The process of mutual-reconstitution achieved by Shriver's characters challenges readers to reconfigure their expectations, assumptions, and biases to engage with characters that court antipathy and yet, to emerge from the experience profoundly humbled. In addition to its astute anatomization of trauma, the novel offers readers a framework for envisioning rehabilitation from trauma that is both recuperative and generative. The article reveals how critical focus on violence in Shriver's novel has so far obscured Shriver's fierce and surprisingly optimistic ethical message. The article combines analysis of Shriver's narrative techniques and unorthodox moral argument with current clinical research, discussions of accountability in post-postmodern society, and Nussbaum's hopes for the place of fiction in such debates, particularly with regard to her distinction between the general and the particular in moral judgment. This article tests Martha Nussbaum's assertion that a novel can be "a paradigm of moral activity" (1990: 148) and expands that claim beyond the boundaries Nussbaum is likely to have originally conceived, through a study of Lionel Shriver's controversial novel We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003). Page of the novel 'The Mandibles' on the site of its publisher: The book's page on its publisher's website: In this review, I briefly analyze the links of Lionel Shriver's novel to the genres of science fiction, financial crisis fiction and family chronicle, as well as the way in which the novel dramatizes the author's libertarian ideology. In this section, one can find my book review entitled "On Lionel Shriver's The Mandibles, A Family (2029-2047)". The collective collection 'Caliban 63: Dynamiques de l'effondrement dans le fantastique, la fantasy et la SF/ Dynamics of Collapse in Fantasy, the Fantastic and SF', published in January 2021 and edited by Florent Hébert and myself, contains, after the thematic dossier of scholarly articles that we edited, a section entitled "Detours", edited by Helen Goethals and James Gifford, which includes reviews, small essays, poems and short stories on the same collapsological themes as the preceding scholarly papers.
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