zoe’s ‘fault’, thereby playing into the evangelical Christian argument that homosexuality is ‘wrong’ or ‘sinful’.

Secondly, my copy of the book included QR codes that linked to a website with music accompanying each chapter. It certainly is an innovative and fun idea, but unfortunately I found the music to be unpleasant if not absolutely dire! Insistent rhymes in the lyrics and high-pitched, piercing vocals made it very difficult for me to listen to, and I stopped after the first track. A real shame and a wasted opportunity, in my opinion.

We Need to Talk About Kevin - Lionel Shriver

We Need to Talk about Kevin by Lioner Shriver, Serpent's Tail, 468 pages

★ ★ ★ ★ ★  

As soon as I heard the interview with author Lionel Shriver on the BBC World Book Club podcast, I knew I wanted to read We Need to Talk About Kevin. And when I finally did, I found it resonated with me and moved me more than any other novel ever had. The effect was just as powerful, if not more, on the second reading. An incisive examination of the age-old nature vs. nurture issue, the novel addresses themes such as parental responsibility, the mother-son relationship, and most importantly, the choice of becoming a parent in the first place.

I saw it coming for nearly sixteen years. (p. 114)

In a series of letters to her absent husband, narrator Eva Katchadourian recounts the upbringing of her son Kevin, attempting to find the reason why one Thursday he locked several classmates and a teacher in the school gymnasium and shot them dead with a crossbow. As a product of a culture where mothers are held most accountable for their children’s actions, Eva examines her own conduct and dissects her troubled relationship with Kevin. She attempts to decode Kevin’s personality and his world view to find a reason – any reason – why he was moved to commit such an atrocity. Eschewing traditional counselling, Eva analyses Kevin and herself in writing, both as a form of therapy and as a self-inflicted punishment. As we follow Kevin’s story and see harmless pranks evolve into pure, calculating evil, we are forced to wonder whether he was born that way, or whether his and Eva’s toxic relationship warped his personality, and thus Eva’s account cannot be trusted. Frustratingly, but also ingeniously, the novel does not provide a clear-cut answer, and the reader is left to make what he or she will of the “evidence” recounted in Eva’s letters. Left reeling from the emotional turmoil in the characters’ lives, the reader is dealt one final blow when the secret behind Eva’s letters is revealed.

Just about any stranger could have turned up nine months later. We might as well have left the door unlocked. (p. 60)

Having read the book years after the aftermath of the Columbine school shootings, the most relevant issue to me was that of the choice to become a parent, specifically – a mother. With candour absent from I think any other book addressing the issue of parenting, We Need to Talk About Kevin gives voice to the fears and concerns of many women who hesitate about having children, or indeed do not want to take this step, but feel pressured on various fronts to give in and fulfil this biological function of the female body. Eva clearly and honestly expresses her own resentment at her societal demotion from the moment of conception and being reduced to a biological function: I felt expendable, throw-away, swallowed by a big biological project that I didn’t initiate or choose, that produced me but would also chew me up and spit me out. I felt used. (p. 61). She describes how Kevin, “Mr. Divide-and-Conquer”, drives a wedge between her and husband Franklin, putting an end to any time spent alone together and forcing them to take sides in the “war” over his upbringing. Lest anyone assume that Eva is being petty and selfish, it is worth naming just a few of the horrifying incidents Kevin was involved in, if not directly responsible for: a preschooler tempted into scratching her eczema till she drew blood; spraying Eva’s study – painstakingly wallpapered with maps of all the places she’d visited before quitting work to become a mother – with indelible blood-red ink; throwing bricks at cars from an overpass; loosening the wheel lock of a neighbour boy’s bike; triggering a schoolmate’s eating disorder; falsely accusing a schoolteacher of sexually abusing him; and most horrifyingly of all, the loss of his sister’s eye in an incident involving drain cleaner. Every word and action appears aimed at making others, particularly his mother, feel intensely uncomfortable: wearing ridiculously undersized clothing that practically cuts into his flesh, uttering incisively critical and brutally honest statements at socially awkward moments, even masturbating loudly at home with the bathroom door open.

Franklin, who appears to love not so much his son as the idea of having a son, a happy family, does not notice – or pretend not to notice – Kevin’s antisocial behaviour. He flatly dismisses Eva’s concerns and assumes the fault is all hers, for being a cold and unapproachable mother. It’s true, Eva did not initially want to be a mother, and approached the role more as a challenge than as the fulfilment of a heartfelt wish. She admits to feeling nothing for Kevin immediately following his birth and many years after. But it’s also true she gets no response from Kevin, who rejects any affection and stubbornly feigns disinterest in everything and everyone. Eva’s experience of motherhood is dramatically different when little Celia – trusting, affectionate and sunny – is born. Indeed, she admits in her letters that she decided on a second pregnancy just to see whether happy parenthood is possible, or whether she is just inherently unable to love a child. Clearly, she isn’t.

Eva may not like or even love Kevin, but she has an inkling of how he sees the world, and the reader, if not Eva herself, can easily spot the similarity between some of Eva’s and Kevin’s opinions on society. She has a strong if not constant feeling of the misery and pointlessness of human existence, and has more faith in evil than in goodness: In truth, we are bigger, greedier versions of the same eating, shitting, rutting ruck, hell-bent on disguising from somebody, if only from a three-year-old, that pretty much all we do is eat and shit and rut. The secret is that there is no secret. That is what we really wish to keep from our kids. (...) Kevin must have felt so fiercely cheated. (p. 170). And indeed, Kevin appears to respond best to Eva when she is honest with him and does not disguise any unpleasant truths, including the fact that she does not like him. Tragically and disturbingly, the closest moment they share is when Eva finally snaps and hits him, making him fall and break his arm. Real love shares more in common with hatred and rage than it does with geniality and politeness, she notes. For two seconds I felt whole, and like Kevin Katchadourian’s real mother. I felt close to him. I felt like myself – my true, unexpurgated self – and I felt we were finally communicating. (p. 232).

Franklin’s cheery, supportive comments ring false to Kevin, and he does not hide his contempt for his father in a TV interview in the years following the tragedy he caused. Although he stubbornly hides it, he appears to actually respect Eva for seeing through his act and striving to know the real Kevin, instead of just defaulting to a socially dictated pattern of parenthood. To Eva’s surprise, in the interview Kevin vehemently denies that Eva was a bad mother, and speaks highly of her accomplishments as a travel writer and businesswomen, mentioning that he used to sneak off to the bookstore just to see her travel guides. And when the camera pans to one side, Eva spots on Kevin’s nightstand in prison – a photograph of herself...

As a reader, I cannot say whether Kevin’s killing spree can be said to be a result of his toxic relationship with his mother. All I know is that their relationship is a tortured one, based on a vicious cycle of mutual rejection and refusing to admit that one needs – if not exactly loves – the other. This strife may not have informed Kevin’s actions, but it must have influenced him in some way.

There is no simple answer to the nature vs. nurture problem, neither in the novel nor in real life. As Eva puts it, whereas the likes of Franklin look to children to find the answer to the meaning of life, it’s Kevin who has posed [her] Big Question. (p. 301). The one answer the book does provide is in the open, honest expression of fears and misgivings about having children, which many people share but are shamed into concealing by accusations of selfishness and superficiality. Kevin’s example may be an extreme one, but it can’t be denied that giving birth is exactly as Eva describes it: an almost foolhardy act of trust that boils down to letting a stranger into your house.