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Bewilderment by Richard Powers

W.W. Norton 288 pp.

By Wendy Smith

The wonder and abundance of life, the brilliance and blindness of human beings: These epic themes pulse at the core of Richard Powers’ intimate, heartbreaking tale of a father and son. His dazzling 2018 Pulitzer Prize winner, The Overstory, roamed through deep time and multiple consciousnesses; Bewilderment focuses on a single family consumed by grief for the wife and mother who died in a car crash and for the animals she fought to defend, dying all around as we pillage our planet.

Theo Byrne’s wife Aly, Midwest coordinator for an animal rights NGO, relied on red wine and poetry at night to keep her tough and resolute for her battles with state legislators and factory farm owners. Their nine-year-old son Robin has no such filters. He dissolves in tears when he learns only two percent of all animals are wild. The sight of motorists pulled over to ogle a family of bears prompts him to snarl, “How would you like to star in a freak show?” while his twitching lips and rigid fingers warn Theo of a screaming fit in the making. Robin has had multiple diagnoses (“two Aspberger’s, one probable OCD, one possible ADHD” [p97]), none of which Theo trusts. “His classmates harassed him for not understanding their vicious gossip. His mother was crushed to death when he was seven. His beloved dog died of confusion a few months later. What more reason did any doctor need for disturbed behavior?”

Robin is a painfully sensitive child. Like his mother, killed in a collision after she swerved to avoid an animal on the road, he doesn’t understand why everyone isn’t horrified that more than 2000 North American species are either threatened or endangered. Theo tries to comfort his son through his work. An astrobiologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, he takes data collected from space telescopes and creates simulations of their surfaces and atmospheres. When the powerful Earthlike Planet Seeker telescope he and his colleagues are lobbying for is funded and operational, his simulations will enable them to identify planets where life might exist. Meanwhile, he takes Robin via computer to some of these simulated planets, unfolding their hypothetical evolutions over millions of years to demonstrate that life could flourish in the unlikeliest of circumstances. His son is thrilled by the idea that there is life everywhere in the universe, but then he wonders, “Dad, with all those places to live? How come nobody’s anywhere?”

Powers excels at embedding big ideas in emotionally engaging stories, and Bewilderment keens with Theo’s love for his distressed son and frustration at not being able to help Robin deal with his bewilderment and fury at humanity’s oblivious destructiveness. “How did Mom do it? Every day? For years?” he asks after handing out flyers at the Wisconsin Capitol building begging people to “stop the killing,” only to be met with near-universal indifference and one enraged legislator who threatens to report Theo for cruelty. “That’s why the universe is silent,” Robin bitterly concludes. “Everyone’s hiding. All the smart ones anyway…We took over everything. We deserve to be alone.”

“Aly would’ve propelled the three of us forward with her endless forgiveness and bulldozer will,” Theo thinks. “Without her, I was floundering.” Robin is in perpetual trouble at school, and the principal gives Theo an ultimatum: put Robin on medication, “or we can get the state involved.” [p69] Desperate, Theo turns to Martin Currier, a neuroscientist who some years back enlisted him and Aly as subjects in early experiments with Decoded Neurofeedback, a real-life technique fictionally extended here. (The Earthlike Planet Seeker is a similar riff on NASA’s aborted Terrestrial Planet Finder; Bewilderment is rich in examples of Powers’ ability to use real science for his artistic purposes.) DecNef is now being tested as a therapeutic tool, Currier explains; it could help Robin control his emotions by training him to model the brain activity of people in composed states of mind that have been recorded in computer scans.

It works brilliantly, especially after Theo hesitantly agrees to allow Currier to train Robin on the recordings of Aly’s DecNef sessions. Robin does better in school, he goes sledding with neighborhood kids and disarms a trio of boys vandalizing a stop sign with the cheerful effrontery of his invitation to follow him and marvel at a great horned owl perched in a nearby tree. “He’d grown easy in his new skin,” Theo marvels, even though he’s unnerved by the mysterious connection Robin has forged with his dead mother in these sessions. Robin’s new coping skills are impressive. When his appearance on a video channel program makes him a social media sensation, Theo is the one who rages at being accosted by strangers; his son accepts his celebrity and puts it to use. Accompanying his father to Washington, where Theo testifies in support of Planet Seeker funding, Robin stages a protest in front of the national Capitol. This time he attracts enthusiastic support from a batch of teens who recognize “the boy they wired up to his dead Mom!”

The hopeful story of Robin’s transformation unfolds in a chillingly plausible near-future America, with democracy evolving towards authoritarianism and natural disasters escalating towards catastrophe. A hurricane blows the South Fork of Long Island into the sea. Wildfires in California destroy 3000 homes; the president blames trees and issues an executive order to clear-cut 200,000 acres of national forest. Later, he declares a national election invalid and orders it to be repeated: “Half the electorate revolted,” says Theo. “The other half was gung-ho…Only pure bewilderment kept us from civil war.” In this polarized society, science is a political issue, with dire consequences for Theo professionally and Robin personally. Bewilderment hurtles in its closing pages towards a tragic climax that feels both inevitable and grievously wrong.

Yet this novel thrumming with sorrow is also filled with joy. The hiking trips through the Great Smoky Mountains that bookend the novel shimmer with Powers’ characteristically gorgeous evocations of the natural world, inspiration and goad for both Robin and his father. Theo’s descriptions of his work make palpable the thrill of scientific discovery, and the planet simulations he explores with Robin express his faith that the abundance of life on Earth must have a counterpart somewhere in the abundance of planets revealed through space telescopes. But Theo is too good a scientist not to know that his faith needs to be backed up by proof, and Powers is too scrupulous a writer to suggest that the tools required for proof are likely to be readily available. It would be safe to say that he is optimistic about the future of life in the universe, a lot less optimistic about life on Earth.

Powers ends on a visionary note with a beautiful passage that reaffirms human connections and our planet’s splendor in enigmatic but moving terms. Bewilderment is another milestone in the career of one of America’s most distinguished and distinctive novelists.