The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Half science, half schmaltz
Big political questions underpin Richard Powers’s touching but simplistic fable about a father and son
288pp, William Heinemann, T £16.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £18.99, ebook £9.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ
Richard Powers, for most of his career, has been the highest-concept of high-concept writers. Complex ideas – about virtual reality, genetics, ecology and the philosophy of consciousness – have been the scaffolding on which he has built complex edifices of fiction; most recently, 2018’s door-stopping The Overstory.
On the face of it, Bewilderment follows this line – mingling ideas about neurodivergence, astrobiology, political radicalisation and environmental collapse – but close up it’s quite a different animal: it’s so direct and simple it’s the closest Powers is likely to get to writing a YA novel.
The narrator, Theo, is an astrobiologist who scans the universe for habitable planets. He is also the widowed single father to a nineyear-old son, Robin. Robin is not quite like the other ducks: prone to obsessively meticulous behaviour and outbreaks of violent rage, he has been diagnosed any number of ways by any number of doctors. Those doctors want to drug him up, but Theo resists medicalising him. After all, it’s suggested, Robin’s vibrating distress at animal cruelty and ecological devastation is on the face of it a more rational response than the sanguine, tinkeringround-the-edges orthodoxy of the adult world.
The book’s backdrop (it seems to be set in an alternative near future) is a United States in which a Trumplike president is a few steps further down the road to fascism than the real one ever got (journalists are being arrested, military powers are being used freely); and Greta Thunberg is refracted into a 14-year-old activist called Inga Alder, who, like her model, talks about autism being her superpower.
Bewilderment’s primary concern – and I say “primary” because those are the colours it’s painted in – is empathy; and its obverse, the “othering” that allows us to hold the non-human (and the racially different or even the extraplanetary) at arm’s length. That theme is more or less literalised when Robin is accepted on to an experimental course of neurofeedback treatment – where he learns to control his brain-state by modelling it on a recording of another person’s (in this case, his dead mother’s).
There is no question that Powers is a novelist of considerable, well, powers. Take, for instance, this easefully expert paragraph describing the landscape as father and son hike in the Smoky Mountains: “Before us, the remnant of a range once much higher than the Himalayas endured as rounded foothills. Lemon, amber, and cinnamon – the whole run of deciduous colors – flowed down the watersheds. Sourwoods and sweet gums covered the ridge in crimson. We rounded the bend into the park. Robin breathed out a long, astonished vowel.”
But the intelligence and lucidity
of the prose don’t quite disguise a dismaying tug in the direction of schmaltz: “Robbie stopped in place on the sidewalk and said the strangest thing: Dad? If you went to sea or to war… if something happened to you? If you had to die? I would just hold still and think of how your hands move when you walk, and then you’d still be here.”
Robin’s savant-like innocence is untroubled by much complexity – he is positioned as too pure for this wicked world. His dead mother, likewise, was (though this could be explained by her being seen only through Theo’s idealising memory) a heroic warrior against injustice. Theo is just, all the way through, a
pretty good guy – a tender and indulgent father, and a scientist who never lost his sense of wonder.
That simplicity (Trump bad; exploitative capitalism bad; wonder of creation good) is reflected in the structure of the book itself. There are pencil-lines of plot arcs that never seem to get developed. Theo mentions that he is in recovery from alcoholism, but that doesn’t get any further play, and a revelation about his marriage doesn’t feed noticeably into the novel.
Bewilderment is both touching and finely written, then. But it’s bewilderingly thin and sentimental for a novel by a writer of such proven scope.