book review of bewilderment by richard powers

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Bewilderment

By richard powers, reviewed by hamilton cain.

Among the glories of an East Tennessee childhood are the Smoky Mountains that straddle the North Carolina state line. Three hundred million years ago, they loomed taller than the Himalayas. Since then, they have eroded to a spine of rounded summits tiered with oak and hickory. Damp paths laced with fern and poison oak run alongside purling streams, and a waterfall is always just a short hike away. The National Park welcomes more than 11 million visitors each year, but there are scores of secluded coves and ridges where you can pitch your tent in isolation.

This is the landscape Richard Powers reverentially conjures up in the opening pages of his lyrical, quietly moving new novel, Bewilderment , his first since the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Overstory . With prose that threads together head and heart, Bewilderment teaches us both to think critically and to feel extravagantly.

When we first encounter him, Powers’s narrator, Theo Byrne, an astrobiologist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, has pulled his nine-year-old neurodivergent son, Robin, from school following an unnerving incident. Father and son rent a cabin, swim in freshets and sleep outdoors beneath the Milky Way, but behind their idyll lies a dark secret. Two years earlier, Theo’s wife Alyssa—a vivacious lawyer and animal-rights activist—was killed in a head-on collision. The circumstances surrounding her death remain fuzzy, even to her husband and son, but in a series of flashbacks Alyssa’s own demons emerge.

From The Gold Bug Variations to Galatea 2.2 to The Overstory , Powers, who initially studied physics in college before changing majors, is, among writers of literary fiction, perhaps the one most steeped in science. It’s no wonder, then, that science fuels the middle section of Bewilderment. Robin’s troubles escalate once father and son return to Madison, where they are faced with an ultimatum from his school’s principal: find a solution for his behavior, or the authorities will intervene. Theo reluctantly enrolls his sun in a radical experimental therapy, which Alyssa and Theo once tried an early iteration of. A neurologist who has kept Alyssa’s plates now offers to connect Robin with his mother’s “ecstasy.” Robin blooms, taking on Alyssa’s speech and mannerisms, as if her ghost has slipped into his body, provoking Theo to anger and grief.

Powers metes out detail judiciously, revealing only bits and pieces of Theo’s backstory. “Lots of monsters inhabited my sunless depths,” he acknowledges in passing, without any elaboration. Although Theo’s wife and son have transformed him for the better, Powers renders their voices in italics—they represent an Otherness, a human goodness Theo can’t access. Only his imagination can make up for Theo’s damaged soul. His job is to search for chemical traces of potential life in exoplanets, sifting through data from the Kepler telescope, but he’s also inspired to build worlds for Robin, such as Tedia, doomed to a steady drumbeat of death and rebirth, and Stasis, an Earth-like planet with little axis tilt and hence no seasons.

As Bewilderment reaches its crescendo back in the Smoky Mountains, Powers upends our expectations. Tragedy, it turns out, is always lurking at the edges of hope. Yet he also affirms the universe: the ineffability of stars and their children, gaseous giants and arid rocks and garden planets. Powers sanctifies the universe of neurons inside us, the churn of human beings toward and away from one another. The fantasy of cyclical renewal lures us in, as Robin suggests to his father:

Spring will keep coming back, whatever happens. Right, Dad? There were strong arguments either way. The Earth had been everything from hell to snowball. Mars had lost its atmosphere and fizzled away to a frigid desert, while Venus descended into hammering winds and a surface hotter than a smelter. Life could crash and spin out, pretty much overnight. My models said as much, and so did the rocks of this planet … “Yes,” I told him. “You can count on spring.”

As for us, we can count on more thrilling work from a master at the height of his powers.

Published on November 5, 2021

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Fresh off a Pulitzer win for ‘The Overstory,’ Richard Powers delivers another environmental ode

Richard Powers’s poignant new novel, “ Bewilderment ,” is a cri de cœur. Like his recent masterpiece, “The Overstory,” which won a Pulitzer Prize , “Bewilderment” deplores humanity’s destruction of the environment and the perverse incentives that make our descent toward universal suicide so difficult to stop.

But unlike “The Overstory,” with its sprawling network of interconnected plots, this is a hauntingly intimate story set within the privacy of one family trapped in the penumbra of mourning. Although there are allusions to a Trump-like fiend accelerating the country’s decay, Powers isn’t interested in exploring the full scientific and political complexity of our environmental catastrophe. Instead, “Bewilderment,” which is shortlisted for the Booker Prize and longlisted for a National Book Award, focuses on how that tragedy is perceived by one special little boy.

When the novel opens, an astrobiologist named Theo Byrne is camping with his 9-year-old son, Robin. The setting is bucolic but tinged with tragedy. Theo and his wife, a passionate animal rights lawyer, once spent their honeymoon in this forest, but two years ago she died in a car accident. Now, father and son are negotiating that tender border between reminiscence and grief. “Alyssa would’ve propelled the three of us forward on her own bottomless forgiveness and bulldozer will,” Theo says. “Without her, I was flailing.”

The most exciting novel about trees you’ll ever read

The whole novel comes across in that wounded, confessional tone, the voice of a man so overwhelmed that he can barely contend with the ordinary diversions of life. “Everything about parenting terrified me,” he says, and he’s got extra reasons to be concerned. His precocious son exhibits a strange set of contradictory behaviors. Noises unsettle him, except in the woods, where he can identify them with precision. He has trouble concentrating but memorizes enormous amounts of information and sits for hours to produce intricate sketches. Although he’s incredibly sweet, he sometimes explodes in uncontrollable rages.

Various specialists have suggested Asperger’s, OCD and ADHD. “I never believed the diagnoses the doctors settled on my son,” Theo says. “His second pediatrician was keen to put Robin ‘on the spectrum.’ I wanted to tell the man that everyone alive on this fluke little planet was on the spectrum. That’s what a spectrum is.” Alarmed by the overprescription of psychoactive drugs to muzzle and normalize atypical children, Theo rejects them all and develops what he admits is a crackpot theory: “Life is something we need to stop correcting,” he insists. “My boy was a pocket universe I could never hope to fathom.”

But fathoming other universes is the essence of Theo’s job. He studies the infinitesimal fluctuations of light from space in hopes of locating alien planets capable of supporting life. Laced throughout the novel are gorgeous glimpses of faraway worlds — imaginative nighttime stories that Theo tells Robin about beings who have two brains, fishlike organisms with religious rites and civilizations that exist along a strip between boiling and freezing.

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“They share a lot, astronomy and childhood,” Theo says. “Both are voyages across huge distances. Both search for facts beyond their grasp. Both theorize wildly and let possibilities multiply without limits. Both are humbled every few weeks.”

But as attuned as Theo is to his son, love and patience alone will not make Robin neurotypical. As the boy’s outbursts grow more violent, Theo attracts more critical attention. If you’re the parent of a child with special needs who’s felt the cold procrustean hands of the public school system, you know what this father is up against. When the principal threatens to get Child Services involved with Robin’s case, Theo is willing to try anything to keep from medicating his son into an appropriate state of docility.

At this point, the story takes a turn down what we might call Powers Lane — that avenue of almost-mystical cutting-edge science that we’ve come to expect from the author’s cerebral novels. Desperate to keep Robin off psychoactive drugs, Theo turns to an old friend of his wife’s who is developing an experimental therapy called decoded neurofeedback or DecNef. It’s a noninvasive procedure that involves placing patients in an fMRI machine and training them to pattern their own neural activity to match some standard, presumably healthier mental state.

For fans of Powers’s earlier novels, this should get all their synapses firing. They’ll remember that “Galatea 2.2” (1995) revolves around the development of an artificial brain. In “The Echo Maker” (2006), a young man suffers a traumatic head injury that alters his memory. And in “Generosity” (2009), an Algerian woman may possess the genetic key to happiness. But if those earlier novels sometimes felt like auditing a graduate course in neurology, “Bewilderment” holds forth in a shadowy forest of fables.

The moment 9-year-old Robin responds positively to DecNef treatment, the lab director hits upon a curious idea: Why not use old neural patterns recorded by Robin’s mother to train the boy in attaining ecstasy? Sure enough, soon Robin is communing with his dead mom’s brain — or at least its recorded neural patterns. In a matter of weeks, he has acquired his mother’s knowledge of the natural world and her intense love for it.

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This mother-son spirit mingling may be incredibly lovely, but it’s also irreducibly creepy. And there’s a high risk of sentimentality here: the precious Messiah child mewing his little Whitmanesque profundities at us about the unity of all life. More problematic still is a corny story line in which Theo suspects that the lead neurologist might be carrying on some kind of adulterous affair with his dead wife’s brain print. All this neurological mumbo-jumbo creates a clammy atmosphere for what is, at its heart, a tender story about a child who responds to the plight of our planet just as passionately as we all should.

Unfortunately, “Bewilderment” goes out of its way to cast the tale of Robin’s miraculous evolution as a green version of Daniel Keyes’s “ Flowers for Algernon .” That classic tear-jerker has taught generations of seventh-graders that the only thing worse than being intellectually disabled is getting smarter and then becoming intellectually disabled again.

Powers’s thoroughly modern fable of environmental mourning hardly needs to dredge up that cringeworthy antecedent. It feels like just one more bit of fantastical melodrama that dilutes the potential power of “Bewilderment.”

Ron Charles writes about books for The Washington Post and hosts TotallyHipVideoBookReview.com .

Bewilderment

By Richard Powers

W.W. Norton. 278 pp. $27.95

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In Richard Powers’s New Novel, Hope for a Grieving Kid and Planet May Lurk in the Human Brain

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By Tracy K. Smith

• Published Sept. 21, 2021 Updated Oct. 1, 2021

BEWILDERMENT By Richard Powers

The great American poet Lucille Clifton once said: “In the bigger scheme of things, the universe is not asking us to do something, the universe is asking us to be something. And that’s a whole different thing.” In Clifton’s mind, this proposition was not speculative but resolutely practical. What if we exist to serve as stewards of the planet rather than its plunderers? What if it is our calling to be the equals of all living things rather than agents of their domination? In the face of all that we have waged, ruthless and unending battles for the right to get wrong, what would it take for us to accept a different role in the bigger scheme of things ?

The proposition that our thriving as a species hinges on assenting not to a different manner of doing but of being sits close to the conflict — and the extraordinary revelation — at the heart of Richard Powers ’s novel “Bewilderment,” his 13th, including “ The Overstory ” (2018), which won a Pulitzer Prize. Personal peace, if not thriving, is predicated on the protagonist Theo Byrne’s ability to see his own life, the memory of his deceased wife and his son, Robin, through newly adjusted eyes.

Theo is an astrobiologist whose research involves searching the galaxy for planets with the potential to host life, and running the data to spin out imagination-boggling scenarios of the possible life-forms such conditions might allow to flourish. It’s a dream job for a sci-fi-loving loner still hamstrung by grief. But in the near future in which “Bewilderment” is set, America has tilted further toward anti-intellectual authoritarianism; government funding for such Old Testament-flouting research is drying up. Nevertheless, dreaming up possible worlds that so brazenly defy earthly logic — worlds that suggest “everything could be for real, somewhere, someday” — is a great skill to have at bedtime, especially because Theo struggles to raise 9-year-old Robin on his own.

Robin is sensitive, introverted, prone to erratic behavior. Theo can’t bring himself to accept the experts’ advice: that the solution to his son’s extreme sensitivity and his occasional outbursts is medication. Instead, father ministers to son by talking, camping and stargazing. Robin longs to feel the presence of the mother he remembers as extraordinarily alive : full of fervor not just for her own living, but for all sentient life, whose entitlement to fair and humane treatment it was her career as an animal-rights lawyer to defend. And so, a large part of the conversation between father and son has to do with recreating a sense of Alyssa, Theo’s daring and passionate wife, and Robin’s imaginative and compassionate mother.

When an outburst in school leads to a threat of expulsion, Theo allows his son to become a human subject in a neurofeedback therapy study taking place in the lab of one of Alyssa’s close friends. On therapy days, Robin’s brain is trained to access neural pathways corresponding to particular emotional states, including on a recording of his mother’s experience of ecstasy, made in the lab before her death. Reader, it worked! “Decoded Neurofeedback” therapy, at least in the world of the novel, makes a pretty strong case for the possibility that the key to being our best selves might be to really and truly find out what it feels like to be someone else. Robin achieves such nuances of self-control, empathy, imagination and consolation that he becomes more than a well-adjusted child — he becomes an emotional superhuman, a public activist, an internet meme.

Some of us will immediately think of Daniel Keyes’s 1966 novel “Flowers for Algernon,” which also happens to be the audiobook Theo and Robin listen to on a road trip from Wisconsin down to a camping spot in the Smoky Mountains. And so the joy of watching Robin triumph is tempered by the knowledge of just how far south such an enterprise might descend.

Oh, but the heights! In “Bewilderment,” possibility is synonymous with the vast wilderness of childhood, with the child mind’s innate world-building capacity, and with the child self’s inherent multiplicity. As Theo puts it:

Decoded Neurofeedback was changing him, as surely as Ritalin would have. But then, everything on Earth was changing him. Every aggressive word from a friend over lunch, every click on his virtual farm, every species he painted, each minute of every online clip, all the stories he read at night and all the ones I told him: There was no “Robin,” no one pilgrim in this procession of selves for him ever to remain the same as. The whole kaleidoscopic pageant of them, parading through time and space, was itself a work in progress.

Powers’s insightful, often poetic prose draws us at once more deeply toward the infinitude of the imagination and more vigorously toward the urgencies of the real and familiar stakes rattling our persons and our planet. In the world of the novel, the president sends Trumpesque tweets straight to Americans’ cellphones via a “National Notification Service” before overturning the results of a national election. Calling the president a “dung beetle” is an imprisonable offense. Freak weather, no longer the aberration, routinely disrupts travel. “Ninety-eight percent by weight of animals left on Earth” are “either Homo sapiens or their industrially harvested food.” Wildfires ravage the continent. There is precious little distance between the world of the novel and the world to which the novel makes its appeal.

Regarding the inevitable forms of tragedy with which this book is intent upon grappling — that loved ones die, that progress has its limits, that as a species we fail more often than we succeed — “Bewilderment” invites us to ponder not only our dominance of the planet and the ways that the unjust power of a few dominates the lives of others. It also insists we ponder this: At what cost do we allow our capacities for fear, jealousy and appetite to trounce other equally intrinsic capacities, like empathy, courage and forbearance? What if our worst enemy is not barricading himself in the White House or pelting our children with taunts on the playground? What if it’s right here, lighting up neural pathways inside our own skulls?

Lucille Clifton’s work demands that in order for our species to recognize its proper place in the universe, we must collectively admit to the beauty and the inviolable sanctity — the essentialness — of Black life. The conscience animating “Bewilderment” lobbies for the essentialness of plants, animals and those of differing needs and abilities. This being 2021, Powers also seems committed to demonstrating an awareness of Black Lives Matter as a viable proposition. Two characters identified as Black play briefly but significantly into the narrative arc of “Bewilderment.” On the depth spectrum, I’d say they occupy spots somewhere between extras and archetypes; their choices help Powers trip the switch on certain narrative inevitabilities, but, by and large, the bewilderment of the novel’s title is played out in white bodies and minds and in spaces where whiteness can be taken for granted.

Perhaps there’s nothing surprising or unusual about that. Neither is there anything surprising or unusual about the kicking in of my readerly desire to bring my whole self, race included, to the pondering of this profound novel. I’ll admit there was a tiny pang in discovering that the Blackness of those two characters was planted in the narrative only to be almost immediately retreated from. As is often the case, my corrective capacity rushed in to try to assure me that the white imagination may be a better setting than many for an exploration of the abysmal ends of power.

Indeed, the dynamic Powers calls out has implications in every context where the wishes of a powerful few claim priority over the needs of others. Coercion is often manifest as the reasonable-enough-seeming demands for compliance insisted upon by teachers, colleagues and even strangers in order to foster the comfort of others: Don’t fight; don’t procrastinate; don’t carry a grudge; carry your own weight; don’t make others uncomfortable; don’t incite guilt; don’t dare name the ends of power’s zero-sum game. Aren’t these the demands with which calls for all manner of change are routinely deferred?

What is the bigger scheme of things, and how do we get — and stay — there? If any writer is capable of invoking such scale, and allowing us to linger there awhile, it is surely Powers, whose capacity for world-envisioning offers rapt readers moment after moment of captivating recalibration. The possible — like the real — is enormous. Like other intelligent life in the universe, the possible is everywhere and nowhere, hiding in plain sight.

Tracy K. Smith, a former U.S. poet laureate, is a professor of English and of African and African American studies at Harvard, and the Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach professor at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. Her most recent book is “Such Color: New and Selected Poems.”

BEWILDERMENT By Richard Powers 278 pp. W.W. Norton & Company. $27.95.

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Bewilderment by Richard Powers review – stars in their eyes

An astrobiologist soothes his troubled son with inner voyages to fantastical worlds in a tender sci-fi novel-cum-family romance

W e might think of Richard Powers as one of contemporary fiction’s big-game hunters, were that not a woefully inappropriate tag for a novelist whose recent work is animated by a truly non-Hemingwayan philosophical orientation: deep ecology. The Overstory , a novel of the highest ambition and ideational scope for which Powers was awarded a Pulitzer prize, explored territory usually ceded to writers of science fiction: the frontier relationship between the human and the nonhuman (specifically, our planet’s trees, given dramatic life as intelligent and interconnected species).

Bewilderment , Powers’s more immediate new novel, is narrated in the first-person and is half the length of The Overstory’s wilderness stretch. Theo Byrne is a grieving widower and astrobiologist whose work involves building simulated worlds to help determine whether exoplanets beyond our solar system can support life. He does his floundering best to raise his son, Robin: “my sad, singular, newly turning nine-year-old, in trouble with this world”. Theo’s wife, Alyssa, died in a road accident when Robin was seven, and Bewilderment is among other things a triangular family romance.

As father and son process their tragedy, the human species accelerates towards ecocide and self-ruination. The novel’s title is perfect: himself a cosmic orphan awed by astral immensities, Theo feels out of his depth as a parent (“I could no more raise a child than I could speak Swahili”), while recognising that his possibly autistic, bipolar or attention-deficit son is a rare and luminous being. A pocket moral absolute, Robin is incapable of knowing that countless species face extinction without devoting himself to resisting this death-drift. The tenderness and delicacy with which the father-son relationship is depicted repeatedly brought to my mind Cormac McCarthy’s The Road , though it is a pre- apocalyptic planet on which Theo and Robin struggle to find fortitude and hope. (Interestingly, Powers, who is in his 60s, is not a father.)

Among the novel’s many virtues is the mood it radiates of sheer cosmic awe. Robin worries himself into fits of agitation by asking the question posed in the Fermi paradox: seeing as the universe is incomprehensibly vast, why have we found no sure signs of intelligent life in its abyss? When Olaf Stapledon ’s classic sci-fi novel of aeonic scope Star Maker is mentioned (“the Bible of my youth”), it is not unexpected. Richard Powers is coming to seem a gift to those of us who admire Stapledon’s genre but regret its indifference to human complexities. Impressively precise in its scientific conjectures, Bewilderment is no less rich or wise in its emotionality. Moreover, science fiction is not just a looming generic presence, but part of the novel’s narrative mechanism. In periodic, myth-like passages, Theo takes his son on inner voyages to fantastical alien worlds based on the deep space atmospheric models he creates at work.

Bewilderment channels both the cosmic sublime and that of the vast American outdoors, resting confidently in a lineage with Thoreau and Whitman, Dillard and Kerouac. It’s also a ghostly and affecting love story. Given the choice between putting his difficult son on meds to appease his school authorities and submitting him to experimental neuroscientific research involving emotional states transferred between human subjects, a disquieted Theo watches Alyssa’s resurrected personality merge with Robin’s. Spectral echoes of Solaris haunt these uncanny passages.

We are into the terrain here of myth, metaphysics and religion. Sorrowing awe is Bewilderment ’s primary tone, and its many remarkable scenes are controlled with high novelistic intelligence. Robin is as compelling a fictional creation as I’ve encountered in some time – fierce, lovable and otherworldly. In dreaming him up, Powers was clearly working out a bold fictive question: what must it be like to father a Greta Thunberg? The penny dropped for me when “the world’s most famous 14-year-old” makes a cameo: Inga Alder, identical to Thunberg in all but name. A mesmerised Robin falls in love with her over TV and YouTube: “ She’s like me, Dad .”

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BEWILDERMENT

by Richard Powers ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 21, 2021

A touching novel that offers a vital message with uncommon sympathy and intelligence.

A widower pursues an unusual form of neurological therapy for his son in this affecting story.

Astrobiologist Theo Byrne, 45, looks for life in outer space while his 9-year-old son, Robin, seeks to protect endangered animals on Earth. Both are still grieving for the boy’s mother, Alyssa, an animal rights activist who died in a car accident two years ago as she swerved to avoid hitting an opossum. Since then, Robin has been subject to tantrums and violence and variously diagnosed with Asperger’s, OCD, and ADHD. Theo has resisted medication and turns to a university colleague who is experimenting with a neurological therapy. Powers has followed his awarding-winning, bestselling The Overstory (2018), a busy eco-epic featuring nine main characters, with this taut ecological parable borne by a small cast. It’s a darker tale, starting with an author’s note about Flowers for Algernon and continuing through Robin’s emotional maelstrom, Theo’s parental terrors, and, not far in the background, environmental and political challenges under a Trump-like president. Yet there are also shared moments of wonder and joy for a father and son attuned to science and nature and each other, as well as flashbacks that make Alyssa a vibrant presence. The empathy that holds this nuclear family together also informs Robin’s ceaseless concern and efforts on behalf of threatened species, just as the absence of empathy fuels the threat. As always, there’s a danger of preachiness in such stories. Powers generally avoids it by nurturing empathy for Robin. While the boy’s obsession with the fate of the planet’s nonhuman life can seem like religious fervor, it has none of the cant or self-interest. He is himself a rare and endangered species.

Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2021

ISBN: 978-0-393-88114-1

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: June 28, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION

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SEEN & HEARD

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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by Kristin Hannah

PERSPECTIVES

BOOK TO SCREEN

by Percival Everett ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 19, 2024

One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.

Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as told from the perspective of a more resourceful and contemplative Jim than the one you remember.

This isn’t the first novel to reimagine Twain’s 1885 masterpiece, but the audacious and prolific Everett dives into the very heart of Twain’s epochal odyssey, shifting the central viewpoint from that of the unschooled, often credulous, but basically good-hearted Huck to the more enigmatic and heroic Jim, the Black slave with whom the boy escapes via raft on the Mississippi River. As in the original, the threat of Jim’s being sold “down the river” and separated from his wife and daughter compels him to run away while figuring out what to do next. He's soon joined by Huck, who has faked his own death to get away from an abusive father, ramping up Jim’s panic. “Huck was supposedly murdered and I’d just run away,” Jim thinks. “Who did I think they would suspect of the heinous crime?” That Jim can, as he puts it, “[do] the math” on his predicament suggests how different Everett’s version is from Twain’s. First and foremost, there's the matter of the Black dialect Twain used to depict the speech of Jim and other Black characters—which, for many contemporary readers, hinders their enjoyment of his novel. In Everett’s telling, the dialect is a put-on, a manner of concealment, and a tactic for survival. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” Jim explains. He also discloses that, in violation of custom and law, he learned to read the books in Judge Thatcher’s library, including Voltaire and John Locke, both of whom, in dreams and delirium, Jim finds himself debating about human rights and his own humanity. With and without Huck, Jim undergoes dangerous tribulations and hairbreadth escapes in an antebellum wilderness that’s much grimmer and bloodier than Twain’s. There’s also a revelation toward the end that, however stunning to devoted readers of the original, makes perfect sense.

Pub Date: March 19, 2024

ISBN: 9780385550369

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024

LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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by Percival Everett

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Review: With ‘Bewilderment,’ expansive novelist Richard Powers goes dark and narrow

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On the shelf

Bewilderment

By Richard Powers Norton: 304 pages, $28 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

Over four decades and 13 books, Richard Powers has combined literary fiction and real science. This alchemy earned him a MacArthur Fellowship in 1989, the 2006 National Book Award for “ The Echo Maker ,” a Pulitzer Prize and a longstanding bestseller in 2018’s “ The Overstory .” His earlier books explored more arcane or intriguing aspects of science, but recently he’s zeroed in on a deep concern for what humans are doing to our planet. He was so compelled by trees, one of the main subjects of “ The Overstory ,” that he moved from Illinois, where he taught, to Tennessee and the Great Smoky Mountains.

“Bewilderment,” his new novel, just shortlisted for the Booker Prize, is a continuation of the same, but simultaneously “The Overstory’s” opposite. Where the last was grand, this is intimate; instead of nine main characters and the spread of their lives, we have just two, a father and his troubled son.

Theo Byrne works as an astrophysicist trying to find life on other planets, and in passages he relates to his son Robin at night, he imagines wildly different possible scenarios. Robin, turning 9, is engaged and curious but also quick to anger, and increasingly violent. He’s been diagnosed with Asperger’s or OCD or ADHD, none of which his father finds valid.

Both are still grieving the loss of Alyssa — Theo’s wife, Robin’s mother — who died in an accident two years earlier. Theo seems to hope that if he can just give Robin enough love and indulgences, like taking him camping, his son will find better footing. The one thing he doesn’t want to do is medicate him. So when things reach a breaking point at Robin’s school, Theo turns to an experimental neurotherapy treatment at his university.

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And it does help Robin. His anger dissipates; his curiosity deepens; his empathy expands; his creativity explodes. He becomes the best possible version of himself. He decides to paint every endangered plant and animal, then sell those paintings and donate the money to charity to save the earth. He’s inspired by a young environmental activist, a fictional version of Greta Thunberg . If there is hope for our planet, it is in young people like the real Greta and fictional Robin who, despite the harshest realities of climate change, believe they can make a difference.

That’s not all there is to the story, however. As Robin improves, his father is barely holding it together. After he lets Robin homeschool, his own work suffers. (This was written, prophetically, before the pandemic-driven proliferation of home learning, with all its negative impacts on parents and children alike.) Theo is failing his university partners. Still bereft, he convinces himself his dead wife had an affair with the scientist leading the neurotherapy experiment.

There are a series of crises brought on by the right-wing American president. He’s anti-science , he’s anti-immigrant, and he’s forcing through measures that will allow him to stay in office. Although these developments animate the plot — Theo goes to Washington to testify as a scientific expert — they don’t loom large in his mind. He mentions answering emails to defend his immigrant students, but we don’t read them. The book lives instead in a universe of two: Theo and Robin.

The neurofeedback therapy allows Robin to train his brain to follow healthier patterns, like an fMRI video game. The catch is that instead of mirroring an aggregate or anonymized set, he’s using his mother’s. It’s something she recorded on a lark before she died.

In the most positive sense, this allows his mother to aid her son after she’s gone. With the training, he doesn’t just stabilize; he blossoms. If this sounds a little bit like “ Flowers for Algernon ,” the much-adapted story (1959) and novel (1966) by Daniel Keyes, Powers wants you to see the similarities; father and son listen to the audiobook together.

But while Theo was celebrating his much-improved son , I was prompted to ask ethical questions that Powers seemed uninterested in answering. Why does the father opt for an experimental treatment when there seem to be less risky, or at least better tested, options? And put his son into a machine with his dead mother’s mind, of all things. Robin can’t get through a school lunch without losing his cool — should he be expected to sort out the implications of his ghostlike brain-tutor mom? Is it OK to put even a fictional child at risk?

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I realize there is no Robin, there is no Theo. Their story works as metaphor: Theo is making choices for a son who, when he’s operating at full capacity, is trying to save the world. Meanwhile his father is trying to find life on other planets. Although he supports Robin’s efforts, Theo has turned his attention away from Earth, abandoning the climate crisis to the next generation.

It’s a relief to see great novelists like Powers, Lydia Millet and Jenny Offill tackling climate change in ways that make for really good stories, brilliantly told. But there’s a key difference here. Millet and Offill, in their most recent books (“ A Children’s Bible ” and “ Weather ,” respectively), are optimists. Even if the solutions their novels come up with are utopic or near-miraculous, the young people in them create something that might last. Powers cannot seem to find a way.

When the plot of “Bewilderment” turns, it’s animated not by ethical questions but by external forces. There’s internet virality and then pushback, all under the shadow of the right-wing administration in Washington. This is fiction taking its cues from dark reality.

When Robin first undertakes his project, he reads that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service lists more than 2,000 North American species as being threatened or endangered. “The amphibians are in trouble. I’m going to start with an amphibian,” he tells his father. He sets to painting them, but how far can he get? Later he tells his father, only slightly hyperbolically, “There’s no point in school. Everything will be dead before I get to tenth grade.”

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July 7, 2021

Kellogg is a former books editor of The Times. She can be found on Twitter @paperhaus .

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Review: Bewilderment by Richard Powers

“I T IS NO MEASURE of health to be well adjusted,” goes the oft quoted but unverifiable aphorism from the Indian philosopher Krishnamurti, “to a profoundly sick society.”

Richard Powers’s new novel Bewilderment takes this notion and embodies it in the form of Robin, a nine-going-on-ten-year-old boy alert to the animated more-than-human world that surrounds him, and enraged when others don’t accept it. Recognizing life where others don’t is a tether between Robin and his father, Theo, an astrobiologist in search of life beyond the bounds of our home planet, who listens for biosignatures in what otherwise appears to be a void.

Two years earlier, an accident caused the boy to lose his mother and, for Theo, his beloved wife. Both are thick with grief. Yet the domestic tale reaches ambitiously beyond the traditional family bond to explore a country faltering as its citizens get lost in a mire of distractions, drowning in information but unable to recognize greater connections of kinship that support them.

The boy and the man sometimes seem to be versions of the same person, both at odds with most of the humans around them. Robin’s outbursts at school become violent and the answer, officials insist, is medication. Theo, Krishnamurti style, can’t figure out why he should force his son to become better adjusted to the culture they live in. He seeks medicine for his son in the woods and under the stars. But a medical trial offers promise to retrain Robin’s thinking using the recorded brain patterns of others, including those of his dead mother, at moments when she was prompted to think about ecstasy.

Even in its intimacy, as Theo and Robin’s lives unfold over the course of a year, readers find the larger recurring themes that thread throughout Powers’s work. Powers won the Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction for his 2018 novel The Overstory , which told an epic tale of eight individuals who discover new worlds, and new conflicts, when they recognize the power of trees around them. What shifts when you start considering the lives and rights of those beyond humans ? So too in Bewilderment , which also explores what can happen when an individual’s inexplicable joy for life becomes contagious, as in Generosity: An Enhancement , and how the frontiers of brain science, and all we know and don’t know, translate to our individual lives, as in The Echo Maker .

But while this book’s message about learning how to listen—how to tune the brain to what is, and what may be, around us, and to be changed by the listening—is similar to The Overstory ’s, it is a much quieter book with a smaller scope, and it lacks the same subtlety in its telling.

Then again, we don’t live in subtle times. The book’s backdrop of current events doesn’t veer far from the nightly news. A belligerent president who’s created a national broadcasting system to make tweet-like pronouncements. A contested election. A slew of extreme weather events and disease outbreaks. An inspiring European teen activist named Inga with a “superpower” that is not unlike Robin’s.

But it is by leaving this troubled world and taking us to interplanetary places that Powers brings Bewilderment home. “They share a lot, astronomy and childhood,” Powers writes. Both are voyages across huge distances. And Powers takes us on these journeys as Theo and Robin spend evenings venturing to other planets, fueled by knowledge from Theo’s work and a house full of science fiction novels and creative speculation. They try to answer the Fermi paradox: Where is everyone?

In the answering, they visit planets with beings so smart they might cloak themselves from probing human eyes. Another is deeply advanced in every way but technology. One planet’s inhabitants listen in color as the beat of their eight hearts tune them into time at an intricate level of synesthesia. They wonder if there are planets whose creatures went so wayward that their occupants created Earth as an Eden to start over, to see if we could get it right.

We’re not, according to Powers, proving up to the task.

Perhaps our exponentially exploding bits of information do not translate to knowledge. Perhaps it is creating a “power too precarious to last.” We experiment, ever hungry for more knowledge, more power, like the white-coated doctors in the 1958 short story “Flowers for Algernon,” which served as inspiration for Bewilderment .

“You know what’s happening,” Powers writes. “Everyone knows, despite the code of silence. This endless gift of a place is going away.” Bewilderment is an exercise in grief, personal and planetary. It is a practice in radical empathy. It is an exploration of what loneliness bears, whether an individual who has experienced a grave loss or an entire species on a singular planet that has lost its way, forgotten its connections, within and beyond its earthly bounds.  

For those who share the weight that Powers carries, about the future fate of this planet and all its inhabitants—from the rocks that humans stack into cairns to the mysterious songmakers of the forest to these familiar yet unknowable humans we give birth to—do not expect forgiveness or atonement in Bewilderment . Instead, this book will bewilder you in the best ways, not in some traditional definition of the word, but rather, as in be-wilder , to return to the wild, sometimes only possible by shifting your perspective rapidly from the astral plane to the microscopic. Powers takes us along as we travel the spectrum between these two vantages in an attempt to provide some antidote to the trouble we’re in. It’s a love without reassurance, but still a cracked-open door to possibility.

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BookBrowse Reviews Bewilderment by Richard Powers

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Bewilderment

by Richard Powers

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In Powers' poignant 13th novel, a widowed astrobiologist struggles with raising his troubled son in a time of political and environmental crisis.

In 2019, Richard Powers won the Pulitzer Prize for The Overstory , a sprawling novel whose characters are obsessed with protecting magnificent trees. Although his follow-up, Bewilderment , has just as much of an environmentalist conscience, its scope is more intimate. It focuses on the experiences of one family and is narrated as a first-person retrospective by Theo Byrne, an astronomy professor at a midwestern university who models earthlike planets in the search for extraterrestrial life. His wife, Alyssa, died in a car accident two years ago. Their volatile nine-year-old son, Robin, named after his mother's favorite bird, is on the autism spectrum and has been violent towards his father and schoolmates. Father and son journey together in memory and imagination as well as in real life. They connect during time spent in nature: hiking in the woods of the Great Smoky Mountains, swimming in streams and watching birds. For bedtime stories, Theo alternates between anecdotes about Robin's mother, who was an animal rights lawyer, and tales of exoplanets, some of them borrowed from the plots of his extensive science fiction collection. Robin is fascinated by plants and animals, and his father encourages his curiosity. Theirs is a cozy, comforting relationship, a cocoon of safety after the loss of Robin's mother. But as the novel goes on, the outside world starts to intrude. In this alternative near-future scenario, perhaps one in which the 45th president was re-elected, the funding for Theo's project is at risk and political dissidents are being locked up. Meanwhile, news about the accelerating environmental crisis has Robin increasingly on edge. Angry after hearing a rumor about his mother, he throws a metal thermos at a friend and breaks the boy's cheekbone. Theo, under renewed pressure from the school to put Robin on mood-altering medication, tries a different tactic. Alyssa's friend Martin Currier researches decoded neurofeedback, a way of locating emotional states in the brain and, through artificial intelligence, giving subjects empathy targets to work toward. She and Theo had volunteered to model emotions for the study and their results are still on file. Currier proposes enrolling Robin in a series of neurofeedback sessions in an fMRI scanner. These are a little like mindfulness training, but because they involve interacting with his mother's recording from years ago, they are also almost like spending time with her again. Robin shows tremendous progress; with his mood now on an even keel, he can have calm dealings with his father and classmates. The case is such a success that Currier reports it to the national news, and Robin becomes the subject of a viral documentary. Powers is in full control of his myriad themes and packs a lot into 200-some pages. The plot leaps between spheres: between the public eye, where Robin is a scientific marvel and an environmental activist (see Beyond the Book ), and the privacy of family life; between an ailing Earth and the other planets Theo can study or imagine; and between the humdrum of daily existence and the magic of another state where Robin can reconnect with his late mother. Within the limited timespan of a school year, much changes for Robin, but regression threatens. The novel opens at the Great Smokies, and returns there for a dramatic finale. I admired this full-circle structure, and the way in which other incidents meaningfully repeat. In an author's note, Powers discusses his inspirations for the novel. One was his nephew, who loved nature and might have benefited from decoded neurofeedback. Another was the growing feeling of solastalgia , especially among young people. The third was Daniel Keyes's Flowers for Algernon (1959), a sci-fi classic Powers first read at age 11. Theo and Robin listen to it during their Great Smokies road trip. (The plot of Bewilderment apparently draws on that of Flowers for Algernon . If you've read it, you may have an inkling of what's coming; if you haven't, it's probably best not to read up on it unless you're not concerned about spoilers.) When I came to the breathtaking final paragraph of Bewilderment , I felt despondent and overwhelmed. I wasn't sure I could forgive Powers for the ending. But as time has passed, the book's feral beauty has stuck with me, and Robin in particular won't leave my mind. His neurodivergence, viewed as a problem by authority figures in the novel, seems to allow him greater communion with other species, and perhaps even with the dead. The pure sense of wonder that Robin embodies is worth imitating. For while "bewilderment" connotes the confusion of modern life, it also suggests the value of embracing wild creatures and places. As Powers writes in the prefatory note, "A childlike love for our wild, entangled home is the only thing large enough to cure what is wrong with us."

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StarTribune

Review: 'bewilderment,' by richard powers.

As he did in his Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Overstory" — which the Financial Times called a "Great American Eco-Novel" — Richard Powers takes up the life of the natural world and its suffering at human hands in "Bewilderment." In this much shorter, more sharply focused novel, though, the suffering is central and viewed through the lens of a father's love for his troubled child.

In a not-too-distant future, much like our own culture-warring times but with the volume and heat turned up, Theo is an astrobiologist working on a project trying to identify life on distant planets; as he puts it: "we studied how the absorption of lines in the spectra of distant atmospheres might reveal biology."

His wife, an animal rights lawyer and activist of luminous character and boundless energy, has recently died, and his 9-year-old son Robin is struggling.

A brilliant, volatile little boy, Robbie takes the plight of the Earth's living creatures, and the failure of humans to protect them, personally and hard. Rather than see the child as oversensitive, "Bewilderment" asks whether the rest of us aren't in fact under-sensitive. Trying to help his son without resorting to medication, Theo allows him to participate in an experimental program "called Decoded Neurofeedback. It resembled old-fashioned biofeedback, but with neural imaging for real-time, AI-mediated feedback."

In what Theo calls an "empathy machine," a subject learns to mirror emotions mapped from other participants — in Robbie's case, his dead mother, who'd once modeled "ecstasy" for the program. This all might sound a bit sci-fi technical, but all the scientific razzle-dazzle, including the details of the planets that Theo elaborately imagines for Robbie, simply underlines the human story at its center — and makes the tenderness between father and son seem so real and heartfelt that the novel becomes its own empathy machine.

The book "Flowers for Algernon" is Powers' touchstone in "Bewilderment," mentioned in the author's note and listened to by Theo and Robin as they drive across the country. But, as Robin reassures his father after discovering the debased state of the Mississippi River: "We're just an experiment, right? And you always say, an experiment with a negative result isn't a failed experiment. … Don't worry, Dad. We might not figure it out. But Earth will."

Ellen Akins is a writer and writing teacher in Wisconsin.

Bewilderment

By: Richard Powers.

Publisher: W.W. Norton, 288 pages, $27.95.

Event: PenPals, April 28-29, 2022; Hopkins Center for the Arts. Tickets $45-$55, supporthclib.org/richard-powers.

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Bewilderment

By richard powers.

Book review, full book summary and synopsis for Bewilderment by Richard Powers, a story about a single father, his troubled son and an experimental neural treatment.

In Bewilderment , astrobiologist Theo Byrne searches for life throughout the cosmos while single-handedly raising his unusual nine-year-old, Robin, following the death of his wife. Robin is a warm, kind boy who spends hours painting elaborate pictures of endangered animals. He’s also about to be expelled from third grade for smashing his friend in the face. As his son grows more troubled, Theo hopes to keep him off psychoactive drugs. He learns of an experimental neurofeedback treatment to bolster Robin’s emotional control, one that involves training the boy on the recorded patterns of his mother’s brain…

With its soaring descriptions of the natural world, its tantalizing vision of life beyond, and its account of a father and son’s ferocious love, Bewilderment marks Richard Powers’s most intimate and moving novel. At its heart lies the question: How can we tell our children the truth about this beautiful, imperiled planet?

(The Full Plot Summary is also available, below)

Full Plot Summary

One-paragraph version: Theo is an astrobiologist who is raising his 9-year-old son Robin (who has been diagnosed with Asperger's, ADHD, etc.) who has been having behavioral issues since Theo's wife's death. Theo starts Robin on an experimental treatment called Decoded Neurofeedback, getting him to try to mirror brain patterns of other people to try to learn to control his emotions. The treatment is successful, especially once Robin starts mirroring a brain scan from his mother. However, the treatment gets put on pause by the government when it gets caught up in political/cultural wars. Robin regresses back to before. The book ends with Theo and Robin on a trip where Robin gets injured and dies.

The book opens with Theo Byrne on a trip in the Smokies with his 9-year-old son Robin . Theo is an astrobiologist who is interested in life on other planets. His wife Alyssa , who was a lawyer and animal rights activist, passed away two years ago in a car accident (and their dog Chester died a few months after that). Robin is passionate about animal rights, astronomy and nature.

Robin has always had some behavioral issues (and has been diagnosed with Asperger's, ADHD, various syndromes, etc.) but it's gotten worse since Alyssa's death. Robin is very happy on their camping trip. On the drive back from their trip, they listen to an audiobook of Flowers for Algernon .

Back at school, Robin has an incident at school where he hits his best friend, Jayden , in the face with a metal thermos. Jayden had angered Robin when he relayed his parents' speculation that perhaps Alyssa's car accident was caused by her trying to hurt herself. Back at home, Theo reassures Robin that it isn't true. A possum ran out and Alyssa tried to avoid it, crossed into the median and hit an oncoming vehicle. Robin is upset that Theo never told him it was a possum (because he didn't want Robin to have possums), but Theo knows the bigger secret he didn't say was that Alyssa had been pregnant at the time.

One morning, Robin has an idea to make paintings of endangered animal to sell at the farmer's market. He plans to donate the money from the paintings to one of the organizations Alyssa advocated for. Theo encourages this idea though Robin has a meltdown later when Theo doesn't allow Robin to skip school to work on his project for the second day in a row.

With the school trying to get Theo to put Robin on psychoactive drugs, Theo asks a friend of Alyssa's, Martin Currier , for advice. Martin is a well-known neuroscientist. He offers to enroll Robin in an experimental treatment known as Decoded Neurofeedback ("DecNef") to help Robin learn to control his emotions. (Theo and Alyssa both once had their brains scanned for Currier's experiment. )

Robin starts to improve very shortly after beginning his DefNef treatment. It involves using the brain scans of others in certain emotional states and having Robin trying to mirror their brain patterns (using visual/sensory cues).

In the spring, they sell Robin's endangered animal paintings at the farmers' market. After he makes his donation, they send him a thank you letter. However, Robin gets upset when he learns that 30% of his donation will go toward administrative costs and that there are big-dollar donors who have money to donate, but who hold back those funds until others donate (donor matching).

Instead, Robin decides he wants to go protest at the state capitol (he's inspired by a famous child activist in the news, Inga Alder). However, that goes poorly when a congressman lambastes Theo for letting Robin protest alone. He says that Robin should be organizing with other kids or getting involved in various projects to be more effective and that what he's doing instead is a waste of time. Robin goes home thoroughly demoralized.

With Robin feeling depressed, Theo turns to Martin for advice. Martin suggests that they use Alyssa's old brain scan to train Robin on (as opposed to brain scans from various strangers) to reinvigorate him. Robin is instantly enthusiastic about the idea.

Very soon, they are making huge progress by training with Alyssa's brain scan, and Robin feels closer to Alyssa the process. Robin is able to focus more, stops having meltdowns, has less anxiety and becomes much more open to the world and new people. However, Theo starts to wonder if Robin knows things about Alyssa that he didn't know before just by training with her brain scans. (Martin insists it's not possible.) Meanwhile, Robin asks to be homeschooled, and after some discussion, Theo agrees. Robin also decides he wants to become an ornithologist someday (likely because Alyssa always loved birds).

One day, Martin asks to use clips of Robin for videos to market his technology. Theo asks Robin what he thinks, and he says he thinks it'll help people, so Robin agrees. The video soon goes viral (seeing Robin's transformation), and people figure out Robin's identity. Robin gets interviewed on a huge online channel and appears in a popular academic lecture series. Strangers start to recognize him when they see him. Robin uses these media opportunities to promote environmentalism.

Soon, Theo's work takes him to Washington D.C. so he can advocate for funding for a space telescope to further his work in identifying possible extraterrestrial life. When they're there, Robin brings a huge banner promoting saving the animals and wants to take a picture with it (so that people can see it when they search for images of him), and it draws a crowd due to his viral fame. When an officer tells them to disperse, it leads to the officer grabbing Robin, which Theo reacts strongly to. Theo ends up getting arrested.

Back at home, Robin turns 10. He goes to Currier's Lab for his next training session, but they find out that Currier's experiments have been put on pause by Health and Human Services while they "investigate". Apparently, the media attention on Robin and DecNef have turned the experiments into a political pawn. The party in power is looking to energize its red base and show dominance against environmentalism, science and spending.

On the way home, Robin is optimistic about being able to maintain his training alone. However, soon Theo sees that Robin struggling to remember what Alyssa "feels like" through her scans. Slowly, Robin's behavior starts to regress, and he starts being anxious and having meltdowns again. When Robin sees some graphic photos of cattle inflicted with some type of disease causing them to go crazy, he flips out and starts banging his head against the wall -- injuring himself -- and screaming. Soon, caseworkers from the Department of Human Services show up to assess whether Theo is abusing Robin (due to his head injury).

Theo finally decides that he's going to take Robin on a trip to the Smokies again and then he's going to start him on a (drug-based) treatment plan. The trip is going well until they get to a river where there are cairns constructed all along the banks. Theo comments that Alyssa hated cairns because people disturb the homes of the wildlife there when they build them. They take a few of them down, and go to sleep though Robin wants to keep going.

That night, as Theo sleeps, Robin sneaks out in the dark to deconstruct more of them. Theo finds Robin injured and freezing in the river. Unable to get him to safety in time, Robin dies. The book ends with Martin Currier texting a very depressed Theo after the funeral. He asks if Theo wants "to be with" Robin (by training using Robin's brain scans).

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Book Review

Bewilderment by Richard Powers was recently released two weeks ago. With Powers’s last novel winning the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, it was sure to be big release. Sure enough, Bewilderment was selected for Oprah’s Book Club and has been shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize already.

The story in Bewilderment deals with a father, Theo Byrne, who is an astrobiologist who is raising his 9-year-old son, Robin, alone after his wife passed away two years ago. Robin has always been a troubled boy, but his behavioral issues have worsened since his mother’s death. In the book, Theo gets the opportunity to enroll Robin in an experimental treatment called Decoded Neurofeedback to help with his behavioral issues.

Bewilderment is an uncomplicated novel that’s deeply intimate and thoughtful. There’s a gentleness and tenderness to the writing that makes it incredibly pleasant to read. That said, there’s also a certain sadness as he regards the state of the world, and sadly Powers offers little in the way of consolation or reassurance.

The writing in Bewilderment reflects the profound love of the natural world that Powers has, stretching from the delights found in the intricacies of a tiny blade of grass to the wonders of the furthest unseen stretches of space.

Bewilderment also ropes in a lot of current events by using fictional entities as stand-ins for their real-life counterparts. In the book, Robin is transfixed by Inga Alder, a famous child activist who is clearly meant to evoke the image of Greta Thunberg. Meanwhile, the book is set upon the backdrop of a world ravaged by weather-related disasters and disease, all the while an unnamed President constantly makes angry and temperamental posts to social media.

Overall, I thought that that it was a compelling read, beautifully written. I wasn’t blown away by it, but I think it’s a book many people, especially readers of literary fiction, would enjoy.

Some Criticisms

There were also aspects of the novel that I was less sure about. Theo’s absolute aversion to psychoactive drugs for Robin (despite obvious and severe behavioral issues) is left largely unexamined. There’s also sort of a weird plot line about Theo’s wife having possibly cheated on him that felt extraneous.

In general, there were a few parts where the idea occurred to me that if Richard Powers hadn’t just won a Pulitzer, that an editor might’ve pushed him a little harder on some of the substance of the book.

There were a handful of occasions where the book poses some fascinating questions, but then it doesn’t really attempt to answer or really address them in a meaningful way. For example, Theo has a deep professional and personal interest in the idea of discovering life of other planets. At one point, the book questions whether or not that’s an important or necessary goal for us as humans, but it sort of brings it up and then doesn’t say anything about it.

Finally, I have to say I didn’t love the ending. It felt a little cheap to me, but I imagine people will disagree about this. Also, I thought it was weird at various points in the book when Theo would make decisions by letting Robin decide on issues (like allowing him to be in the training video) that Robin had no way of comprehending the possible consequences of (he’s 10!). If you’ve read the book, I’d love to hear your thoughts below!

Read it or Skip it?

Bewilderment is an intensely interior novel that tells a largely uncomplicated, but poignant story about a father and his son. It’s a story full of wonder about grief, science and nature. I mostly enjoyed this book, and I loved the writing in it.

I would readily recommend this to anyone who enjoys accessible literary fiction and to book clubs. There’s plenty to mull over in this thought-provoking read. In fact, I imagine some people may actually get more out of discussing it than the book itself, since it’s a book that doesn’t offer a lot of hard answers to the questions it asks.

P.S. For anyone curious about using neurofeedback in their own mindfulness training, as I was reading this, I was reminded of related mindfulness training technology (though it relies on EEG measurements as opposed to an fMRI like in the book, so it is undoubtedly less precise) that I tried a while ago. It’s a device called Muse that measures your brain activity and shows you images (such as of a sky or beach, etc.) that reflects your mental state. The goal is for you to control your thinking and empty your mind so that the image you see is a calming one.

Anyway, if you want to try neurofeedback training for yourself, you can try out the Muse Brain Sensing Headband . Just make sure to test it out before the return window closes in case you don’t like it, since it’s a pricey device.

See Bewilderment on Amazon.

Bewilderment Audiobook

Narrated by : Edoardo Ballerini Length : 7 hours 50 minutes

Hear a sample of the Bewilderment audiobook on Libro.fm.

Discussion Questions

• How would you describe Robin’s personality? Why do you think Robin has trouble at school? In what ways has his personality been shaped by his parents and experiences?
• What did you think of the character of Theo? In what ways do we see Theo struggle as a parent as he tries to raise Robin? In what ways do we see Theo succeed as he tries to raise Robin?
• What do you think this book says about grief? In what ways do we see the grieving process play out in Bewilderment?
• What role does religion play in Theo’s thinking?
• What role do the descriptions of the imaginary planets play in the book? Were there any planets that were particularly notable to you? Why do you think Robin likes hearing about these planets?
• Why do you think Theo agrees to let Robin drop out of school? What do you think about him allowing Robin to be Currier’s clips and the Ova Nova video? What do you think of his parenting decisions in general?
• What did you think of Robin’s transformation? How does he change, and why do you think he changes so suddenly?
• Why do you think Theo plays Flowers for Algernon for Robin? Why do you think Powers includes this in the novel?
• What role does the political situation described in the book play in the plot? Why do you think Richard Powers includes this aspect of the novel?
• What do you think of the whole concept of finding proof of life elsewhere? Do you think it matters?
• Why do you think Theo decides to
• What did you think of the ending of the book? What do you think Currier means when he says “If you’d like to be with Robbie, you can be”? What do you think happens when they mirror the brain scans of another person? What do you think will happen after this point?

Book Excerpt

Read the first pages of Bewilderment

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Having thoroughly enjoyed The Overstory – i was excited to read Bewilderment. I agree with your comments regarding Theo’s aversion to psychoactive drugs for Robin’s behaviour and was left with the feeling (in the book) that this was a striking neglect of his child’s well-being. If there has been more explanation I might not feel as if Theo should’ve been on psychoactive drugs himself, to be a better parent instead in total self-absorption.

Sad book in keeping with the victim stories of today. A troubled boy, single dad, planet at risk, politics askew .. all leading to no progress. No hope. Opposite of a Horatio Alger story: a kid in a tough spot works hard, plays fair and with some luck and pluck progresses to a better life and makes the world better. No wonder the US population so depressed. Literature, such as Bewilderment, is replete with stories of decline, with no hope — only sadness. Why buy books that only bring us down

I found Bewilderment very depressing. The failures to mitigate climate change, the not so nuanced implication that our country will continue to move in the Trump like direction we have just (barely/maybe) survived, the suppression of science, voter manipulation, and lastly, Robin’s death. Maybe the timing is just bad….Covid, political rancor and divide, global warming, war, and on and on with seemingly no light at the end of the tunnel. I had to distance my reading time far from bedtime. Otherwise, it literally gave me nightmares. Really sorry I read it.

Raising Geek Generation 2.0

‘Bewilderment’ by Richard Powers: A Book Review

I was thrilled to be offered the chance to review Bewilderment. Richard Powers is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and Bewilderment had been longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize (and is now on the final shortlist). Conversation about this book was likely to be as big as any literary fiction release this year and I had been invited to join in too! Let me start by saying that Bewilderment is a bewitching blend of science, parenting, and wonderful writing. It’s beautiful and geekily brilliant throughout.  

What is Bewilderment ?

Bewilderment  is the story of a father and son. Their wife and mother, Aly, was killed in an accident two years before the book opens. Theo, father of Robin and narrator of the story, is an astrobiologist. He looks into the heavens and tries to find planets that might sustain life. Robin is considered by the authorities to be on the autistic spectrum. Theo feels that they want to label, pigeonhole, and medicate his son. Robin is articulate and fascinated by the world around him. When Robin smashes his friend in the face with a thermos, Theo is given an ultimatum. It’s time to put Robin on psychoactive drugs or be removed from the school system. 

Why Read Bewilderment?

It’s hard to know where to start with this really.  Bewilderment  is a relatively slender volume, at less than 300 pages. (Compare this with Powers’ Pulitzer-winning Overstory,  which clocked in at over 600.) Yet despite its brevity, it covers many themes and topics. 

Firstly, from a purely scientific point of view, the astrobiology stuff is fascinating. It’s reminiscent of the “What If?” type stories found in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Doors of Eden .  The search for life goes far beyond looking for little green men and Goldilocks planets. I hadn’t realized how far the science had evolved since my undergraduate days, back when I had time to keep a vague eye on developments in astronomy. 

Aly (Theo’s late white) was an environmentalist and this directly informs Robin’s attitude towards the planet we share with so many other lifeforms. Robin is passionate about the natural world, both local and global. He and Theo campaign for environmental rights in the book. Bewilderment contains a thick “we must do something about climate change” chord. At times Powers borders on being too didactic—a criticism I’ve seen leveled at the novel in the British broadsheet press. It’s hard to refute this opinion, but then, as a planet, we seemed to be determined to close our eyes, jam our fingers in our ears, and shout, “la la la la la la,” so a strong message, reinforced, is arguably more than necessary. 

The main thread of the novel, the main bewilderment, if you will, is the raising of a child. The small person that is part of you yet is wholly not you. Theo’s navigation of trying to work out what to do for the best for Robin is deeply affecting. I’ve never had to make such a complex decision for my children, but the agony of trying to determine the best course of action is deftly portrayed. The difficulty of assimilating all the information. Trying to ensure your head is ruling your heart, but also that your heart isn’t stacking the deck against the head. It’s all here. 

In the middle of the novel, Powers picks up another thread. Theo contacts an old friend, one he and Aly once helped out with a science experiment that looked at brain function and emotion via MRI. After Robin lashes out with the thermos, Theo persuades the friend to let Robin have a scan, so that they might better examine his brain function. The results bear fruit and lead to a therapy of sorts. Again, more fascinating science is packed into the story.

This starts a domino effect of examinations within the novel; about the ethics of science when it’s governed by money, the ripples of social media, and the problems of an insular society with a reactionary government. It’s hard to imagine how they might all fit into a single narrative but they do. 

If I had a criticism of  Bewilderment  it’s that everything ends abruptly. But that is just one more bewilderment for the reader. Things don’t end mid-sentence or anything like that, but the only thing that lets the reader know that the story of Theo and Robin will soon end is that the book is running out of pages. I feel like their story is one that could run and run.

Having initially been dismayed at the abrupt finale, the more I thought about it, the more I felt it fits the narrative. Life is bewildering and unlike most novels, its stories do not neatly finish. A story is told for as long as you tell it, but life continues after the narrator has finished. 

As one might expect from a prizewinning author, Bewilderment is an artfully constructed novel. It’s delivered in small sections that are easy to consume and very addictive. This is an almost perfect geek parent novel. It’s a fabulous blend of parenting, science, and science fiction (in a “fiction about science” sense, rather than spaceships and rayguns). You live every moment with the characters of Bewilderment. Powers ensure that their happiness is your happiness, their pain is your pain. I loved it from start to finish. I have no idea what makes a novel prize-worthy, but come the end of 2021, this book will surely have been one of my favorite reads of the year. 

If you’d like to pick up a copy of  Bewilderment,  you can do so here in the U.S. , and here in the UK.  

If you enjoyed this review, do check out my other book reviews.  

Disclosure: I received a copy of this book in order to write this review. 

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Bewilderment by Richard Powers review: An original look at fatherhood and the future of the planet

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When a child misbehaves at school, there are often logical explanations. In Bewilderment, the 13th novel from Richard Powers , it is no different. Robin Byrne, aged nine, has plenty of reasons to behave erratically. He doesn’t understand his classmates’ jokes, his mother died in a car accident two years ago, and, like her he is profoundly disturbed by the speed at which humans are destroying the planet. Bewilderment is told from the point of view of Robin’s father, Theo, who has no idea how to be a single parent, especially when everything his son does reminds him how much he misses his wife Alyssa.

Powers’s previous novel The Overstory won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018, so, naturally, there are high expectations for his follow up. The Overstory was universally praised for the way it made the reader care about trees; Bewilderment, which has just made the Booker shortlist, has a similar ecological drive.

Alyssa was an environmental activist and Theo is an astrobiologist who has found a way to search for life on other planets. He and Robin are victims of the Cassandra complex - knowing something that no one wants to hear, so dismissed as being too clever for their own good. We see how they are treated as outsiders for caring, and their protests are met with punishment from the police and politicians.

We hear about a Trump-esque President who refuses to engage with what is happening to the planet. Theo has a personal axe to grind with him: the President doesn’t want to fund his deep-space telescope.

All of this is maddening, but the most successful aspect of this novel is the story of Theo and Robin, and Powers’s portrait of an intelligent man poleaxed by his feelings. The passages about Theo’s helplessness in the face of bringing up his son alone reminded me of the ground explored in Max Porter’s 2015 novel Grief is The Thing with Feathers, another story where a man’s sense of grief and loneliness at parenting alone takes a surreal direction.

Theo may know everything about extraterrestrial fauna, but he has no idea what to do about his unhappy little boy, and no one to support him. Robin’s teachers want to put him on psychoactive drugs but Theo thinks this is a last resort and ends up trying an unorthodox solution instead. This is where the book tips into sci-fi. Before Alyssa died, she and Theo had their brains mapped, recording what happened when they felt certain emotions. It is decided that Robin will be played the recording of Alyssa feeling ecstasy (a bit oedipal perhaps, but Powers doesn’t go there). Theo knows he is taking a risk but never expects what happens next and the plot takes some unexpected twists encompassing our interest in the brain and the nature of fame.

Theo’s pain is compounded by his conflicted relationship with the man who is doing this neurofeedback experiment. Theo suspects he had an affair with Alyssa but Powers doesn’t overplay this storyline, only giving us titillating details. This is not a romance novel - rather, it is all quite earnest, about people who are interested in the world and want the best for all the plants and animals who inhabit it with us.

Theo talks about his work with Robin, going off on tangents about planets which can be a bit hard to follow. He owns a 2,000-book library of science fiction, which Powers mentions multiple times, and tells his son bedtime stories about made up planets that Powers has clearly had fun inventing. On Stasis, everyone knows just one “infinitely deep” thing, while Tedia is a place where civilisation destroys itself each time people realise the end is nigh. At its best, Robin and Theo’s relationship is like a boy’s own adventure - two geeky men talking at length about facts rather than feelings, so that when they do reveal their emotions it feels more poignant.

There  is a lot packed in and not everything works. Some may find the passages about the planet worthy, but I was so charmed by Theo and Robin that I didn’t mind a little preachiness. The plot is entirely implausible, like a Black Mirror episode, but all the feelings behind it ring true. This won’t be as successful as The Overstory: it’s less ambitious than that, and I think it is unlikely to win the Booker as parts of it are too niche. But I found it completely refreshing, original and moving.

Bewilderment by Richard Powers (Cornerstone, £18.99)

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Childhood Climate Anxiety Is a Real and Worsening Problem. So Why Can’t We Take It Seriously?

A new novel on the subject has big ambitions, but loses itself in sentimentality..

Richard Powers’ thirteenth novel, Bewilderment , is a follow-up to a huge success—2018’s The Overstory , a centuries-spanning book about forests and people who want to save them that won the Pulitzer Prize. But Bewilderment, a much smaller domestic story, is an awkward successor. In the New York Times, Dwight Garner panned the novel as “meek, saccharine, and overweening in its piety about nature,” and called it “a book about ecological salvation that somehow makes you want to flick an otter on the back of the head, for no good reason at all.”

I almost couldn’t get through the new Powers, not because of the earnestness or the piety (though those were very real and very annoying), but because its failed ambition was so big and so honest. Bewilderment is a story about what the knowledge of ecological collapse may do to a sensitive, intense child’s mental state, and how that child’s anxiety may, in turn, change a desperate parent’s life. To judge by recent evidence, it seems like this is a problem that may unfold in more and more households, as everything gets worse. Recently, researchers asked 10,000 people, ages 16-25, in ten countries, about their climate anxiety, and found that 59 percent reported being very or extremely worried ; 84 percent moderately so. Over half felt a string of negative emotions about climate change: “sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless, and guilty.”

Robin, the 9-year-old at the heart of Bewilderment , feels all of those things, and feels them so dramatically that sometimes it affects his ability to go to school, relate to other children, and handle anger without becoming violent. Richard Powers told Time in an interview that he doesn’t have children. Robin, he said, is modeled on a niece, a nephew, and the son of a friend. “I think there is a growing plague among children,” he said. “They’re born into this world and in childhood we feel the magic of the living world, we’re pantheists, we connect to the nonhuman, we take it seriously. I think any adult with an active, engaged, intense, intelligent child now is going to have a hard time answering their questions about what’s happening.”

This is a pretty big-R Romantic idea of childhood, and it makes sense, looking at the way Robin is in Bewilderment —often far too sensitive and wise to sound like a real kid—that Powers thinks this way. Robin’s emotions are on overdrive, and a lot of the book is very difficult to read, because the strange intensity (and accompanying transience) of kids’ feelings is hard to represent well. Not only is he miserable about the ecological collapse that’s already in motion in the near-future Wisconsin of the novel , but also, his mother died two years ago, and he’s not doing well with it. “He melted down and exploded over nothing,” says Robin’s father Theo of his son, who’s got various diagnoses from various doctors, but whose father emphatically resists medicating him. “But he could just as easily be overcome by joy.”

The Robin arc in the novel—an intentional echo of what happens in Daniel Keys’ Flowers for Algernon , though the change is in the subject’s emotional landscape, rather than his intelligence—comes courtesy of an experimental technique called “decoded neurofeedback” (this idea is taken from the real world ). Robin learns, with the help of machines and a scientist as trainer, how to tweak his responses to the world away from despair, and toward connection and joy. His late mother, Alyssa—a dynamo, an animal rights activist who read poetry to dogs at night—thought much the way Robin did about animals and the natural world, but largely managed to channel her own despair into an attitude of positive allegiance to nature. That’s what Robin learns to do.

Before he starts these experimental treatments, he connects with the part of Alyssa’s environmental consciousness that’s grim and hopeless. He watches a clip of her testifying before the legislature on the loss of biodiversity, rewinding it obsessively, to try to remember her. Watching it triggers a crying jag, when he asks his father whether one of the numbers Alyssa quotes in her speech—that 2 percent of all animals, among all the humans and “factory cows and factory chickens,” are wild—is correct. Theo finds himself unable to comfort him, because “something in him hated me for letting that number be true.”

Robin’s turnaround starts when he begins with decoded neurofeedback treatments, and the scientist who runs the lab suggests training him on a recording of Alyssa’s mind, made before her death. The recording is one that the scientist made after suggesting Alyssa conjure a mental state of “ecstasy.” In his review, Garner found this part very awkward—“Powers doesn’t begin to explore the Oedipal implications”—and I get that. It’s especially weird because Theo is fixated, throughout the story, on what it was that Alyssa was picturing when asked to project “ecstasy.” (He suspects she cheated on him, and hopes it’s him in the brain scan, not somebody else.)

But I think Powers picked “ecstasy” because it represents the other side of Alyssa’s eco-consciousness—that flavor of feelings about nature that, environmental educators know, is what actually moves people to action. ( Not guilt; not fear—joy .) It’s an awkward way to prove that point, and far too deus ex machina . But I think that’s the argument. “To watch this boy become a joyful person … is to raise in the reader the possibility of a life that’s more meaningful and more rewarding than the life of accumulation has ever been,” Powers told Time.

It’s just very difficult to fully realize what a young person’s climate anxiety might look like, because if adults took it seriously (as Robin points out several times in this book) they’d act differently. The constant temptation is to see the whole thing as ridiculous, or overblown, because the implications—and self-implication—are too painful. A few years ago, when Greta Thunberg spoke at Davos, it became clear how divisive the topic of youthful climate anxiety can be. At the time, I wrote about how the right made a laughingstock of Thunberg, calling her “deeply disturbed,” implying she’s a puppet of the adults around her, and so on. Liberals made an icon of her, putting her face on candles and murals, which isn’t super great, either; the point (as Thunberg herself would be quick to note) is not to lionize one kid with blonde braids, but to think differently about the future.

That liberal adult response to Greta Thunberg—a response I’d describe as guilty hagiography—showed how hard it can be to really think about children’s climate anxiety without falling into the kind of sentimentality that pervades Bewilderment . Thunberg has an analog in the book: a girl named Inga Alder, who Robin watches on television and identifies as being “like me.” Thunberg has a big dose of what Theo likes about Robin: an angry fragility. “I couldn’t imagine Robin toughening up enough to survive this Ponzi scheme of a planet,” Theo thinks. “Maybe I didn’t want him to. I liked him otherworldly.”

There may yet be a great novel to write about children’s climate anxiety. The topic combines two terrible parental worries: the child may be unhappy; the world may be broken. (Or: The child may be broken; the world may be unhappy.) Bewilderment is a few shades too lumpy, sincere, and strangely plotted to be it. But the road is open for the next.

Bewilderment by Richard Powers: A call to arms for empathy and action

Book review: booker shortlisted novel is a damning assessment of the state of the world.

Richard Powers: Bewilderment’s dexterous narrative weaves themes of climate and grief

“It changed how I thought about the Earth and our place in it… It changed how I see things and that’s always, for me, a mark of a book worth reading.”

With this recommendation from Barack Obama and a shortlisting for the Booker Prize, Bewilderment comes with a weight of expectation. Richard Powers’s most unusual novel lives up to the hype, not only because it is, technically speaking, a great read, a story with striking characterisation of a father-and-son duo, written in precise, enlightening prose, but also because it stretches beyond fiction to make the reader care about the real world.

Books about climate change and ecological disaster are not easy sells for many readers. Speaking at an event in the RDS some years back, writer and activist Naomi Klein said that the difficulty was getting people interested in problems that seem too far away in time and space, specifically beyond 30 years, the life cycle of a generation or the average mortgage. In a capitalist society, we think in terms that are too small, too short-sighted, too self-orientated. In his new novel, Powers has managed to come up with an antidote.

Theo Byrne, the narrator of Bewilderment, is a promising astrobiologist and widowed father of a nine-year-old boy. Despite Theo’s grief and struggles as a single parent in suburban Wisconsin, he has a notable curiosity and care for the world beyond his own back yard. At work he’s part of a team that models the potential for life on other planets. At home he takes his son Robin through these discoveries on the computer, hoping to educate him.

More urgently, these virtual visits work to distract Robin from the heightened emotional states and erratic behaviours that have increased since the death of his mother, Ali, two years previously.

Bewilderment wears its mammoth subject matter lightly. In a dexterous narrative, the various strains complement each other, with the connections left to the reader to figure out: “Every one of us is an experiment, and we don’t even know what the experiment is testing.” Private and public worlds are in disarray. Theo and Robin’s planet-hopping gives a loose structure and forward momentum to the book, while the outside world seems to go backwards.

The tone is never pedantic. Robin’s attempts to combat climate change and help his beloved animals show rather than preach. Theo, meanwhile, frequently sums things up in his stark, scientific style: “Everything had happened in broad daylight, and against shamelessness, outrage was impotent.”

Who is madder, this novel asks, a young boy who rages against all the waste and cruelty and injustice he sees around him, or a society who watches on indifferently?

Powers, the author of 13 novels, is a MacArthur Fellow who has received the National Book Award. His most recent book, The Overstory, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Booker. He lives in the Great Smoky Mountains and his affinity with the landscape is evident in the camping trips that Theo and Robin take to get away from society: “A full Hunter’s Moon hung fat and red on the horizon. Through the circle of trees, so sharp it seemed within easy reach, the Milky Way spilled out – countless speckled placers in a black streambed.”

There is so much in this book that it seems impossible, and wrong, to cram it into a single review. It is at once a thoughtful exploration of individual grief, a study in empathy for the biosphere, a questioning of the medical profession's pathologising of children and a beginner's guide to astrobiology. There are echoes of the news agenda in recent years – a president who won't admit defeat, a teenage Scandinavian climate activist, ice shelves breaking off Antarctica: "Heads of state were testing the outermost limits of public gullibility. Little wars were flaring everywhere."

Throughout, Theo is an erudite, likable guide. His scientific explanations to Robin, and by proxy the reader, are never condescending or overly simplistic. Similarly, Powers gets the balance right with a sci-fi esque subplot about an empathy machine experiment run by university colleagues, which in lesser hands could stretch credibility.

For all its learnings, readers will be drawn to this book for the father-and-son pairing at the centre. There is a sense of an almost hermetically sealed parent-child relationship, akin to Emma Donoghue’s Room, but in this instance the barriers are invisible, the villain the world at large. Who is madder, this novel asks, a young boy who rages against all the waste and cruelty and injustice he sees around him, or a society that watches on indifferently?

Bewilderment is both cerebral and heartfelt, a rigorous and damning assessment of the state of the world today. A call to arms for empathy and action, that is, incidentally, a good bet for the Booker: “Life wanted something from us. And time was running out.”

Sarah Gilmartin

Sarah Gilmartin is a contributor to The Irish Times focusing on books and the wider arts

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Author Interviews

Richard powers' book 'bewilderment' explores life on and beyond earth.

Leila Fadel

Alejandra Marquez Janse

Amy Isackson

NPR's Leila Fadel speaks with novelist Richard Powers about his new book, Bewilderment , about a widowed father and his son trying to make sense of the world.

LEILA FADEL, HOST:

Climate change, new planets, grief, mental health - these are only some of the themes that Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Powers explores in his new novel "Bewilderment." The tale centers around a single father, Theo Byrne, with a 9-year-old boy named Robin. Both are grieving the death of Byrne's wife, Alyssa. Her life remains intertwined with theirs through the magic of neuroscience. The narrative is told through the lens of the father, an astrobiologist who searches for the possibility of life beyond Earth. But he's also struggling to raise a sensitive child in a world that is dying and a nation that is growing more authoritarian.

Richard Powers joins us now.

RICHARD POWERS: Thanks so much, Leila. It's a lovely introduction.

FADEL: Thanks. I mean, the novel was definitely an emotional one, and so much of it felt like a version of the world that we live in right now. But I wanted to start by asking you how we got "Bewilderment." I mean, after your last novel, "The Overstory," you said you'd never write again. What changed?

POWERS: Yeah. Well, "The Overstory" was my 12th novel. And it was well over 500 pages and five and a half years in the making. And I was worn out. I just felt like I'd given everything that I could to the book. As it turns out, "Bewilderment" is far shorter, less than half the length of "Overstory." It deals with only two characters. And I think that greater intimacy and that greater focus allowed me to rally my energies during the pandemic.

And it's a bit of a pandemic book, you know? It certainly treats a kind of parallel Earth to the one that we've been living through. And because I was locked down in a very beautiful part of the world, the Great Smoky Mountains, I used place, also, as a restorative and as a way to build my stamina again for a new novel.

FADEL: Now, the Smokies are featured in this book. And I'm curious how you decided to tell the tale through a father and son, especially because you've talked about how you yourself have never really wanted children and decided not to have children.

POWERS: The idea to set it in the Smokies and to feature a father and a son occurred to me while I was on a trail here in the national park. I was deep into the trail, two or three miles. I hadn't seen a human being in a long time. And all of a sudden, I had this odd sensation that there was a little boy riding on my shoulders. And that's when I realized I was going to do this great leap of speculative fiction at the age of, you know, 62, 63, to wonder what it might have been like to be a father.

FADEL: You mention this parallel world, and that world is a world ravaged by floods and water contamination and wildfires. There is a very Trump-like president in power, deep societal divisions, authoritarianism. How much did current events inspire you for this novel?

POWERS: I was, like so many people during lockdown, just chained to the headlines. And the book really was created under the shadow of this feeling that we were at a moment that could get out and follow a very disastrous trajectory.

FADEL: Are we still in that dangerous moment?

POWERS: Yeah, no question.

FADEL: Yeah.

POWERS: You started out with a litany of the natural disasters that the book treats. And the book does venture into speculative fiction a little bit, but, boy, when I heard you name that catalog, I thought, there's no exaggeration there. There's no parallel Earth there. That's where we are.

FADEL: Right. I mean, those are the types of things we report on every day now. Now, you really drive home in the novel how, when you talk about the non-human life of this planet, how easily humanity grows accustomed and really ignores atrocities going on around us, especially the possible extinction of so many species on this planet. And the son, Robin, is obsessed with human beings' mass killings of animals and the destruction of our planet. Is Robin ultimately humanity's mirror in this book?

POWERS: Yeah, it is a book about the results of a way of thinking about the living world as if we are the only sacred entity with agency and meaning. And while I wrote "Overstory," I realized that it's that culture that has to shift if we want to stick around here much longer. And that's where "Bewilderment" started. I thought, well, the next thing that I could do is try to tell the story of one person who begins to think about the world in a much different way, in a way where we aren't separate from but we are reciprocally interbraided (ph) with other living things.

FADEL: And there's this sort of - with a child first learning the world, this almost disbelief in the way that people can ignore things, right?

POWERS: Yeah. I mean, there are many reasons why it was important to me to have a child at the center of this story and a child who's just on that threshold. You know, from 9 to 10 is a very interesting transition in age. They don't yet understand why we might have to look away or qualify or be confused. You know, they see things in that childlike black-and-white way, and they demand answers. And in this case, he wants to know, is it really true? Are we losing this incredible patrimony? And Theo has to say yes, and he has no good answer for why.

FADEL: Which is just crushing - right? - in the way that it goes between father and son 'cause he can't protect his son.

POWERS: Yeah. And I think it's an invitation for readers to wonder how they would explain something that we have gotten good at not explaining or avoiding or postponing. Because you can't say no to a 9-year-old.

FADEL: Now, ultimately, this book, it's about love between father and son, love between husband and wife, mother and son and then that larger connection to the planet. But there's also a lot of hopelessness in this book against all that is going wrong in the world. And I'm just curious what you want readers to walk away with when they finish this novel.

POWERS: I would characterize the book itself as a strange mixture of darkness and light. This question of whether it's ultimately hopeful or despairing has everything to do with how we understand the idea of hope. But I do hope - insofar as hope means a commitment to engage the future as a meaningful pursuit, I do hope and I strongly believe that this place where we are that is still so incredible will provide us with a meaningful place to put all our efforts and all our empathy for as long as we can stick around.

FADEL: Novelist Richard Powers speaking to us about his new book, "Bewilderment," shortlisted for a Booker Prize.

Thank you so much for joining us.

POWERS: Thank you, Leila.

(SOUNDBITE OF GIRLPOOL SONG, "IDEAL WORLD")

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