Interesting Story, Predictable Characters

We Need to Talk About Kevin is striking in its ability to so thoroughly examine the personalities and inner workings of so many characters without really changing them. From beginning to end, every main character represents a predictable stereotype that never veers far from his expected thoughts and actions. Eva is the career woman, the mother who did not want a child and resents him for it. Despite her desire to love him, which comes in waves, she simply cannot overcome that resentment and has to justify it, most significantly with another child, in order to prove she is a capable, loving mother and good person. Franklin is the traditional family man. He loves sports and his country and wants to instill those passions in his kids. He would never allow his wife to work while he stays at home, even if she's making considerably more money than him. Because of his burning desire to achieve the perfect nuclear family, he tends to overlook any flaws in his family that stray from that happy family picture, and deals more with the ideal than the real. Celia is the innocent younger sibling who naively can only see the good in people even when looking at pure evil, and she is her mother's saving grace.

That brings us to Kevin, who despite being the focal point of the novel and its most interesting character, is relatively static. It is not difficult to look past his insincere gestures to his father and see that every single interaction he has with every character in the book is selfish, and he has only bad intentions. While Kevin is hard to figure out, he is not hard to predict. He does not throw many curve balls at the reader. The biggest surprise he offers is those two weeks when he is sick, where his actions are hard to explain, but they ultimately change nothing and it's back to business as usual as soon as he recovers. That small window of love and normalcy for the family, even if it did come out of illness, makes the tragic ending all the more depressing.

While the novel is an interesting read and explores themes that people often do not want to discuss, the characters themselves are not what makes the book especially noteworthy. If anything they are rather unbelievable and would be hard to take seriously as a true story.