Bewilderment

Richard Powers absconded to the old growth forests of Tennessee which prompted the fantastic, Pulitzer Prize winning Overstory. Bewilderment feels like a continuation of that book.

Instead of eco-warriors, Powers resorts to the cliched trope of neurodivergent child who speaks plainly of the impending climate crisis, who sees the loss of biodiversity with stark clarity and asks “Why is it so hard for people to see what's happening?

It's easy to screw this up and in less capable hands (or through the eyes of more cynical readers) it's going to come off as cloying and sentimental. And yet I loved the fierce love Theo Byrne has for his 9 year old son Robin, and how lost he feels without his wife to help navigate his erratic rages. How doctors seek to quell his behaviour with drugs, how pediatricians are keen to place Robin on a spectrum.

“I wanted to tell the man that everyone alive on this fluke little planet was on the spectrum. That's what a spectrum is. I wanted to tell the man that life itself is a spectrum disorder, where each of us vibrated at some unique frequency in the continuous rainbow.”

It's that sort of language that Powers invokes that you can either hang with or roll your eyes right into the back of your head. I thought he earned that and that Theo perfectly embodies how much you can love your child and fear, everyday, that you're doing something that's going to ruin them. What it is to wrestle with being a parent in the midst of a climate crisis and the slowly looming end of the world.

That is the chewy centre of the book and rest is confection. I found the imagined extrasolar planets meandering but pretty diversions and the Decoded Neurofeedback a handy plot device to better centre Robin for the sake of moving the story forward and creating the arc of the narrative. PS. totally did not know that rock cairns were a bad thing.