Chris Barker

We Need to Talk About Kevin, Lionel Shriver’s 2003 pitch-dark thriller about a killer child, is a fascinating puzzle because of its unreliable narrator, Kevin’s mother, Eva.

In the book, Eva is a successful travel guide writer who was always uncertain about becoming a mother. After a tough pregnancy and birth, she struggles to connect with her new son, Kevin, suggesting postpartum depression.

Kevin is also a difficult child: driving away nannies with his incessant screaming, never learning to toilet train, and seeming, according to Eva, to lack interest in anything other than making life difficult for her. During one incident of misbehaviour, Eva breaks his arm out of pure frustration.

Kevin develops an interest in archery, based on the time he and his mother bonded over stories of Robin Hood. Kevin’s misbehaviour becomes more covert, and he is involved with several ambiguous but disturbing incidents: a pre-school child in his class scratches herself until she bleeds, Kevin and a friend are found apparently throwing bricks from an overpass onto a highway, and they and a group of other school children accuse a drama teacher of molesting them.

At the horrific climax of the book, Eva and her husband Franklin agree to a divorce after an incident when Kevin’s sister is blinded in one eye. In response, 15-year-old Kevin locks several classmates in the school gym and shoots them to death with his crossbow, killing them slowly and gruesomely.

There are three possibilities:

Before Kevin’s shooting spree, there is little hard evidence as to which narrative is correct, although the number of disturbing events surrounding the family suggests something is wrong.

The evidence of Kevin’s maleficence comes from Eva. She describes him as conniving, sadistic, cunning, unable to form relationships or show empathy for anyone around him, even though there are hints that this is not entirely true. She is repelled by him even when he is a pre-speech infant, when it seems impossible that he could genuinely have been a sociopath.

Eva more or less admits to hating her son since birth, and always thinks the worst of him. She is convinced that Kevin is guilty of throwing bricks from the overpass and endangering cars below, out of pure cruelty. Kevin is later shown to be innocent, one of the few occasions where the ambiguity about his actions is removed.

When Kevin claims to have been molested by a teacher, Eva is convinced he is lying despite the teacher admitting that several elements of his story are accurate. While Kevin’s friend might have invented his account,  it seems unlikely Kevin could have influenced other students to do the same thing, given his lack of close relationships.

The overpass incident raises the possibility that Kevin is innocent of the other strange events surrounding the family, as well. That would make him the victim for most of the narrative; a disturbed child, treated cruelly and abusively by his mother and a teacher, and finally driven over the deep end.

The problem with that scenario is that, even accounting for the unreliable narrator, Kevin does come across as a genuine sociopath.

Kevin is shown to be highly intelligent despite his anti-social nature, eloquently justifying his actions when interviewed on TV and showing a disturbing amount of pre-planning and sadism in the gymnasium shooting spree.

His mass murder at the climax of the book is calculated, gruesome, and suggests a total lack of empathy. While it’s possible to doubt that he is responsible for all the things he is accused of- for example, it’s never clear if he injured his sister’s eye- there are so many incidents this strains credulity. It doesn’t seem likely, on the balance of evidence, that Kevin is a more-or-less normal child.

This raises the question as to whether Eva’s account is inaccurate in the other direction. Is she casting herself in an unfavourable light, and even exaggerating her incidents of cruelty towards Kevin? Is she motivated by a guilt complex, or trying to make herself in some way the equal of her school shooter son?

The problem with that scenario is Kevin’s broken arm. You could argue that Eva was driven to it by his behaviour, but it’s not something a normal parent would do, even under extreme stress. Notably, this is the only other incident from Kevin’s childhood where there is no ambiguity about Eva and Kevin’s actions.

The problem is I do not believe the book is mostly accurate, because that would mean having a sociopathic child and an abusive mother in the same family was pure coincidence. They must be related.

Eva’s narrative is fundamentally misleading in some way, and it’s almost impossible to figure out how- one of the reasons We Need to Talk About Kevin is such an endlessly fascinating book.