Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin is a conundrum. It is complicated; it is simple. It is the story of a victim; it is the story of a perpetrator. It is all of those things, complexity layered onto clarity, love mixed inextricably with hate, and, above all, blame and responsiblity, and where either, or both, really lie.

Eva, the book’s centre and Kevin’s mother, talks to the readers through letters. Letters she writes, without fail, to her absent husband. Letters where she tries to understand what happened to herself, to Kevin, to their family–what happened to cause Kevin’s deadly rampage, where the root of the action lies. It has taken Eva two years to reach this point, two years to gather the courage and allow herself to wonder, to face what happened on a day she refers to as Thursday. There is bravery in her actions, but it is a brittle, fragile sort of bravery, and Eva readily admits that:

I’d always made it a policy, one you admired, to face what I feared, though this policy was conceived in days when my fears ran to losing my way in a foreign city–child’s play. What I would give now to return to the days when I’d no idea what lay in wait (child’s play itself, for example).

For now, for Eva, facing her fears means looking into her past, trying to find the reason, a reason, for what Kevin became. Is it her fault? Was her hesitancy about motherhood to blame for Kevin’s difficulty bonding? Is it the way Kevin was born? Was his refusal to become part of the family what led him down this path? It is the age-old questions of nature or nurture, free will or fate, blame or absolution.

The letters themselves serve multiple purposes. Writing them to her husband allows Eva the sense of a search with someone, even if it is only one-sided, and gives the reader a modicum of distance from the terrible acts that Kevin committed. It also places the reader a step away from Eva, a step that allows questions to form about what really lies at the heart of Kevin’s struggle. This layer of doubt is the crux of the story, a ledge that the question of nature or nurture balances upon.

This is a challenging book to read, not merely because of what it addresses, but because of the uncertainty that lies at its heart. Neither we, nor Eva, nor Kevin himself, really know what drove him to be who he was, to do what he did, and this ambiguity makes the deed all the more horrifying. Could Kevin have been stopped? Could Eva have somehow understood what was happening? Without an answer to the terrible question of “why” the event itself seems to spiral on, reluctant to let Eva go, refusing to let the dead rest, and leaving Eva unable to act, leaving her with, in the end, only a demand: that they talk about Kevin.

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