Bewilderment by Richard Powers

Bewilderment by Richard Powers

Read by Edoardo Ballerini

7 hours 51 minutes

Published September 2021 by Norton, W. W. and Company Inc. 

Publisher's Summary:

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?

My Thoughts: 

Well, this one befuddles me. Not so much the book but why Oprah would have picked this book for her book club. Sure, there's plenty to discuss - again Powers looks at man's effect on his environment and unwillingness to acknowledge the damage he has done, as he did in The Overstory, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. Powers also tackles the themes of loss; marriage; and parenting, especially parenting a child on the spectrum. And it's bound to get an emotional response from readers; there is so much here intended to provoke emotional reactions - anger, sadness, empathy. 

But that's just it - Powers is too obvious in this book, too clearly attempting to manipulate his readers. The educators are evil, the doctors who insist that Robin should be medicated are evil, the government leaders who control Theo's work funding are evil; and the man who developed the experimental treatment is a terrible person who, in Theo's mind, was having an affair with Robin's mother. Our hearts are meant to ache for Robin (and mine did; I'm not that hardhearted!) as he struggles with the loss of his mother and trying to assimilate with his school mates, with teachers and administrators who don't understand him and a father who is not much better at it. We're meant to sympathize with Theo as he tries to balance parenthood with work and his own pain. There is very little shading to any of the characters, very little chance to understand their point. 

Powers is too clearly attempting to manipulate his readers, except when he isn't - in those places where he ventures off into imagined planets that Theo has created as part of scientific research he's doing to help earn funding for a new space telescope. There are a lot of these expeditions to the simulated planets and while there was often a tie to the story with them, they pulled me out of the story entirely. 

I'm not alone in not caring for this one but there are others who applaud it. The Guardian calls those trips to the plants "myth-like passages" and says Robin is "as compelling a fictional creation" as the reviewer has encountered in a long time. So don't just take my word for it. Maybe look to see what the readers of Oprah's book club thought of this one if the publisher's summary sounds like something that interests you.