What happens when bad children happen to good parents? Does it mean they are not, in fact, as they had imagined themselves to be?
We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003) is a novel by Lionel Shriver which examines these issues through the story of a woman whose teenage son Kevin has committed a Columbine style massacre. We read this novel in our book club about two years and I remember the discussion was pretty heated, since the book deals with a subject which has eluded other books and films on the subject: the aftermath.
Kevin cannot be tried as an adult so who will wind up getting the blame? The mother, of course. Eva must spend the rest of her life trying to make up for a crime for which she is not responsible and which she does not understand. So Eva tries to find out if there was one key, terrible misjudgment or failing of hers as a mother, which set her son off on the road to murder.
The book explores a central, emotionally incorrect theme: motherhood itself is a ritual in which the adult consents to gradual parasitic destruction. This thoroughly contemporary tale employs an old-fashioned fictional form. It is an epistolary novel: a narrative composed entirely of letters that Eva sends to her absent husband Franklin.
There is no voice apart from Eva's, even the dialogue is quoted by her. Shriver has rediscovered the combination of intimacy and antagonism that comes when the narrator is writing to a person she knows and loves.
There is a 2011 movie by British director Lynne Ramsay which I think is superb, but extremely pessimistic. In the end, we are left with the same unanswerable question: what made Kevin do it? Nature or nurture? A mother supplies both. Kevin is flesh of her flesh and perhaps an inability to judge him is her awful biological destiny. It is tremendously acted by Tilda Swinton and by Ezra Miller.
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