WHAT is more taboo than a woman who is repulsed by her own child? This is the genius of "We Need to Talk About Kevin", a remarkable novel from Lionel Shriver (a former literary critic for this paper), which considers the life of a reluctant mother after her teenage son commits mass murder. The story unfurls as a stream of letters from Eva Khatchadourian to her husband as she retraces the steps of their lives together-the happy marriage that morphs into a toxic family, and the haunting event that casts everything in shadow. Yet even as Eva recounts evidence of her son's malevolence at a young age, the reader is left with a galling question: would Kevin have fared better if his mother loved him more?
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