Lionel Shriver - We Need to Talk About Kevin

“All right, Mr. Snide.” I abandoned my lettuce. “What do you want to talk about?”

“This was your idea. I never said I wanted to talk about a fucking thing.”

We squared off over my pigeon breast and red-currant confit, and I began to saw. Kevin had a way of turning pleasures into hard work. As for the turn he took after three or four minutes’ silence, I can only conclude that he took pity on me. Later in Claverack he would never be the one to blink first, but after all, in Hudson House he was only fourteen.

“Okay, I’ve got a topic ,” he proposed slyly, picking up a carmine crayon from the restaurant’s complimentary glass of Crayolas, grown ubiquitous as scooters. “You’re always griping about this country and wishing you were in Malaysia or something. What’s your problem with the place. Really. American materialism ?”

Much like Kevin when I proposed this date, I suspected a trap, but I had an entrée and two-thirds of a bottle to go, and I didn’t want to spend it drawing tic-tac-toes on the disposable tablecloth. “No, I don’t think that’s it,” I answered sincerely. “After all, as your grandfather would say—”

“ Materials are everything . So what’s your beef?”

This is sure to dumbfound you, but in that moment I couldn’t think of one thing wrong with the United States. I’m often stymied in this vein when some stranger on a plane, making conversation when I put down my book, asks what other novels I’ve enjoyed: I draw such a perfect blank that my seatmate might infer that the paperback stuffed in the magazine pocket is the first fiction I’ve read in my life. My leery outlook on the United States was precious to me—even if, thanks to you, I had learned to give the country grudging credit for at least being a spirited, improvisational sort of place that, despite its veneer of conformity, cultivated an impressive profusion of outright lunatics. Abruptly incapable of citing a single feature of this country that drove me around the bend, I felt the bottom fall out for a second and worried that maybe I hadn’t kept the U.S. at arm’s length from sophisticated cosmopolitanism, but rather from petty prejudice.

Nevertheless, on airplanes it eventually comes to me that I adore Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky . Then I remember V. S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River , which always reminds me of Paul Theroux’s delightful Girls at Play , and I’m away, restored to literacy again.

“It’s ugly,” I submitted.

“What? The amber waves of grain?”

“The fast-food taka-taka. All that plastic. And it’s spread all around the country like potato blight.”

“You said you like the Chrysler Building.”

“It’s old. Most modern American architecture is horrendous.”

“So this country’s a dump. Why’s anywhere else any better.”

“You’ve hardly been anywhere else.”

“Vietnam was a shithole. That lake in Hanoi stank.”

“But didn’t you think the people were gorgeous? Even just physically gorgeous.”

“You took me to Asia for chink pussy? I could of booked one of those package holidays on the Web.”

“Having fun?” I asked dryly.

“I’ve had better.” He shot a ball of bread into the basket. “’Sides. The guys all looked like girls to me.”

“But I thought it was refreshing,” I insisted, “along that lake—even if it does smell—the way the Vietnamese pay entrepreneurs with bathroom scales a few dong to weigh themselves, in the hopes that they’ve gained a few pounds. It’s biologically sane.”

“Put those gooks around a bottomless vat of French fries for long enough and they’ll pork out wider than they are tall, just like mall rats in New Jersey. You think only Americans are greedy? I don’t pay attention in European History too good, but I don’t think so.”

Served the salmon for which I now had little appetite, I drummed my fingers. With the backdrop of the wallwide seascape at Hudson House, in that flashy white shirt with its billowing sleeves, raised collar, and a V-neck cut to the sternum, Kevin could have passed for Errol Flynn in Captain Blood.

“The accent,” I said. “I hate it.”

“It’s your accent, too,” he said. “Even if you do say tomahto .”

“You think that’s pretentious.”

“Don’t you ?”

I laughed, a little. “Okay. It’s pretentious.”

Something was loosening up, and I thought, my, maybe this “outing” wasn’t a bad idea after all. Maybe we’re getting somewhere. I began to throw myself into the conversation in earnest. “Look, one of the things about this country I really can’t stand? It’s the lack of accountability. Everything wrong with an American’s life is somebody else’s fault. All these smokers raking in millions of dollars in damages from tobacco companies, when, what, they’ve known the risks for forty years . Can’t quit? Stick it to Philip Morris. Next thing you know, fat people will be suing fast-food companies because they’ve eaten too many Big Macs!” I paused, catching myself. “I realize you’ve heard this before.”

Kevin was winding me up, of course, like a toy. He had the same intent, mischievous expression I’d seen recently on a boy making his model race car hurtle off the rocks in Tallman Park by remote control. “Once or twice,” he allowed, repressing a smile.

“Power walkers,” I said.

“What about them.”

“They drive me insane.” Of course, he’d heard this, too. But he hadn’t heard this, because until then I hadn’t quite put it together: “People around here can’t just go for a walk , they have to be getting with some kind of program. And you know, this may be at the heart of it, what’s my beef . All those intangibles of life, the really good but really elusive stuff that makes life worth living—Americans seem to believe they can all be obtained by joining a group, or signing up to a subscription, or going on a special diet, or undergoing aroma therapy. It’s not just that Americans think they can buy everything; they think that if you follow the instructions on the label, the product has to work. Then when the product doesn’t work and they’re still unhappy even though the right to happiness is enshrined in the Constitution, they sue the bejesus out of each other.”

“What do you mean, intangibles ,” said Kevin.

“ Whatever , as your friends would say. Love—joy—insight.” (To Kevin, I could as well have been talking about little green men on the moon.) “But you can’t order them on the Internet or learn them in a course at the New School or look them up in a How-To. It’s not that easy, or maybe it is easy… so easy that trying, following the directions, gets in the way… I don’t know.”

Kevin was doodling furiously on the tablecloth with his crayon. “Anything else?”

“Of course there’s anything else,” I said, feeling the momentum that gets rolling in those plane chats when I finally get access to the library in my head, remembering Madame Bovary , and Jude the Obscure , and A Passage to India. “Americans are fat, inarticulate, and ignorant. They’re demanding, imperious, and spoiled. They’re self-righteous and superior about their precious democracy, and condescending toward other nationalities because they think they’ve got it right—never mind that half the adult population doesn’t vote. And they’re boastful, too. Believe it or not, in Europe it isn’t considered acceptable to foist on new acquaintances right off the bat that you went to Harvard and you own a big house and what it cost and which celebrities come to dinner. And Americans never pick up, either, that in some places it’s considered crass to share your taste for anal sex with someone at a cocktail party you’ve known for five minutes—since the whole concept of privacy here has fallen by the wayside. That’s because Americans are trusting to a fault, innocent in a way that makes you stupid. Worst of all, they have no idea that the rest of the world can’t stand them.”