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We Need to Talk About Kevin - Lionel Shriver

**spoiler alert**

I truly struggled with what to rate this book. In the end, because I felt so physically drained (not to mention ill) after finishing it, I gave it four stars for effectiveness. Still, it was an arduous read, made even more arduous by its waffling between being an epistolary memoir and a page-turner. I probably should have seen the “twist” at the end coming from a mile away, but since the story packs such a painful punch without it, I let down my guard. The book barrels toward its expected conclusion–the school “shooting” (with the very crossbow Kevin received as a gift from his parents)–but then proceeds to kick the readers while they’re down as they relive Eva’s gruesome discovery of her husband’s and daughter’s bodies in the backyard. A horror novel itself could not be as nightmare-inducing as the gory scene Shriver lays out before us. In a sense, this is a horror novel–part chest-clutcher, part bloodbath, part cautionary tale, part scathing commentary on affluent America.

“We Need to Talk About Kevin” takes a cursory glance at the actual school shootings of 1998 and 1999, but the main events are Kevin and his mother, Eva. From day one (literally), the two are at odds with one another: Eva feels nothing when the newborn child is placed on her chest and Kevin refuses to nurse. Shriver creates a dark psychological landscape wherein there is no obvious reason for the ultimate acts of violence. Eva is painted as cold and detached from her abnormal child, while Franklin is painted as an over-indulgent father who sides with Kevin against Eva at every turn. However, even in infancy, Kevin displays aberrant behavior and a total disinterest in the world and people around him, leading us to believe that at least some of his psychosis is innate. We are left wondering whether he was a natural-born monster, the product of bad parenting, or the unfortunate byproduct of a rare Prozac side effect (the sociopathic Kevin tries to make the case in court that Prozac was to blame). The book leaves you with more questions than answers.

Ultimately, I believe that the reason Eva was spared was because she never had any delusions about who Kevin really was. While Franklin, coaxed into complacency by Kevin’s artful lying, turns a blind eye to his every misdemeanor and act of cruelty, Eva remains firm in her belief that there is something horribly wrong with her son. At the end of the book, you wish with all your heart that she had been wrong.