Reviewed by Grayson Perry

When a child is growing up he takes in what psychotherapists call introjects. These are pieces of information, feelings, attitudes picked up usually from the parents. What is particular about introjects is that they go in whole and unexamined like a bolus of food swallowed without chewing. Children pick up these ideas and behaviours often subconsciously and the parents are unaware that their feelings toward the child are leaking out drip by drip into the emotionally undiscriminating minds of their offspring.

The feelings that drip then pour out of Eva Khatchadourian into her son in Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin are pure glorious poison. They are feelings she daringly admits to herself that she has harboured even before Kevin is born. She dislikes her son. She senses even in the womb that he is a bad lot. This turns out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Lionel Shriver gives us permission to indulge in the guilty pleasure of hating a child whilst her ‘heroine’ Eva walks a tightrope between bravely slaying the sacred cows of motherhood and being an ungrateful sourpuss bitch.

The question burning at the heart of this novel is Nature or Nuture? The answer, as is often the case when faced with a polarised choice, is both. Kevin is a bright sensitive child who sucks up on his mother’s antipathy with the painfully expressed breastmilk and spits it back in her face. I empathised with Kevin’s disappointment, I share with him curse of imagination that means the world rarely lives up to our expectations. I don’t share his retreat into nihilism though I did find his deliberately monotone school essays funny and I shall never be able to look a lychee in the eye again.

Written as a series of letters to her husband about their son who is in prison for a Columbin- style massacre, each chapter seems to end with a nail to the guts. We are treated to a finely-paced account of Eva’s marriage, Kevin’s increasingly frightening childhood and the fall-out from its crescendo of violence.  Eva asks all the difficult questions and looks at them from all angles. This novel never lets up its superbly observed emotional intensity not even in the final heartrending paragraph.

read on…