We Need to Talk About Kevin

I have a million thoughts about this book, and I recommend it highly to anyone thinking about the complexities of motherhood, or just the challenges of being a human person who can't help but project your thoughts, feelings, and experiences onto those around you. This is an uncomfortable and fascinating book, with characters who are simultaneously intensely dislikable and (sometimes) terrifyingly relateable.

The narrator, Eva, is obviously presenting us with an unreliable version of events, but as we have no other version to go on we are forced to read between the lines, judging her understandings of what happened through the lens of the behaviours she presents to us and the way she speaks. This traps you in a spiral of questioning and doubt.

The rest of my review contains spoilers/ Eva is both defensive and self-recriminating, stewing in guilt but also painting a picture of a miserable life in which her husband was (intentionally or unintentionally) gaslighting her, and in which she and her son hated each other. The book's main question is whether her son is deeply evil, or whether her intense mistrust of him from infancy pushed his character in a certain direction. It is a unique take on the nature vs. nurture question, and inevitably the answer is somewhere in between. At the same time, Kevin so often seems like a reflection of the worst parts of Eva's personality, or, she acts like him. She often acts just like him. Did he learn these behaviors from her? Did she learn them from him? If she approached her son with a different attitude could they have bonded over their acidic judgment of the world, their tendency towards selfishness, their feelings of detachment? And yet, at the same time as you ask yourself those questions, you remember what he did and his lack of remorse and the gulf opens up between them again. The end of the book delivers two more devastating blows: the first which I won't even write here in case anyone did not heed my spoiler warning (yes, you can sort of guess it while reading, but I did not want to try to guess, so I did not). That first revelation makes Eva's alone-ness even more acute, for even the righteous indignation we feel on her behalf through much of the book can have no answer. The second twist is Kevin's turn towards softness and remorse. This moment, their hug at the end of the book, leaves your head spinning. How can we reconfigure our understanding of Kevin to include the capacity for remorse, for goodness, for uncertainty?

A content warning: there are a few moments where Eva, the protagonist/narrator, expresses some borderline racist/stereotypical views of other groups...these are presented clearly as the narrator's views not the author's, and serve to characterize Eva further as self-centered and flawed in a particular way. I know that Lionel Shriver has also been considered a controversial figure. These views are not throughout the book but do come up maybe two or three times.

And a final warning: if you, like me, are a teacher, probably don't read this book in the lunchroom at school because someone will inevitably ask you what you are reading and then you will have to have a fairly uncomfortable conversation...