![]() The novel passed the signal sales mark of 1m copies worldwide some years ago, and I've stopped keeping track. A fine spectator sport in which I never participate, since what the book means is no longer up to me. She was simply one more reader who discovered the book for herself.īook 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. Even Lynne Ramsay bid for the film rights well before the novel was a commercial hit. Its success is therefore a populist tribute. This novel has been driven from the off not by advertising and publisher hype, but by individual readers who passed it on to friends. Oddly, for a book to do well merely because people like it is surprisingly rare. 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. 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. 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. Offer in hand, I got a wonderful new agent whom I retain today. She read it over the weekend, made an offer on the Monday, and that's where the fairytale starts. Finally in desperation I sent the manuscript directly to an editor at a small house who'd published me before. I spent the next eight months shopping in vain for a new agent. 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. ![]() 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. 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. 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. Xan Brooks gives his verdict on We Need to Talk About Kevin, while assorted bloggers, buyers and blaggers share their thoughts .uk But the responses you have to ask for you don't want." 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. (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. Waiting for her response, I recorded in my journal that my new novel "abruptly seems irrelevant and, more dangerously, dated". 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. 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. 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. 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 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.
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