We Need to Talk About Kevin

Lionel Shriver

4 ideas

1. Kevin's Thursday massacre and the mother left behind

   Days before his sixteenth birthday, Kevin Khatchadourian locks seven students, a cafeteria worker and a teacher in his school gym and kills them with a crossbow. Only in the final letters is it revealed that he first killed his father, Franklin, and his younger sister, Celia, at home, so the husband Eva has been writing to all along is dead. Two years later, visiting him in juvenile detention, Eva asks why, Kevin says he is no longer sure, and she embraces him and resolves to have a room ready when he is released.

2. Nature versus nurture is undecidable from inside

   Eva cannot tell whether Kevin was hostile from birth or whether her own reluctance to have a child, which she believes he sensed from infancy, produced the hostility she then saw in him. Because she is both the only witness and the chief suspect, her testimony can support either reading. The novel keeps both explanations open and suggests that a parent looking for the cause of a child's evil cannot rule out being part of it.

3. A split parental alliance lets a child hide

   Franklin insists on a wholesome, normal-boy reading of Kevin and dismisses Eva's warnings as her own coldness. Kevin performs cheerful sonhood for his father and shows his real contempt only to his mother, so each parent's certainty confirms the other's blindness. When parents disagree about a child, the child can exploit the gap. The parent who reports trouble is then disbelieved, and the disbelief protects the behavior.

4. Atrocity as a bid for audience

   Kevin says the world is split between people who watch and people who do, and that television audiences want someone to give them something to watch. On this view, mass violence is partly theater staged for a culture of spectators and made worthwhile by the notoriety it earns. The novel's mechanism is that media attention to killers creates the incentive it later reports on.

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