Nature vs Nurture

We Need to Talk About Kevin
Lionel Shriver
Harper Perennial

I'm not exactly sure what it was about this novel that grabbed me so much. The central character, Eva, is a successful, hands-on business woman, who obviously has some serious commitment issues. Her job frequently takes her away from home (sounding familiar?) and while she occasionally grouses about being away from Franklin, her husband, she's really not that interested in changing careers. One day, she decides that she might not be "happy enough" and asks Franklin if he wants to have a baby. Franklin is dying to be an all-American dad and readily agrees.

Months later, Kevin is born. Right from the start, he and Eva have an uneasy relationship --he won't take to the breast, he goes through nannies like diapers, and is fundamentally a mean (can I say evil?) little boy. When, two days before his sixteenth birthday, Kevin turns into a Columbine-type mass murderer , Eva's world is shattered. In putting it back together, she is forced to re-examine her life in the context of Kevin's horrific act of nihilism.

Reading We Need to Talk about Kevin is both a gripping and a harrowing experience. Written in the form of an epistolary novel, Shriver uses the text to implicitly provoke readers into considering the nature versus nurture question. Did her son turn out that way because Eva was a cold, aloof, emotionally-absent mother, or was he just bad from the beginning? Personally, I believe that the latter is more often the case. Sure, parents can seriously muck-up their kids, but the existentialist in me asserts that we are all responsible for our own choices and that morally there is a right and wrong. Kevin, like my boyfriend Dexter, (remember him?) is smart enough to understand the conventions of morality -- even if they don't exist for him as part of his nihilistic world-view. Three and a half Nietzsches out of five.