How harshly do the sins of the son reflect upon the mother? That’s the contentious question posed by Lionel Shriver’s seventh novel We Need To Talk About Kevin, which takes the form of narrator Eva Khatchadourian’s letters to her ex-husband Franklin following a Columbine-style high school massacre perpetrated by their son.

The book has caused quite a stir stateside by dint of it’s undermining of conventional parental stereotypes – Eva is an ambitious and rigorously analytical character who decides to have a child largely out of restlessness rather than any great biological imperative. To her horror – and the reader’s – she finds herself not only failing to form a bond with Kevin, but growing to outright dislike the kid, a problem that only escalates as he gets older.
The novel’s premise is a potent one because it dares to breach a subject that is borderline taboo in societies where children are indulged rather than reared. It’s not that Eva is a bad mother per se, in fact she’s dutiful to the point of pathology, but she just doesn’t enjoy being around her son.
Clearly the author, whose sartorial sense and manner of speech are as precisely observed as her prose, has hit a nerve.
“Despite the fact that it hasn’t been very heavily promoted, the degree that it succeeded has been all word of mouth stuff,” she acknowledges. “There’s clearly some kind of a hunger out there.”
Does she get people thanking her for –
“Being more honest about motherhood? Yeah. Very grateful that somebody has tried to get across what it’s like to raise a child.”
Shriver herself decided at the age of eight that parenting wasn’t for her. Yet her insights into the minutiae of motherhood are pretty impressive.
“Well, I do have an imagination,” she says. “Or rather, I have vivid fears. Ultimately I was still trying to examine my own fears of a potential coldness in me, a selfishness that would exclude extending myself to particular children, because I think children are particular. As a child, I felt like a person with volition rather than a being that was being acted upon from without, and therefore my parents had to contend with me as a real person whom they have not always liked. In writing the book I started getting more sympathetic, less condemnatory, stopped looking at it from a child’s perspective. What I was afraid of for myself, if I were to become a mother, was just… having someone around the house I didn’t want there. A kid is a stranger in the house. You have to get to know him.”
Which may seem obvious, but it’s quite the wake-up call for those who assume having children will solve their own existential crises, or save their marriage.
“They don’t understand that it’s going to try the marriage,” Shriver observes. “I think people bring a completely different expectation to parenthood now. It’s not about your kid going to till your fields, it’s about them giving you a new sense of meaning, that they are going to fill out your life emotionally and reward you with their love, and your life is going to be richer, fuller and more exciting in those senses. And that’s actually expecting a fuck of a lot. And it doesn’t always come across.”
In Kevin’s case, that shock is compounded by his obnoxious nature.
“We’ve all been in the restaurant with this nyah-nyah kid, and you want to kill him,” Shriver says. “And his parents don’t do anything. And that’s where Eva and Franklin divide, because Franklin is completely indulgent and Eva is much more an old style disciplinarian.”
But more than that, as he grows older, Kevin becomes more sullen, disconnected, lacking in empathy and disdainful of humanity in general.
Was his psychological profile assembled from case studies of high school killers?
“Not really. That was just stuff I made up. As a construct, I liked it. And the whole concept of Kevin was really of someone who wasn’t, as you say, seething with fury, but who was just… bored. Bored to the point of disgust with everything. Essentially not interested in being here, and a little resentful of the fact that he was, because nothing about being alive interested him.”
Which is a hallmark of most male adolescents – at least until they become interested in sex, drugs or rock ‘n’ roll.
“You see it all the time, that feigned boredom, I’ve-seen-it-all-before, nothing impresses me, the physical lassitude, clothing dripping off them. What made it an interesting character to write is that it’s usually a phase that kids go through and come out the other side of, but I imparted it all the way back to infancy.”
It’s a chilling notion that, beyond all the sociological and nurture-versus-nature factors, there can be such a thing as a bona fide bad seed, irredeemable from birth.
“I read an interesting article in the New York Times about psychologists who worked with and have written about mass murderers,” Shriver says, “and there’s this movement arguing that we need to bring in ‘evil’ as a clinical diagnosis, that there are single cases they have contended with that so boggle the mind there’s no other word that will do. I’m of two minds about that impulse, but clearly there is this sub-category that they’ve been exposed to that is constantly upsetting them and they need a label for it in order to accommodate it, and probably in order to quarantine those experiences they’ve had from the rest of life because they’re so upsetting. I don’t think it’s necessarily the case in this book, but I guess ultimately I do believe that some people are born irredeemable.”

We Need To Talk About Kevin is out now, published by Serpent’s Tail.