We Need to Talk About Kevin

Archery Author Baby Based On Novel Broken Arm Brother Sister Relationship Character Name In Title Courtroom Steps Covered In Blood Crying Baby Family Relationships Father Son Relationship Guilt Guinea Pig Husband Wife Relationship Killing Spree Little Boy Loss Of An Eye Mother Mother Son Relationship New York New York City Nonlinear Timeline Office Party Parcel Potty Training Prison Visit Slap In The Face Small Town Suburbs Supermarket Teenage Boy Title Directed By Female Travel Agent Travel Writer Young Boy

That neither nature nor nurture bears exclusive responsibility for a child's character is self-evident. But such generalizations provide cold comfort when it's your own son who's just opened fire on his fellow students and whose class photograph--with its unseemly grin--is blown up on the national news. The question of who's to blame for teenage atrocity tortures our narrator, Eva Khatchadourian. Two years ago, her son, Kevin, murdered seven of his fellow high-school students, a cafeteria worker, and a popular algebra teacher. Because he was only fifteen at the time of the killings, he received a lenient sentence and is now in a prison for young offenders in upstate New York. Telling the story of Kevin's upbringing, Eva addresses herself to her estranged husband through a series of letters. Fearing that her own shortcomings may have shaped what her son has become, she confesses to a deep, long-standing ambivalence about both motherhood in general and Kevin in particular. How much is her fault? We Need to Talk About Kevin offers no pat explanations for why so many white, well-to-do adolescents--whether in Pearl, Paducah, Springfield, or Littleton--have gone nihilistically off the rails while growing up in suburban comfort. Instead, Lionel Shriver tells a compelling, absorbing, and resonant story while framing these horrifying tableaux of teenage carnage as metaphors for the larger tragedy--the tragedy of a country where everything works, nobody starves, and anything can be bought but a sense of purpose.

A key element in the novel is that the first-person narration invites our empathy: Eva was a successful woman and Kevin’s birth forces her to give up her career and the travel journalism that has been either a compulsion or a calling. What makes this worse is that the baby is not an easy child, but a squirmy boy tortured by colic, who develops into a recalcitrant toddler, a brooding child and finally a dangerous teenager. Eva does not like Kevin. It is this key insight which catches the attention – and it goes a bit further: Eva does not like Kevin. Kevin goes bad. Cause or effect?

Some parents do not like their offspring (either as children or as adults), and some people who have children (possibly including some watching the film or reading the book) are not ready to be parents, and resent the demands their children make on their lives. In the real world many people adapt to this and change their priorities, giving-up their careers and leisure; but some do not, and in some of these cases, this has a negative effect on the children. But this less-than-good-enough parenting doesn’t usually appear to result in mass murder, but the slow, relentless misery of an adult life built on insecurity or the simple lack of love. And given that the deficit and the distraction can be as much the father’s failure as the mother’s, some have wondered why there is the central focus in this film on the rôle of the mother in creating these tortured monsters. In my view, however, both the book and the film seem to avoid a simplistic allocation of blame, not least through the complex play of empathy and analysis, and an awareness (certainly in the novel) of the wider influences on Eva’s psyche.

Nonetheless, the fact is that some parenting – some mothering – is less than ‘good-enough’, and the effects on the children concerned can be devastating. That’s worth thinking about, and both the book and the novel make us do just that. This is an excellent film – it achieves something unusual, offering a thoughtful and filmic version of a very popular novel. It is a gripping, compelling and terrifying descent into distress, denial and egotism (and may result in you reading more bedtime stories, for a while).