Why We Need To Talk About Kevin

When Lionel Shriver's novel, We Need To Talk About Kevin, appeared in 2003, it was greeted as a taboo-breaking success. Yet with hindsight and despite the gory plot, I remember Kevin not for the story or the drama, but the subtle afterthought - that living is worth it, even if it makes no sense.

After Kevin Khatchadourian, not yet sixteen, decides to kill nine of his fellow high school students, a teacher and a cafeteria worker, how should blame be split between the boy and the grieving mother? Could things have gone differently? This, Eva Khatchadourian ponders at length and with indelible insight, in letters to her estranged husband Franklin.

The mental atmosphere is that of slow smouldering rage. The apparent cause is that Franklin wants a child - Eva does not and the cake cannot be had and eaten. In binary relationships, zero-sum happiness is really just unhappiness by a different name. To remain barren is for Eva to wound the man she loves, deeply and sincerely. To have a child is to become "hopelessly trapped in someone else's story", a mere body "designed to expel its own replacement". There is no winning third option. There is only that archetypal human conundrum: to be sincere or not lonely?

Ostensibly, Eva aims this rage at every stock argument in favour of reproduction. Meaning? She pulls no punches and there are notes of raw bitterness in her reproof for those who "foist their own aimlessness onto their offsprings". Love? Try cowardice, Franklin, she taunts: having children because "you can never become their ex-father, as I might become your ex-wife". And in any case, "if there is no reason to live without a child, how could there be with one? To answer one life with a successive life is simply to transfer the onus of purpose to the next generation".

Yet what is the rage really about? Some clues in the remarks that "you can locate most people on a spectrum of the crudest sort and.. it may be their position on this scale with which their every other attribute correlates: exactly how much they like being here, just being alive".

At one end, there is Franklin, who "disparaged people (people like [Eva]) for their cussedly nonspecific dissatisfactions, because to fail to embrace the simple fitness of being alive betrayed a weakness of character". Here too are Franklin's parents, a pair unique in their living "so exclusively in three dimensions". These are people who do not struggle, like Eva, "against convention as a constraint", but who are "grateful for the rules". (There is the side remark that childhood and maturity are both, in their extremes, "all about following the rules"). They are "still and present" and Eva, at length, concedes: "the capacity is existential, that ability to just be, with a profundity that I have seen elude some very well educated people".

At the other end, of course, is Kevin: beset by an indifference "so absolute that it's like a whole you might fall in". It is not rage that ultimately moves Kevin to massacre, as much as an unbearable apathy. Because in his experience, there is no joy or simple fitness of living: reality is lame, if only because "it is real and therefore finite and fixed". Why was life "foisted" on him? he seethes. The promise of life is that it's worth living - but "expectations are dangerous when they are both high and unformed". As Eva puts it: nothing is interesting if you are not interested. This is existence through the joyless eye of the depressed, who suffers not from unbridled melancholy, but a deadly lack of vitality, sheer and true. Poignantly, Kevin feels cheated. Moreover, he rightly feels unloved ("what does it mean that Dad loves you and hasn't a bleeping clue who you are?"). Eva alone understands why. For if Franklin's parents (and most people) manage to forget the uncanniness of existence through their "forever puttering, greasing the machinery of daily life", Kevin refuses "to deceive himself that by merely filling it, he was putting his time to productive use". The line lies between those who have the character to face the void and those who don't. There is no real point to life and no good reason to do anything. "The difference", she concludes mournfully, "is that your father would wittingly install the water softener for no good reason and Kevin would not".

Eva knows this because she is caught in the middle. Franklin's parents might be silly, "well-meaning but unimaginative" and blind to "why anyone would seek out a film with an unhappy ending or buy a painting that wasn't pretty", but they are happy. And unlike Kevin, she does not seem to begrudge their capacity for immersion or their enthusiasm for doing the living thing. (Or if she does, it's only to the extent of passive aggression.) Their wholesome unselfconsciousness is not "the string and arrows of other people's outrageous fortune" (no accident that Kevin's weapon is a crossbow). She recognises that "it may not be fair to call it a character flaw that someone's life has always gone well with minimal impedance". If anything, that might be the aspiration: to be "too busy attending to a flourishing business and a marvellous marriage to bother about what it all amounts to". Yet she never quite gets there. Mingled with her "cussedly nonspecific dissatisfactions" and despite the permanent goings to and fro, her own struggle with meaning festers unacknowledged. That Kevin should come to embody this secret void of vitality is more than a parent's nightmare of a child she cannot love. It is our communal horror of genuine self-knowledge. For after all, "who could live day after day with the deficiencies of their own imagination made solid as brick"?

Under the circumstances, the question of blame has particular significance. This is a quintessentially human obsession, for we are staunch believers in free will. Eva's acerbic dismissal of people who spurn accountability through lawsuits, is telling - as is Kevin's derision of "amateurs" who try to justify their atrocities with paltry excuses ("I was bullied", "I was misunderstood"). For his own, he insists to take responsibility. Yet there is subversive ambivalence on both sides. Kevin's defence makes use of his Prozac prescription, at Kevin's own suggestion. And Eva herself asks with revealing poignancy: why so much guilt and shame, attached so vehemently, to events regarding which one feels at once "responsible and helpless"? Is mental illness, lacking the simple vitality of living - a curse or a character flaw?

Nevertheless, both Eva and Kevin cling to blame as to a life boat. Why, when "there's a freedom in apathy, a wild dizzying liberation on which you can almost get drunk [and] do anything [like] Kevin"? As Eva herself observes: "you can only punish people who have hopes to frustrate or attachments to sever; who worry what you think of them. You can really only punish people who are already a little bit good". Like Roman Romanovich Raskolnikov, the hero of Crime and Punishment, Eva and Kevin accept blame because it is the necessary payment for something neither is ultimately prepared to abandon: membership in the human race.

And there is another reason: because it does not matter. When one victim's mother sues her for negligence, Eva writes: "The problem was not who was punished for what. The problems was that her daughter was dead". Likewise, the problem is not whether society ever deigns to forgive Eva and Kevin - the problem is that life has no meaning.

Ultimately, the high-minded reasons for living, like the reasons for having children, are just dirigibles: "immense, floating, and few; optimistic large-hearted, even profound, but ominously ungrounded". Happiness perhaps is possible only in the negative, as Prince Andrei Bolkonsky once remarked: we feel it briefly in the the lack of suffering, the lack of deprivation. This reminded me of a passage in George Orwell, from the review of Mein Kampf (1940): "[Hitler] grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. (...) because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, [he] knows that human beings don't only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades. (...) Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people "I offer you a good time", Hitler has said to them "I offer you struggle, danger and death" and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet"¹. As Eva reflects bitterly to Franklin: "when your life was wholly in your lap you didn't know what to do with it". Struggle, hardship and self-sacrifice are an easy way out.

Thus we are come, full circle, back to the "simple fitness of being" - and our communal perplexity before it. For in the end, Kevin's rejection of just being is no more baffling to us than it is to Eva. We've all peeked at the void. If not exactly struggle, certainly work is a vital distraction from the vast meaninglessness of it all.

And if it's true of individuals, it's true of collectives. Every so often, societies are driven to despair by their own success - unsure how to find meaning in a life largely void of real hardship. In Eva's world, the hate-mail is "meet-red", whereas the kindness of condolences is "pastel and processed" and nobody uses "nice" to mean anything other than "boring". In the midst of progress, there is an atavic yearning for violence, "raw and unleashed", to tear away the veil of civilisation which "comes between us as much as it makes life possible". Is it rash to put progress on a pyre and light it? Yes. Then again, "desperate people will often opt for short-term relief in exchange for long-term losses".

Despite this, I don't think Kevin's conclusion is pessimistic. On the contrary. The book ends with a certain softness. Needing kindness herself, Eva is kinder now. In the end, there is something of Franklin's attitude in her remark that maybe "you only get at gist by assembling all the tiny inconclusive anecdotes that would fall flat at a dinner table and that seem irrelevant until you collect them in a pile". More importantly, she finally discovers how to love Kevin and through him - the nihilistic impulse in her own heart. In the end, she does love life, in full awareness of its ultimate meaninglessness.

And unlike Franklin's - who hasn't a bleeping clue, who loves not his real country or his real son or life as it really is, but delusive shadows of those things built with squinting eyes in his own heart, Eva's love is real.

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