Bewilderment: A Novel
The 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?
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Community Reviews
The vechile for this story is the relationship between a father and son. The hero is the natural environment, from earth’s history out into the galaxies. The setting is a sadly familiar Trumpesque America. Beautiful written, highly recommended.
Not what I expected, and yet it was. A true work of immense imagination. I am impressed with the seamless way Powers weaves science into his fiction. There was a lot of astronomy, psychology and biology in this one and some welcome place monikers in that it is set in Madison, WI and the Smoky Mountains. The structure of the book is unique and circular in a way that really works. There are no chapters, just little segments of text that share a single experience with us. Theo and his son Robin are reeling from the accidental death of their wife/mother Aly. Robin might be on the spectrum, but Theo desperately refuses to medicate him. Their struggles are so real and so poignant, and they are peppered with fantastic world creations Theo 'visits' with his son. The human story is the most immediate, and yet a parallel story unfolds, of the US under increasingly nationalistic leadership slipping into a kind of death itself. Intriguing. Flowers for Algernon, but for a modern and wider world
While this book held my interest, it has scientific jargon and stories which are excessive in relating to the gist of the book.
I wavered between mixed emotions on this one. Fitting given the functional utility of emotions to the story. The main engine moving this plot along resembled the thought exercise of the ‘Ship of Theseus’. It asks us to consider what is and is not essential to being. Perhaps even more broadly, are humans even an essential part of existence?
Despite the brevity of this work it takes on a vast struggle between hope and despair. It asks how much can technology solve our problems and if any of the solutions are in us. It presents a sometimes forced social commentary on capitalism, politics, and priorities. It is balanced, however, by the interplay in the human relationships. The essential component to the best science fiction. Again, in the larger scope of the universe, it asks us do the questions and answers even matter.
Richard Powers artfully leverages the key characters’ journeys to transform a state of bewilderment into enlightenment. Their respective reliefs coming from the learning and acceptance of what is. These discoveries come at a cost, spilling the secrets of the past and shattering perceptions of others. Then giving way to the aww of the universe within.
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