Category: Nonfiction

That neither nature nor nurture bears exclusive responsibility for a child’s characters is self evident. But generalizations about genes are likely to provide cold comfort if it is your own child, who just opened fire on his fellow algebra students and whose class photograph – with its unseemly grin- is shown on the evening news from coast to coast. If the quesiton of who is to blame for teenage atrocity intrigues news-watching voyeurs, it tortures our narrator, Eva Khatchadourian. Two years before the opening of the novel, her son, Kevin, murdered seven of his fellow high school students, a cafeteria worker, and the much-beloved teacher who had tried to befriend him. Because his sixteenth birthday arrived two days after the killings, he recieved a leniet sentace and is currently in a prison for young offenders in upstate New York. In relating the story of Kevin’s upbringing, Eva addresses her estranged husband, Frank, though a series of startingly direct letters. Fearing that her own shortcomings may have shaped what her son becamed she confesses a deep, longstanding ambivalence about both motherhood in general – and kevin in particular. How much is her fault? We need to talk about Kevinoffers no pat explanations for why so many white, well to do adolesents – whether in Pearl, Paducah, Springfield, or Littleton – have gone nihilistically off the rails while growing up in the most properous country in history. Instead Lionel Shriver tells a compelling , absorbing and resonant story with an explosive, haunting ending. She considers mootherhood, marriage, family and career – while framing these horrifying tableaus of teenage carnage as metaphors for the larger tragedy of a country where everything works, nobody starves, and everything can be bought but a sense of purpose