Lionel Shriver: We Need to Talk About Kevin

Some mothers do have them. Children who are, well ... not nice. Take Kevin — variously described as "a little shit", "a defective product", and "a boy with an almost Zen-like indifference to whatever you might deny him". And one who, just before his 16th birthday, goes on a shooting spree, carried out with callous precision in the school gym, killing nine.

The question We Need to Talk About Kevin asks is, should the mother take the blame, especially a mother who hasn't bonded with her child, a mother who, try as she might, never liked this intrusion into her fabulous career and self-centred New York lifestyle?

In the visiting room of Claverack prison there's an answer of sorts. "It's always the mother's fault, ain't it?" a commiserating mother reassures Eva Khatchadourian ("Mumsey" to the infamous KK).

"Nobody ever says his daddy a drunk, or his daddy not home after school. And nobody ever say that some kids just damned mean. Don't you believe that old guff. Don't you let them saddle you with all that killing."

Lionel (formerly Margaret Ann) Shriver's captivating and sometimes maddening narrative — a series of unanswered letters written by Eva to her absent husband Franklin — is a painstaking picking over of the past. Exploring in minute, often droll detail life before and after Kevin, Eva is ever watchful for signs to explain, or at least rationalise, the atrocity obliquely referred to as Thursday.

But Eva is a none too reliable narrator. She wears her bad mother status like a badge, but constantly apportions blame to Franklin — "Dad the dupe" — the see-no-wrong father. "I worry equally that I may seem to be laying the groundwork that Kevin is all my fault," writes Eva.

"I do indulge that sometimes, too, gulping down blame with a powerful thirst. But I say indulge. There's a self-aggrandisement in these wallowing mea culpas, a vanity. Blame confers an awesome power."

Quick to see Kevin's faults, she is blind to her superiority rubbing off on her son. Similarly, Eva resents how Kevin drives a wedge in her relationship with Franklin but fails to notice the same resentment and selfishness at work in Kevin's cruelty to his sister and his antisocial behaviour. "I watched Kevin despoil other people's pleasures for most of his life."

But if Eva's bad mother guilt doesn't always wash, her letters wending their way to a blood-gurgling climax produce an uneasy cumulative effect. Shriver peels back layers, not just to expose the dysfunctional anatomy of a nuclear family, but to flay it alive. Sometimes there is too much information: "My daughter had been half-blinded, my husband doubted my sanity, my son was flouting his butter-greased penis in my face."

Sometimes she really is a hopeless mother. "He hated me with all his being and I was happy as clam," Eva gleefully recounts, having taken the 4-year-old Kevin's water pistol. But sometimes she gets close to a maternal instinct. "But underneath the levels of fury, I was astonished to discover, a carpet of despair. He wasn't mad. He was sad."

But if Eva fails to fully grasp Kevin's rationale, Shriver succeeds admirably in challenging the conventional wisdom of why kids engage in Columbine-style shootings and sets a fire under the simmering nature/nurture debate of why kids go bad.

As a warning to would-be parents, Shriver's worst cast scenario of what one might bring into the world could put many off. But Kevin's brilliance is that it works equally well as a primer on how not to be a wilfully stupid mother. Or father.

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* Chris Barton is a Herald feature writer.