We Need to Talk About Kevin - Lionel Shriver

An important read for any parent, anybody interested in parenthood, or anybody fascinated by the psychological intricacies of deep tragedy

pp. 468

Published: Serpent’s Tail, 2003

A novel that proposes to be about a high school massacre is almost bound by its own premise to fall into the trap of sensationalism, to be grubbing for attention and high end sales by capitalising on the public’s fascination with tragedy. Indeed, We Need to Talk about Kevin has no doubt courted many of its millions of readers because of this very fact, this penchant for the gruesome, for unexplainable and seemingly purposeless violence. But Shriver’s novel is infinitely more than that. As the book builds up to the day of the massacre we become so absorbed in the precision of the protagonist’s (Eva’s) psychological musings that at times we forget all about it. Yet, somehow, we never ever truly forget, because every sentence is absolutely loaded, weighed down, by the hefty bulk of the school shooting and its emotional fallout.

Kevin’s mother, Eva, is the honest and eloquent voice of the novel, attempting to exculpate herself from blame, to scoop herself out of the firing line of her conscience. She wants to find out where it all went wrong with her son by replaying and analysing every major instant of his childhood. She wants to discover what caused him to kill nine of his classmates, the act that caused everything about her life to become ‘precarious’, balanced tentatively between blame and defiance.

The epistolary form that Shriver uses is precarious in itself. A novel put together using a number of epistles usually allows for multiple perspectives on an event, and because we get the feeling of eavesdropping on a private conversation we can often attest to the reliability of what we are reading. However, Eva addresses these therapeutic letters to her husband, Franklin, who conspicuously never writes back. Thus we are left with a one-sided discussion, with merely one version of events, albeit a very convincing and candid version. The fact that later on she admits to being wrong on a couple of occasions, judging Kevin in a harsh light only to have been fooled, suggests that we cannot rely on her testimony as much as we had thought.

One of these occasions involves an incident when Kevin and his friend Lenny are caught by two policemen throwing rocks off an overpass. Kevin lies to his father, asserting that it was Lenny’s idea and that he merely took the blame to save him from trouble. Eva is less than taken in by what she sees as his cunning trickery, since she sees Kevin as the leader and Lenny as a kind of degraded, baseless ‘slave’ to him. After a heated argument between herself and Franklin, who appears to take Kevin’s side on very limited evidence, as throughout the novel (his gullibility a device to draw us onto Eva’s side of their feuds before we are proven wrong along with her), she overhears the two boys talking in Kevin’s room. Her son states that ‘I saved your ass this time but don’t expect a sequel’, and, ‘I don’t like associating myself with that shit. Rocks over an overpass. It’s fucking trite, man. It’s got no class at all, it’s fucking trite’. Her false accusation is an indication that perhaps she has falsely accused him on a number of other occasions, but was not fortunate enough to overhear a conversation that proved her wrong.

And there are more ambiguous events in the novel that cause us to wonder whether we should trust Eva or take what she says as potentially agenda-serving. When Kevin’s sister loses one eye, we wonder if Kevin could indeed be wicked enough to have poured the bleach into it himself, as Eva believes, or whether the girl could have simply gotten hold of the bottle after her mother forgot to put it away in the cupboard. And then there is the incident of the girl who suffers from eczema, and when she is caught in the bathroom scratching herself to a bloody pulp, Kevin is there with her, and we are forced to consider if it was Kevin’s malicious instigation that coaxed her into tearing away at her own skin just to get at that persistent itch.

Do Eva’s inaccuracies cause us to view Kevin in a different light? To be honest, it depends entirely on the reader. Shriver has crafted a novel that expresses perfectly her belief that ‘readers bring imaginations to the table, and contribute additional substance to a book’. Kevin certainly becomes more human throughout the book, yet to what degree Eva’s perspective on events can be trusted is up to the reader to decide. And our ultimate decision is indeed vital to the way we will view the novel at its culmination. Is Eva a bad mother? Is Kevin an innately evil child? Has Eva nurtured Kevin’s ‘evil’ by refusing to see any good? How much can you really blame a teenager's horrific act on his parents?  Are the two of them more similar than we think?

Questions such as these are thrown at us from the beginning of the novel, and whether we have answered them for ourselves by the end or whether they have merely begotten more questions, this book is an important read for any parent, anybody interested in parenthood, or anybody fascinated by the psychological intricacies of deep tragedy. Whether we find out why Kevin decided to commit mass murder is dependent upon how we read the novel. Shriver gives us everything we need to make the decision, and yet simultaneously she gives us plenty of points upon which we can debate for years and remain indecisive.