I just finished We Need to Talk About Kevin, and now I feel a need to talk about it.
How did you interpret it? Was Kevin really born evil? Or did he become evil?
When reading reviews I feel like most intrepted Kevin as evil or at least a mean child. But with the exception of the murders at the end, which are clearly evil acts, everything is filtered through how his mother interprets her son. Most of her examples from his childhood when she tries to show how he is a bad child, there is actually no proof to support her claim. Eva was clearly not a great mother, but was she unlucky and gave birth to an evil child? Or did he becom evil after having a mother who always thought he was evil?
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Born evil.
People who display psychopathic traits generally cannot be ”fixed”. Recidivism rates are incredibly high. Some studies have shown poor brain development in critical areas.
Also, someone who refuses to use the bathroom just so that his mother will have to clean him, and who also masturbates where she can see him is just … yeah, Kevin’s not right.
I think the great thing about this book is that there’s no clear answer. Readers see him only through Eva’s eyes and she is hardly objective, both because she’s his mother and because she’s full of guilt and shame over who he was and what he did. I think he had it in for her and relished making her uncomfortable and playing up to her expectations of him.
The dad didn’t think he was evil, iirc.
Since it’s told from the perspective of Eva *after* her son has already committed the crimes, I interpreted it as her own unreliable, partially fabricated or exaggerated version of events to justification her own position. She tried to rationalise the trauma of having a son like that by creating a narrative where Kevin was bad from birth, and she wasn’t to blame. I don’t believe what she says happened at points through his life is the truth. I supposed she goes to visit him in prison because she believes her narrative enough to feel absconded of guilt by that point — she no longer has to worry she is a bad mother, his crimes prove their terrible relationship was all on him.
I imagined Kevin as a psychopath and the mother as an unreliable narrator with some kind of mental health situation. I do think he was born with some “wires crossed”, and that the mother was ill-equipped to deal with it.
You’re never directly told who’s to blame, or whether or not Kevin is “evil”, unwell, or a product of how he is raised. I get similar vibes from Lolita — the relationship between Lolita/Lolita’s mom, can a person truly be evil, but obviously that’s an entirely different can of worms.
The mom is unlikeable, Kevin is unlikeable — maybe the two deserve each other, maybe he’s a manifestation of her despair. I would read the story of those two dealing with each other in a small town two bedroom apartment after he gets out of prison. Or maybe she meets someone and forgets about Kevin, letting him suffer his thoughts in a cell. Its an unsettling book for sure.
Have you read Sue Klebold’s book, “A Mother’s Reckoning”? That might be an interesting follow-up read for you. Kevin was enough for me. 😜
I hadn’t thought about this book for a long time, but I have been reading “people of the lie” this last week which covers some of the same ground about “how do we account for evil”…..I’m inclined to think that you need to read between the lines of the unreliable narrator.
Literally the only thing I ever read that made me momentarily afraid to have a child!
This is why I love this book. I don’t think there’s a clear answer. As others have said, the story is told through the perspective of an unreliable narrator who is struggling to find an answer to the same question you’re asking and who is desperately trying to justify it to herself that she isn’t to blame. This book made me think of motherhood in a totally different light. How do you reckon with yourself if your child does something unforgivable and you’re supposed to love them anyway? How do you reckon with yourself if you have a child and you don’t love them at all? How much are you to blame if your child does something terrible? It’s a bit of a nature vs. nurture debate – was he raised in a way that made him “evil” or would it have happened regardless?
I love this book. Nature v nurture, a very complex question with no proof as of yet. Being a psychopath seems like an easy answer, but not all psychopaths are murderers, it does help though. I read Steinbeck in a similar way, he is also asking the nature v nurture question in some of his stuff East of Eden, comes to my mind first.
There’s certainly something going on with Kevin, but I don’t think he’s “born evil” or at least that he couldn’t have been helped. In fact the majority of his acting out as a very young child is clearly just him seeking attention from his mother.
My interpretation was that both the parents were narcissists, just two different types. They were also a terrible match, whose relationship only worked when they didn’t have kids to bring out the difference in the ways they wanted to live and raise their children.
The father wants kids but it’s all a part of his idea of his idyllic All-American-Man lifestyle. He has no interest in seeing and addressing Kevin’s psychological defects or struggles because his son is supposed to be playful and boisterous and a boys-will-be-boys type. The mother’s motivation for having a child was weak and impulsive, and she’s resentful of how her life has to change to accommodate a child. She resents that her husband expects her to fulfill a more traditional role after kids, and she’s jealous of the child taking up his attention.
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One scene that stuck out to me was when Kevin ruins her map-wallpaper project with the ink in the watergun. She takes this as an act of true evil, because she’s explained to Kevin that it’s important to her to have her own space that reflects who she is. So he must understand how much it devastated her, and he clearly wanted to hurt her profoundly.
One, Kevin is four years old. He’s never taken on a long personal project of his choosing, he does not have the capacity to understand how much this would hurt his mother’s feelings. Two, his main complaint prior to the vandalism is that it’s dumb and it took too long. A four year old whose family just moved to a new area is upset that his mom then holed up in her room to spend several months on a personal project about the lifestyle that she gave up because she had children: he’s clearly jealous and wants attention.
The book is what it is. I find it more interesting as a look into the mind of a narcissistic mother than of a mass shooter, because I don’t think it does the latter that well. Never read about a mass shooter that didn’t have a victim complex. They believe they are retaliating or even acting in self-defense.
If you enjoyed this book, there’s a recent one called The Push by Ashley Audrain that is along similar lines.
Shriver deliberately leaves it up to the reader to decide on the whole nature/ nurture aspect in the story. And the novel is all the better for it imo.
I’m not a fan of writers who steer the reader to a conclusion, I prefer to work that out myself.
Personally, I found Eva to be the very definition of an unreliable narrator. I’m not sure if I trusted all of her accounts of the events in Kevin’s childhood. There was her justifications of some of her own actions that felt a little self serving, a little like she was trying to soften the consequences of her treatment of Kevin.
It’s been a while since I read it but there was a scene that’s stayed with me. The one with Kevin in his cot as a baby and her feeling his, perceived, malevolence and defiance, when they’re living in a small flat. He’s a baby in a cot, it’s easy to see how an exhausted mother, who’s possibly suffering post natal depression can interpret malevolent devilry from a child laughing in a cot. But still, the likelihood of a very small child actually exhibiting those characteristics seems…I don’t know… unlikely at an age when mental development is concerned with discovering and understanding the world around you.
I really liked that Eva wasn’t exactly self aware, it gave the book a feeling of authenticity that I wasn’t really expecting.
I loved the writing in this book. Your questions show how well she did her job – I think the answers are entirely up for debate, intentionally. Was evil created or was he born that way? How reliable is Eva as the narrator? How much does her guilt about creating a monster influence her memory?
My own take was that Kevin was mentally ill from birth, a damaged soul and Eva was the only one who could see it. Her husband was in major denial about Kevin’s problems and that conflict eroded the marriage and family. I couldn’t stop thinking about this book after I read it, for the longest time. To me it’s just brilliant.
It was a while ago, but I thought of the mother as suffering from undiagnosed post-natal depression, which made her interpret everything as being malevolent and so she emotionally distanced herself from Kevin until he felt so neglected and unwanted that he reacted with anger.
Missed opportunity for the title to be “We Need to Talk About ‘We Need to Talk About Kevin.’”
this is never my approach to literary criticism, and this is highly personal, but—I’ve always used this book as a shorthand to describe my brother. he was terrifying from the very first day, and my mother tried so hard (at a time before the internet or anything like) to figure out how to help him. nothing worked. she, to this day, laments the fact that all she managed to do was teach him how “normal” people react to things, thus giving him a way to mimic normalcy.
all that to say, while in general nature vs. nurture is a complex relationship, some people are genuinely just born evil. for whatever it’s worth to you, I’ve seen it. in literature it’s a pat and unsatisfying conclusion, but it is a possibility.
How dare you talk disparagingly about me.
I think this book is a great example of an unreliable narrator – the whole thing is from Eva’s perspective and that might include lies she has to tell herself (like her son was just evil).
Imagine it written entirely from Kevin’s POV – it’d probably be completely different.
There’s no clear answer to that. But I do not think Kevin was an evil child. Just a kid with issues, eccentric parents and a highly unstable home.
It’s been a while since I’ve read that book but I remember at the time feeling like she was a cold detached mother and that could have contributed to how Kevin grew up , lacking empathy and emotionally unhealthy. Like that experiment with the baby monkeys where they deprive them of their mothers touch and they don’t develop properly
Well, his mother was pretty awful in her own way. But I get the impression that what it was was the intersection of a distant, self-centered and cold mother who clearly would be happier doing literally anything but raising a child (nurture) and a child already struggling with personality disorders (nature) who perceives the one person he should be able to turn to with his suffering as uncaring at best.
She resents her kid for what she perceives as Kevin interrupting her life’s ambitions increasingly seeing Kevin’s mere existence (let alone his issues) as the proximate cause of her lack of fulfillment.
Kevin, already with improperly addressed disorders, perceives his mother’s true feelings about him though she lies to his face trying to keep up the facade that she loves her son. The indignity of being a child who perceives themselves to be unloved (and being gaslit about it) can easily become resentment and grow into hate. Hate for his mother and hate for everyone else who had, like regular, loving parents.
And then.. the shooting.
I don’t think Kevin was born “evil” per se. Who knows that if his mother had really cared about helping Kevin as opposed to just looking for professional validation that Kevin is just a bad seed. whether that would have been enough to keep Kevin’s psychopathy from developing into what it did. I mean there’s lots of people with antisocial disorders and things like Borderline that don’t ever go on to mass murder. I think that the story left the definitive answer to that deliberately obscure because that’s how it often is in real life. The ultimately depressing and unsatisfying lack of answers that would help make sense of it, was, IMO a key reason why the story sticks with you so long after finishing it. So many “what ifs” that will never have an answer.
(Continuing with spoilers) These are superb questions! I just recently finished it, too. We get a lot of in-depth inner monologue from the mother, and very little of it contains any genuine parental devotion or prioritizing of Kevin. She is cold and absent. Can this style of nurturing cause, or encourage the development of a similar psychopathy in the child she is raising (coldly, at arm’s length)? Can the mother’s narcissism convince her that the baby is plotting against her because he is not responsive to her half-hearted attempts to ‘nurture’ him, and she demands instant positive feedback from the baby for her poor efforts? (This is not a rhetorical question, I’ve seen this parenting dynamic in operation, and it is heartbreaking to watch) I think that her psychopathy and ragingly self-centered narcissism was ‘inherited’ by Kevin as a tendency to the same behavior, and the tendency became expressed in Kevin because he was raised by the cold, narcisstic mother/absent, ineffective father. Now, did Kevin actually do the things he was accused of? After all the neglect, suspicion, and active dislike by the mother, yes, I think so, but I may re-read specifically to look for evidence that could not be manipulated by the mother. (Note that with child #2, the mother seems to get a bit of genuine nurturing energy) I went on Reddit the moment I finished this book and asked for nonfiction examinations of the family lives of school shooters, and there are several. Kevin is fiction, I’m motivated to read a nonfiction in-depth similar examination.
As someone who has only seen the movie, my reading is that he was born evil, but not irredeemably so.
My take is that it’s a critique of the domestic model of the woman who takes care of the kid while the husband does anything else. If the father had put in equal effort and support, then I think Kevin would’ve turned out ok. In the end he kills his dad, so I think really he only ever loved his mum. He just needed help that his mum couldyprovide on her own.
One thing I loved about this book is its questioning on the unconditional love for the child that is expected of every mother. And this book definitely strengthened my determination as a child-free person.
This was my review on GoodReads:
“I started this book thinking I knew what I was getting into. After all, even in the synopsis on this site it states that it’s about the mother of school shooter. In addition, I’ve read other books about school shootings and, while poignant and emotional, I kind of felt like “if you’ve read one, you’ve read them all.” So, I started this book with a very blasé attitude regarding the subject matter.
I had no idea what I was getting into, not even one little bit. This book hit me over the head like a sack of bricks. I can usually read a book of this length in a day or, if I’m busy, a couple of days. This book took me 25 days. It took me 25 days because I’d read it for a bit, get blindsided by emotions, and need to take a break for a couple of days. I finally pushed myself to finish it and, once I did, the devastation was complete.
This book is written with Eve writing letters to her husband Franklin. It started out slow and with a debate that, I’m sure, a lot of people debate in their marriage; if/when to have children. Eve is not as on board as her husband Franklin is but finally gives in. It’s pretty clear from the start that she never wanted to be a mother and doesn’t know how to handle the child from day one. It is also pretty obvious, from pretty early on, that something is not quite right with Kevin. However, is that because he was born that way or because of Eve’s apathy towards him?
The author plays very cleverly on the nature vs. nurture debate in this novel and, really, leaves you to make the decision for yourself. Even though Eve realizes she doesn’t love her child as she should she does try, she really does and, except for one instance, she manages to maintain her calm and care for him the best she can despite all the odds being against her.
At first I didn’t like her but, as the novel progressed I actually began to, not really like her, but sympathize with her and at least understand her a bit. I also came to highly dislike her husband. Eve sees everything with a pretty clear eye, and calls herself on the carpet quite clearly and does not portray herself in a shaded light. She knows her faults and she doesn’t hesitate to state them.
As she talks about her husband you can see that he has massive blinders on and uses Eve’s lack of maternal instinct against her to continue wearing said blinders. In his eyes Kevin can do no wrong even when all the evidence is quite to the contrary. In situation after situation (including one involving his sister that leaves her maimed for life) Frank accuses Eve of hating their son and, due to that, never wanting to believe that he is the innocent even though it is, pretty obvious, that Keven is never innocent in any of the situations that arise. In the end, this blind trust and faith is Franklin’s undoing.
As the book moves along you see all the good, bad and ugly moments as if watching this family from behind a plate glass window. There’s not much good but they struggle along with their lives despite Keven and his oddities and her decision to have a second child and how that adds a new dimension to their lives. She also chronicles her life after the shooting and it is a sad, depressing life.
I read through all of this 100% in Eve’s shoes. I could feel what she felt and see what she saw and feel her love towards Franklin despite his and her attempts to love her son despite his. As a mother myself, this all just resonated with me.
Throughout the entire book she alludes to “Thursday”, which is what she calls the day of the shooting, and talks about her visits to Kevin at his juvenile detention center and their conversations there. It’s just more light being shone on who this child is and what their relationship is like.
Finally, she gets to “Thursday”, the day of the shooting. She starts describing that day with a cold detachment that is completely understandable. She lists the events as if reading from a timeline.
As if that timeline of events wasn’t horrendous enough, as if the cold-blooded way in which Kevin acted out his horrific crime with stunning forethought and planning wasn’t chilling enough; it is when Eve breaks from the monotone of listing the events, it is when she finally lets her emotions in and replays the rest of the day that it all hits you. That you FEEL what she felt, that you SEE what she saw, and there is no going back. If you have any kind of heart the end of this book will shatter you, 100%. Then, just as you pull yourself back together because she goes back to talking about the trial and whatnot, she drops another bombshell on you and that one rolls through all the way to the end.
When I finally closed this book the pages were wet from my tears and I was shaking from all the emotions. And, my last question, after reading this entire book, after living through all that she lived through, after seeing her son through her eyes, was “What would I do if I were Eve?” “Could I do what she was doing?”
I still don’t know that answer. I hope to GOD I never have to find out that answer for myself. I hope that I never have to wonder if my child was born to be the killer he became or if I caused it because I don’t feel I loved him enough.
This book is a one-time read for me. I will not read it again. However, once was enough for it to rock my world. I give it four stars and highly recommend it with the warning that it is NOT for the faint-hearted. It is a life-changing, incredibly emotionally charged roller coaster of a book that will leave you a completely different person when you close that final page.”
I’m finishing this up now and good god I’ve never disliked a cast of characters quite as fully as this one. Kevin was definitely born with issues but his dad is infuriating with his “boys will be boys” approach to parenting and his refusal to back his fucking wife up with a single thing. Finally, Eva has her issues too where she’s emotionally distant to a child and considers him malevolent from the get go. Her throwing him across the room and breaking his arm is just an awful amount of abuse. Kevin was hopeless with these two pieces of shit for parents and poor Celia didn’t stand a chance with a brother like Kevin either. Ugh, had to get that off my chest despite this thread being a year old.
I’m very late to this party but I’m kind of upset most people just mention Eva as the source of the problem but Franklin was the equally awful. If Eva saw EVERYTHING wrong with Kevin, Franklin saw NOTHING wrong with him.
Things happened that were unbelievable and he was there to be condescending to Eva, and pat Kevin on the back when he behaved badly.