Book Review: We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver

With We Need to Talk About Kevin, Lionel Shriver raises far more questions than she answers. Questions about whether evil is born or created. Questions about what it means to be a good parent. Questions about forgiveness and violence and sanity and love.

I finished reading the book almost a month ago. For a month, it sat on my desk, waiting for me to give it the summary treatment. (Usually, I write about a book within a few days of reading it.) When reading it, I didn't tuck any of my normal sticky notes on the pages, either. It's the whole of this book that left an impression, not the pieces. When I flipped through it just now, the atmosphere came back to me instantly and completely, with the tension and discomfort I felt while reading it.

On some levels, it was a really simple book. Eva, mother of the titular Kevin, writes a series of letters to her husband, trying to explain and understand what went wrong with their son, what would drive him to kill his peers in a mass shooting at his suburban school. Eva is deconstructing the story that they lived through, even as Kevin sits in jail, seemingly proud of what he has done.

What makes the book interesting is the fact that I never quite feel entirely sympathetic to Kevin's mother. I can't shake the sense that she's an unreliable narrator, that she brought this on herself somehow, that she's a milder version of the sociopath her child turned out to be. This causes me unease, because it's not how I react to these stories when they're in the pages of my newspaper. I don't react to the news with a call to blame the parents, even when the news seems to want me to. Why do I feel it so strongly here? Is that what Shriver intended?

Article Author: Bonnie

Bonnie writes about books every Thursday at Fourth-Rate Reader, about everything else at Signifying Nothing, and sometimes she resorts to pictures. She lives in Toronto.

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