We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [149]
“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