Who knew it was a new genre?

The Telegraph’s Helen Brown looks at the burgeoning field of “high school massacre lit”, talking to Lionel Shriver, the author of WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN (which is brilliant and must be read by everyone) about the impetus for that book and others like it:

Lionel Shriver wasn’t in the cafeteria of Columbine
High School on April 20, 1999 when Harris and Klebold opened fire. She
never met them. Or the boys from Jonesboro, Springfield, Santee,
Edinboro or Moses Lake. But people keep asking her why teenage boys
take guns to school. Her devastating new novel, We Need to Talk About
Kevin, is a fictionalised account of a high-school massacre as narrated
by the teenage killer’s mother. Shriver had the perfect opportunity to
explain it to us – and she didn’t.

"It’s getting
really bizarre, unnerving," she told me, on a grey afternoon in London
this week. I had spent the morning reading interviews she has given,
and they don’t play out like other writer profiles. People don’t ask
her about her remorseless prose or where she gets her characters from.
Nobody asks about her favourite pen, or the authors she admires. All
the interviewers act as if Eva and Kevin Khatchadourian are real
people: they all ask her if it’s Eva’s fault that Kevin does what he
does, or if he was just born evil. "I do know the secret," she says, "…
it’s that I made them up."

Also of note is Shriver’s reaction to DBC Pierre’s VERNON GOD LITTLE, pretty much echoing my own:

Has Shriver read Pierre’s book? “You know,” she sighs, “I started it

and I couldn’t take the voice. I just found it jarring and loud and

overdone. I suppose that I shouldn’t be bad-mouthing the competition

but what the heck? I thought that awarding Vernon God Little the Booker

Prize was extraordinary in the worst sense of word. That was clearly

politically motivated – stirring the heated Bush-bashing and taking the

mickey out of the United States in a very cheap way. It spoke to Brits

as a real crowd-pleaser. We Need to Talk About Kevin is also pretty

hard on the US – which is historically spoiled – but in a more nuanced,

realistic way.” The well-travelled Eva Khatchadourian passes on to her

son a sense of superiority to the mainstream Happy Days fraudulence of

American culture. “She thinks she can exempt herself, and of course you

can’t. I guess some of that comes from me too, having lived outside the

US since 1987. Of course, hating America from within – especially from

a Left-wing perspective – is as American as apple pie.”