Powers’ follow-up to his extraordinary arboreal fantasia The Overstory (2018)—as wide-ranging, brilliant and beautiful a novel as you could hope to read—is a much more tightly focused though equally environmentally-engaged novel. Bewilderment is its two main characters, and their relationship. Narrator Theo Byrne is a university astrobiologist, programming simulations of life on extrasolar planets, though his job takes second place to caring for Robin, his behaviourally-challenged son. Robin is mourning the car-crash death of his mother, Alys, an environmental activist. He is intensely focussed on the environment and is prone to violent rages when thwarted or challenged. Bullied at school he narrowly avoids expulsion after breaking the cheek of another boy by hitting him with his thermos. ‘So far,’ his dad notes wryly, ‘the votes are two Aspergers, one probably OCD and one possible ADHD’. Theo loves his son intensely and refuses to permit the medication regimen urged by the authorities (‘he’s nine-years old! His brain is still developing’). But as Robin’s behaviour becomes increasingly erratic and rageful he has to do something.
Bewilderment is a much narrower piece of writing than the capacious, multi-strand The Overstory, even to the point of claustrophobia. The knife-edge of Robin’s moods is rendered with remarkable believability and sensitivity, and the love between son and father has an emotional truth and vividness that absolutely wrings the heart. But the focus is so tightly on these two, and the larger tragedy of a world increasingly poisoned and abused is so unremittingly pushed home, that the novel becomes rather pinching to read.
The first quarter of the novel details a wilderness trip Theo and Robin take together, exploring rivers and forests and sleeping under the stars. Powers’ nature writing here is as beautifully observed and evocative as it’s ever been, and in this world Robin is happy and adjusted. But they can’t live in nature forever. Robin must go back to school and Theo to work, and the world they return to is broken and inhospitable. We’re in a near-future which, though Powers doesn’t specify, looks very like a Trumpian second-term (‘did you see the President’s tweet?’) with environmental collapse accelerating, democracy falling apart and private armed militias patrolling for ‘unspecified foreign invaders’.
There’s not much a neurodivergent 9-year-old can do, but he does what he can, inspired by watching TV clips of Inger Alder—this novel’s Greta Thunberg (an ‘oval faced girl in tight pigtails’ who considers ‘her autism her special asset, “my microscope, telescope and laser put together”’). He paints pictures of endangered animals hoping to sell them and donate the money to environmental causes. He stands outside Congress with a sign saying HELP ME I’M DYING. He simply doesn’t understand—and neither does his father—and neither, evidently, does Richard Powers—why people can’t see how urgent our ongoing natural collapse is, why they aren’t moved to dedicating their lives to doing something about it.
The novel is science fiction, not just in its extrapolation into a dystopian future, and not just in terms of Theo’s detailed accounts of life on other planets, which intersperse the chapters, but because of the main story-device: a technology called ‘Decoded Neurofeedback’, AI-mediated neural imaging which enables people to ‘approximate’ the neural structures of other people’s brains. Robin uses this technology to get closer to his dead mother’s mind—she was an early test subject on the programme and her thoughts have been, in a slightly hand-wavey way, recorded. In many ways the story reworks Daniel Keyes classic SF novel Flowers For Algernon (1966), something Powers is perfectly upfront about, name-checking the story, and giving Robin the nickname ‘mouse’. ‘Boy learns bliss from his dead mother,’ says Theo, amazed; but if you know the Keyes story you have an inkling where Bewildered is going.
If Bewilderment is a little suffocating it’s not because Power’s sense-of-wonder at the natural world has waned: his descriptive writing is as spacious and brilliant as ever. And it’s not because the novel inhabits a tragic mode. Of itself, tragedy doesn’t need to be suffocating—indeed at its best the mode is expansive and reinvigorating. But the narrowness of dramatic focus here closes around the reader. Perhaps that’s apropos. Perhaps we ought to feel suffocated by what’s happening to our world. But activism is one thing, fiction another, and Bewilderment is unable to conceive of anyone except the wicked and the ignorant failing to join Theo and Robin in their intensity of belief. Drama needs to be more two-ply, it needs a little more of the old Antigone dialectic. The novel treats Robin’s emotionally myopic, intense and furious obsession with the harm we are doing nature as right, actually. Maybe it is. But such polemical certainty cramps the novelistic form here. Powers has extraordinary gifts as a writer, and there is much to admire in this book, even if it doesn’t quite reach the heights of his previous work.
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