Richard Powers and being bewildered

In Bewilderment, his first book after the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Overstory, Richard Powers uses first-person narration by a scientist, Theo Byrne, concerning his son, Robin, who is somewhere “on the spectrum” (2021, p. 5), though the father wishes not to acknowledge the meaningfulness of the term. Powers relates how the boy’s mother, Alyssa, died in a car accident, having driven into an ongoing vehicle as she swerved to avoid killing an animal crossing the road.

By day, the father is an astrobiologist, seeking objects in the universe that might support life. By night, he invents new planets, somewhere in the universe and full of life forms, as bedtime stories for the nine-year-old Robin. These worlds, and the world that Theo and Robin inhabit, have their own rules. Understanding them is a way that Theo uses to encourage Robin to understand the rules of this world. Facing pressure from the boy’s school to calm his behavior through psychoactive medication, Theo enlists a friend of his wife, an old acquaintance and perhaps lover, who conducts clinical experiments in neurofeedback therapy. It involves an fMRI scanner using software powered by artificial intelligence to encourage people with psychic disorders to find ways of coping. At first, it proves a success for Robin.

Robin’s mother was a campaigner for biodiversity, obsessed with species threatened with extinction in a world now so dominated by humankind. When we meet Robin, he shares that obsession. After the initial success of the scanner-based treatment, Robin begins his own campaigning, with little and then some success.

This novel is one of ideas in that it explores the epistemological challenge that autism highlights: How do we know something to be true? Specifically, how did Robin’s mother know – for sure – that the existence of 98 percent of species by weight on Earth was threatened? That challenge raises the ethical one: What should we do about it? The ontological version comes in the novel’s science fiction, the stories he invents, which are made more, rather than less, plausible through Theo’s deep understanding of the possibilities for life on other planets in other parts of the universe: What is real?

The characters in this book dominate; plot is there in a broad narrative arc, but its main role is providing opportunities for empathy for a boy who has trouble empathizing and then drawing back from it to maintain a sense of self. On pp. 129-130, we read Theo’s recollection of one of his wife’s nightmares:

The first time, I thought she was screaming at someone coming into the room. I shot up, my heart seceding from my chest. My lunge woke her. Still in limbo, she broke out crying.

“Honey,” I said. “It’s okay. I’m here.”

Her rebuff was so violent I almost got up and went to sleep in the other room. Three in the morning, the woman I loved was weeping in the dark and I wanted to tell her how badly she’d just hurt me. That’s the ruling story on this planet. We lived suspended between love and ego. Maybe it’s different in other galaxies. But I doubt it.

“Between love and ego”: the dichotomy separates the other- and self-regarding, empathy and self-interest, perhaps even the collective and the individual. In a different form, the puzzle of Robin’s life, too, his inability to read the minds of present others, and yet deeply in love with his missing mother, who sacrificed her life – figuratively and then literally – for the sake of non-human animals.

In this book, Powers enacts the emerging science of autism in fiction, alongside his discursive articulation of the dangers from the loss of biodiversity. But he does so in a way that lets us explore the uncertain, ambiguous epistemology and ontology through the development of his characters, even as the ethics seem firmly fixed, never open to question. It is a story that, for all its tolerance of strangeness, tells us what the meaning of life is. The strangeness makes it affecting – even when the ideas come across as preachy.

How does the book achieve this? One example is this: From the first page onward, Powers makes prominent use of an odd typographical device. Theo speaks in quotation marks, as in the paragraphs cited above. Robin responds in italics. So does his dead mother. That device begs questions: Is it an allegory, a signal of an ending? Of Robin’s? Or of human life on Earth? The allegorical is never articulated, however. Is this, then, like The Overstory, a novel of ideas, or a novel of ideology?

November 2023

Powers, R. (2021). Bewilderment. London: Penguin.