Our view of Franklin is formed through Eva’s views of him, since he never writes back. It is quite difficult not to see Franklin as naïve (as Eva would seem to) for his attitude to the United States and to Kevin (“There was such a thing as a good life. It was possible to be a good dad, to put in the weekends and the picnics and the bedtime stories, and so to raise a decent, stalwart son. This was America. And you had done everything right”, as Eva imagines Franklin thinking just before he was shot – the language here (“our firstborn pivoted on his mound and sighted his own father down the shaft of his Christmas crossbow, you simply didn’t believe it”) is emotionally charged, and suggests the destruction of an ideal family (“firstborn”, “Christmas”, “his own father”), which had never actually existed.) The important question with regards to Franklin is whether we consider him as purely a fool or, more positively, as a misguided but well-meaning idealist: these are, in fact, Kevin and Eva’s respective views.
Kevin sees him as “Mister Plastic” (which he uses as a nickname while Franklin is still alive – it is what he is called by the police officer who brings Kevin home after giving him a warning for throwing bricks onto the highway)– “‘it was all cheery chirpy, hot dogs and Cheez Whiz. A total fraud, you know?… What does that mean, your dad ‘loves’ you and hasn’t a [bleep]ing clue who you are? What’s he love then? Some kid in Happy Days. Not me.’” Similarly, Franklin displays no knowledge of Celia as an individual (when Eva asks how Celia might have come to lose her eye, he says “‘Kids… Playing I guess.’” There is an argument to be made that Kevin commits Thursday due to his inability ever to measure up to his father’s ideal of a son (just before killing Franklin he says, “levelly”, “‘I’m not interested. I’m not interested in baseball or the founding fathers or the decisive battles of the Civil War… And I’ve had it up to my eyeballs with heart-to-heart father-son talks about aspects of my life that are none of your business.’”. As Eva recognises, Franklin seems to regard parenting as a series of activities that can be picked up out of a book, to feel that if he does the right things, all will be well. Kevin, according to Eva, plays along with Franklin’s fantasy in a way that is “too much like a regular kid; almost studied… You’d be so enchanted that I couldn’t bring myself to raise the possibility that he was pulling your leg.” “When you walked in, his face changed…Altogether, his features assumed the permanent expression of startled happiness that you see on aging starlets who have had too much plastic surgery” (this also displays Eva’s wit) “he’d enthuse Gosh, that’s great! Another car ad!” (the clichéd nature of these exclamations rather suggest his insincerity). Franklin’s attitude to Kevin, which so contrasts to Eva’s, seems to Eva not to be based on a real understanding of Kevin but on an idealised view of a son – as she says “I did sometimes consider that, between us, I was the more interested in Kevin… I mean, interested in Kevin as Kevin really was, not Kevin as Your Son, who had continually to battle against the formidable fantasy paragon in your head.”
Eva is much more generous towards Franklin – “Is it called naiveté when you’re naïve on purpose?” (Indeed, her description of Franklin is both mocking and affectionate: “A fearless, trusting consumer who only reads labels to make sure there are plenty of additives”) – and defends him against Kevin’s assaults: in response to his “Christ. What an asshole.”, Eva says, “‘Don’t you ever say that. Don’t you ever, ever say that. Not once, not ever, not one more time!’” – She refuses to allow him to criticise Franklin, although she does it fairly often herself: “You tried so hard to be an attentive, affectionate father. Yet I did warn you that children are unusually alert to artifice, so it makes sense it’s your very interest he derides.” The major difference between her and Kevin’s feelings towards Franklin is that Eva does not despise him – he may have annoyed her, but she does love him: it is why she never left.
Their differing approaches to Kevin lead Eva and Franklin into conflict – one of the first is due to a bout of mastitis which Eva describes in the letter dated December 18th, 2000. She “started to feel draggier than usual” – she regards new motherhood as “baffling despair”. She expresses her resentment at being “stuck all day with hell in a handbasket while you tooled messily off in your baby-blue pickup to window-shop for fields with the right-coloured cows” (here, the frivolity of his work (suggested particularly by “tooled merrily off”, “window-shop”) is contrasted with the trial of staying home with a small child (“stuck”)). When he returns, she feels neglected – “I was glad you were turning into such an attentive father, but of the two other inhabitants of our loft it was only your wife who appreciated the meaning of the word hello.” (the bitterness here is tangible, and interestingly she also refers to herself in the third person in another bitter remark “I suspected that if our situation were reversed… Eva would be expected to drop the scouting altogether like a hot brick.”). Later in the passage, the violent language she uses to describe Franklin’s treatment of her “you poked the end [of the thermometer] in my mouth, and left to change Kevin’s diaper” and “…stabbed me with a back glance”.
Eva also resents Franklin’s refusal to believe how difficult Kevin is (He cries incessantly, and that day, “Kevin had pulled off a virtuosic recital” – she uses wit as a distancing device, as usual – and she feels that he is driven by outrage at being alive, as is suggested here by “he looked deceptively content. Dreams of oblivion, perhaps.”): he regards Kevin as “‘crabby’”, “‘fussy’” and “‘a little ill tempered’”, and would seem to see Eva’s attitude as irrational – that he begins a statement with “Listen, Eva, …”, where the use of her name and “Listen” suggest that she needs to calm down, and also says “‘I believe you’re being straight up about your perception of how hard it is’” (“perception”, emphasised with italics, suggests that she is imagining Kevin’s hostility), and that she observes that “Your eyes flicked towards the ceiling like, oh-brother-not-this-again” all serve to suggest this. These thoughts of hers are typical of someone with some form of disordered thinking and she is under a great strain (“I saw no one and rarely got out because Kevin’s rages, in public, were not socially acceptable”) and “daily, I faced a purple churn of insatiable fury while rehearsing to myself with dull incomprehension, I’m supposed to love this.” This attitude to her own child is to many incomprehensible and makes her a rather unsympathetic character.
The exchange between them – “‘Then why do you always take his side?’” “‘He’s only seven weeks old! He’s not big enough to have a side!’” – is fairly symptomatic: whether she has grounds or not, Eva is always inclined to suspect Kevin means ill, whereas Franklin regards him (perhaps sensibly here, if less so later) as an entirely normal child. When they discover how high her fever actually is, “You looked at me. You looked at Kevin, for once torn between loyalties” (“For once” here would rather suggest that he sided with Kevin at all other times) – when Eva wins, she regards Franklin again as the same man she married, “with that manliness I’d always adored, you ignored him”.
Again, Kevin is only really ever seen through Eva’s eyes. We cannot know whether Eva imposes things such as “He strode out of the room, squirt gun swinging at his side with the arrogant nonchalance I associated with airplane hijackers” onto her four year old son.
Both Kevin and Eva have a sense of the other’s malice. Eva feels however that Kevin seems to appreciate her violence towards her (“‘I was proud of you,’ he purred” – the question here is whether he really describing his thoughts at the age of six or projecting later feelings onto them – Eva thinks that he really does feel this: “There was a different quality to this affirmation; I felt he truly remembered, whereas these other recollections were post hoc”. The use of “purred” suggests Kevin derives some pleasure from this – it also appears rather threatening.)
Kevin’s complete hatred of life, as Eva sees it (“I think Kevin was off the scale, he hated being here so much”) and his complete lack of interest or enthusiasm is deeply threatening – he transgresses normal bounds (as Eva says to Franklin’s parents “‘You can only subject people to anguish who have a conscience. You can only punish people who have hopes to frustrate or attachments to sever; who worry what you think of them.’”), that he cares for nothing (his first words are “I don like dat”; Eva says “I looked at the scarves and the hats through his eyes and they suddenly seemed stupid or unnecessary. We had scarves. We had hats. Why bother.” (The lack of question mark is interesting – it isn’t really a question but a statement of the sheer pointlessness)). Eva feels that he is angered by “favourites”, since he has none himself, “every one of them [his victims] enjoyed something… I realise that Kevin doesn’t experience his aversions as envy. To Kevin, all ten of his victims were supremely ridiculous. They each got excited over trifles, and their enthusiasms were comical. But like my wallpaper of maps, impenetrable passions have never made Kevin laugh. From early childhood, they have enraged him.”
One of the most fascinating passages in the novel is when Kevin gets ill, aged ten. The illness makes him “slump” and “I was astonished that when I helped him up and lifted him to bed that he offered no resistance. Franklin, he put his arms around my neck.” This is the first affectionate gesture she has received in ten years as his mother; similarly, he expresses like for anything for the first time (“he thought for a moment and then whispered in a small voice, ‘The spaceman ones. I like the monkey in the rocket.’”) He becomes an entirely normal child for two weeks – “I know that we all transform one way or another when we’re ill, but Kevin wasn’t just cranky or tired, he was a completely different person. And that’s how I achieved an appreciation for how much energy it must have taken him the rest of the time to generate this other boy (or boys).” Eva also comes to the conclusion that “underneath the levels of fury… lay a carpet of despair. He wasn’t mad. He was sad.” When ill, Kevin refuses to see Franklin – Eva feels this is because “He didn’t have the energy – not to give you the intimacy you demanded, but to resist it. Kevin made himself up for you, and there must have been, in the very lavishness of his fabrication, a deep and aching desire to please.” The irony of this passage is that Eva unwittingly sows the seeds of Thursday just when her son is at his most normal by reading him Robin Hood – the end of this letter, “I was all for it”, is really rather poignant.
Kevin seems to ‘own’ the phenomenon of High School Shootings from the very beginning (“whenever the subject arose he assumed an air of authority that got on my nerves”), and provides us with explanations which, although vague (“‘Maybe his future is real to him… Maybe that’s the problem’”), seem less banal or glib than his parents’ (“The problem is guns.”, “The answer, if there is one, is the parents.”) He rejects the comfortable middle-class life presented to him as essentially meaningless, in the same way that many other well-off, white, middle-class young people do – his parents have failed to provide him with any real meaning or identity, having nothing in common with relation to politics, religion (he is brought up without any – celebrating Christmas is, he feels, “totally empty”.) The Plaskett/Khatchadourians are representative of a certain part of the United States - the wealthy, New York suburbs they live in are, like their house, an “antiseptic wasteland”. Kevin is, however, attracted to nullity: as a theory for Thursday, Eva puts forward “the ‘purity’ he admired in the computer virus. Having registered the social compulsion to derive some broad, trenchant lesson from every asinine murder spree, he must have painstakingly parsed the prospective fallout from his own.”
However, as the novel progresses, both Eva and Kevin change. He becomes, by the last letter, almost normal – he “looked dwarfed …Three days from adulthood, he’s beginning to act like a little boy – confused, bereft”. Eva regards his behaviour as “extraordinary”, but she is changing as well, becoming “direct and motherly” in comparison to her usual cold detachment. Furthermore, he seems to have lost his interest in memorising every detail of every killing spree “Kevin remembered vaguely. ‘What a sucker. Wanna know the truth, I felt sorry for the chump. He’s been had.’” He has stopped trying to provide explanations of the sort he gave to the documentary makers: “‘I used to think I knew,’ he said glumly. ‘Now I’m not so sure.’” Eva’s response to this (“without thinking, I extended my hand across the table and clasped his.”) is the first time since she broke his arm that she has made a spontaneous gesture towards him. Similarly, the coffin he produces for Celia’s eye is the first thing he has ever really created – he is moving from destruction towards something more positive. This change in Kevin, his new vulnerability, makes him more sympathetic – he now “clung to me childishly, as he never had in childhood proper”.
All three characters are, despite their unsympathetic qualities, actually rather sympathetic: Kevin and Eva are so because they have developed into rather more vulnerable people and more rounded characters. Franklin did not have the opportunity to do this, but his death makes him sympathetic – “the expression on your face – it was so disappointed”, creates a sense that he deserves our pity. This growth in character and the ordeals that Eva has been through means that the characters do, in fact, attract our sympathy.
