Mind Picker: Bewilderment

On Saturday, the President declared the entire election invalid. He ordered a repeat, claiming it would require at least three more months to secure and implement. Half the electorate revolted against the plan. The other half was gung-ho for a retry. Where suspicion was total and facts were settled with the like button, there was no other way forward but to do over. I wondered how I might explain the crisis to an anthropologist from Promixa Centauri. In this place, with such a species, trapped in such technologies, even a simple head count grew impossible. Only pure bewilderment kept us from civil war.

This is the third novel that I’ve read by Richard Powers, the third to have been nominated for the Man Booker Prize, and I’d rank Bewilderment at the bottom of the three. Powers’ last novel, The Overstory, was a high-level piece of Ecofiction; a love letter to trees and forests that went on too long and eventually felt too baggy and pedantic to really wow me (on the other hand, I found the earlier Orfeo to be sublime). As a follow-up to The Overstory, Bewilderment (another Ecofiction effort) is much more accessible, with a family drama at its heart that would appeal to your average book club — and maybe that’s the point. Maybe Powers decided to bring his — undeniably important — ecowarnings to the mainstream; but if The Overstory muddled the power of its message by being too dense, Bewilderment felt lightweight and predictable, full of narrative choices that eventually grated on me. I’m all for bringing the core message of this book (that the health of the Earth and all of its inhabitants is more important than economics) to the fore, and while it would be impossible for an author to please every reader, this book did not really please me. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

Watching medicine fail my child, I developed a crackpot theory: Life is something we need to stop correcting. My boy was a pocket universe I could never hope to fathom. Every one of us is an experiment, and we don’t even know what the experiment is testing.

Theo Byrne is an astrobiologist, balancing his search for extraterrestrial life with parenting a special needs child after the recent death of his wife in a car accident. The eight-year-old boy, Robin, has had various diagnoses (from OCD and ADD to “something on the spectrum”), and with high anxiety, learning challenges, and violent outbursts against his bullies, Robin’s school is keen to see the boy medicated into submission. Theo resists the idea of “psychoactive drugs'' for his child, and when he remembers the work that a Neuroscientist on his university campus was doing with “Decoded Neurofeedback” — essentially mapping the brains of neurotypical subjects with an fMRI and then training those with psychiatric disorders to better respond to emotional cues by mimicking these “healthy” brains — Theo is able to get Robin enrolled in the program. As Robin responds incredibly well to this therapy (which is explained as more of an exercise in learning empathy than anything else), he grows from a little boy who is uncontrollably anxious about species-at-risk (Robin’s dead mother was an animal rights advocate and the boy honours her loss by attempting to take on her responsibilities) to becoming really Zen about ecology; his “everyone is in everything” message eventually making him a viral internet meme. But as the nightly news tolls warning after warning in the background — crops are failing, rivers are dying, some scary virus has made the jump from Texas cattle feedlots to humans — the unnamed President of the United States (he’s totally Trump) goes from outlawing public criticism of his administration, to attempting to rig the next election, to cutting the funding to both the deep space telescope program that is essential to Theo’s research and also the Neuroscientist’s “DecNef” program.

So far as the plot goes, that’s a strong storyline, but here’s what didn’t work for me: Theo’s research is interesting — having read “two thousand sci-fi paperbacks”, he has a good idea of the diversity of life that could be out in the universe, and he has assembled what his fellow astrobiologists refer to as the Byrne Allen Field Guide; the best guess for what kind of lifeforms could account for the spectographic readings for various distant planetary atmospheres. But what this means practically is that Theo tells Robin the story of an imaginary planet every night and it’s written as though the two of them are out exploring them — they discover together that planet Dvau is unstable for life because it doesn’t have a moon, the planet Pelagos is one huge ocean (and no fire means no technology for its inhabitants) — and a few of these might have been charming, but it happens ad nauseum. It bothered me that once Robin has his emotions under control through therapy, everyone reacts to him as though he’s the cutest, smartest, most interesting kid in the world; everyone remembers Theo’s dead wife the same way. And it really bothered me that Powers set his story in our recognisable world but wouldn’t name any of the real people in it: What is obviously Trump is an unnamed president, people participate in “COG” instead of TEDtalks, and the following character stands in for Greta Thunberg:

In one go, Inga Alder opened my son’s feedbackprimed mind to a truth I myself never quite grasped: the world is an experiment in inventing validity, and conviction is its only proof.

There’s some unfortunate timing for this book: It’s maybe hard to get worked up with Theo as he goes to Washington to fight for tens of billions of dollars for space exploration when the internet has spent the summer mocking today’s billionaires playing Rocketman when they could be using that money to make things better here on Earth (and even in the novel no one notices the irony of Theo lobbying for a fortune in government-funded telescopes while Robin sells his paintings at a Farmer’s Market for animal-focussed charities). But what bothered me the most: Early on, Theo and Robin listen to an audiobook of Flowers for Algernon, and as one might imagine, that’s a significant (verging on melodramatic) choice.

Earth had two kinds of people: those who could do the math and follow the science, and those who were happier with their own truths. But in our hearts’ daily practice, whatever schools we went to, we all lived as if tomorrow would be a clone of now.

I can see this being Powers’ most popular novel, and this essential message deserves to be widely read and pondered (I did like when Robin sees a bunch of people looking at their phones in agitation and remarks that they seem to be rewiring their brains just like he does in therapy; we may all be training our responses to the devices we focus on and that may be the deeper meaning of the title even though the word “bewilderment” only occurs in the book in my opening quote). But while all of this might be important, the writing, to me, obscured the message.