The Story Isn't Over: Bewilderment

Bewilderment

by Richard Powers

Norton

 "Anyone who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the light or from going into the light, which is true of the mind's eye, quite as much as of the bodily eye; and he who remembers this when he sees any one whose vision is perplexed and weak, will not be too ready to laugh; he will first ask whether that soul of man has come out of the brighter life, and is unable to see because unaccustomed to the dark, or having turned from darkness to the day is dazzled by excess of light."

Plato

 Bewilderment, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, can mean “confusion from losing one’s way.”  Richard Powers’ previous novel, The Overstory, featured nine major characters (and their back stories), in a narrative told in several voices that took places in many locations over decades.  It is 502 pages long, and ends: “This will never end.” This novel had powerful scenes, memorable ideas and impressive sentences; it broke new ground in contemporary fiction and won the Pulitzer Prize, but bewilderment was probably not uncommon among readers trying to navigate it.

 Except in its basic concerns, Bewilderment is in many ways its opposite.  In just 278 pages (not all of them entirely filled with prose) comprised of short chapters (some just a couple of pages.)  The story is told by one narrator in one narrative voice, and apart from first-person description, it is basically a series of dialogues between two characters.  There are only a few locations, and it takes place in a single year.

 A couple of early reviews (in the Guardian and the New York Times) characterized the book as polemical and unliterary.  Dwight Gardner in the Times (a reviewer no writer should ever read) called it an “earnest opinion page essay” and “middling Netflix sci-fi product.” “As fiction it is DOA.”

 I take an opposite view: to me the book is highly literary, and to suggest otherwise misleads readers who might anticipate a kind of self-help book.

 The narrator is Theo Byrne, an astrobiologist and the single father of a troubled nine year old son, Robin.  Robin is highly intelligent and sensitive, but his behavior endangers both of them (though it would barely seem unusual in novels of a different age): school officials want him in treatment that usually means drugs, and Theo’s parental rights are also threatened.  

Robin’s equilibrium in what we all know is often a nasty world for a sensitive child, is thrown off by the sudden death of his mother, an environmental activist, two years before.  The dialogues between Theo and Robin that form the bulk of this book often center on her. Much of Theo’s reminiscence is also about his wife.   She (Aly) is the novel’s third major character.  There is a phantom fourth, to be noted later.

 To avoid drugging his son, Theo seizes on the hope implied in an experimental treatment called decoded neural feedback.  (It is being developed by a scientist he and his wife knew, who becomes a subsidiary but important character.)  As a literary device, this works like Wells’ time machine: it’s plausible and drives the story. It’s also a real and potentially useful and scary thing, though Powers gives it superpowers it may never possess.  In the novel, Robin entrains with the ecstatic state previously recorded by his mother, absorbing her equanimity and empathy as well as their shared passions for the natural world.  For a while it works: with his sketchbook in hand and his eyes wide open to the non-human world, “Fascination had made him invincible.”

 The precocious and angelic child, the child who sees and feels what adults are too jaded and conflicted to see and feel, has a long literary pedigree, going back at least to Charles Dickens.  Paul Dombey, the son in Dombey and Son is a clear precedent.  Their literary nature is as memorable, revelatory and tragic characters.  Readers who are looking for tips on how to deal with their own children suffering from “eco-anxiety” (a now leading source of mental and emotional problems for the young) should not expect a happy ending in this sense.

 As substitute bedtime stories, Theo shares with Robin examples of radically different forms and fates of life that may be possible on distant planets, based on Theo’s astrobiology but with literary models in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities for example, and the mind-bending varieties of civilizations in an acknowledged science fiction masterpiece, Olaf Stapledon’s Star-Maker (which Theo mentions late in this book.) 

 There’s also the precedent of Flowers For Algernon by Daniel Keyes, which both major characters mention in this novel as a kind of model for Robin’s experience.  Powers has said in interviews that when he went back to re-read that book, he saw that Keyes prefaced it  with a version of the quote from Plato at the top of this column, about the two types of bewilderment: of going from darkness (in Plato’s cave of illusions, for instance) into the light, and of leaving the light for the darkness. That in essence is the movement of Bewilderment. 

The irony of Robin’s angelic vision is that he is the only one who is attuned and attends to this earthy, physical world—the not just human but planetary universe that humanity ignores (and therefore is profoundly ignorant of), that humanity misunderstands and is actively (if not always consciously) destroying.  For example, only Robin sees the huge great horned owl in their own neighborhood that is invisible to others until they see photos of it on their phones.

 As often in literary tradition, the character names don’t appear to be arbitrary.  Maybe Robin Byrne is a bird whose wings are burned when he flies too close to the sun, so perhaps this is also a slant on the Daedelus and Icarus story. Theo is the flawed god of this tale because he’s the sole teller, revealing what he’s tried to create and what he has failed to fix.  But Robin’s journey is also joyful, and (in a book in which Buddhism is referenced more than once) he lives a kind of enlightenment: of being in the present moment, and the intense presence of the planet.  The ghost of his mother Aly, as patterned in the neural feedback machine, becomes Robin’s ally, like a goddess to a mortal.  Even the neuroscientist Currier is a carrier, bringing Robin together with his mother, and ultimately uniting them with Theo.

 The structure of this book aids the simple magic of its sentences to create beautiful reading.  There is more going on than simplicity would cover, and some of it remains puzzling to me, but re-reading is likely to either solve the mysteries or deepen them.

  The novel is set in a kind of near future or alternative present, or slightly skewed recent past, in which Trump is triumphant.  This recognizable political background noise becomes deafening and defining at the end, which makes this also seem like a literary equivalent of a realistic novel set in Nazi German in the 1930s. 

Robin’s voice reminded me especially of the Quibbler boys in Kim Stanley Robinson’s similarly near-future or alternate-present Science in the Capitol trilogy, reborn as the long novel Green Earth.  There are other literary connections there as well.

 The missing fourth character I mentioned is the one non-human (also ghostly) character in the story (though lots of animals—and aliens—are mentioned): Chester, the family dog, whose death shortly after Aly’s precipitated Robin’s crisis.  Robin wanted to get “a new Chester” but Theo demurred.  He thought better of that decision later, but too late. As a literary matter, a dog in the family might take the story places the author didn’t want to go.  But as a practical matter, the father’s decision seems under-explained and flawed.  For a child so desperate to bond with non-human life, an animal companion could be better therapy than drugs, or a machine.

Part of Robin's sweetness becomes the ecstasy he feels just seeing the world underneath, above and around the human world.  It becomes part of the beauty of the reading.  But this also makes his tragedy all the more troubling, as well as the essentially artificial way he comes to it. 

 As he did with The Overstory, Powers challenges the assumption that literary fiction can’t include non-human life as legitimate subjects. Other writers in other traditions do this routinely—Powers mentions sci-fi in interviews, but there’s also Native American fiction and other forms and traditions that often get overlooked if not sneered at by the literary establishment.  But Powers has too much literary cred for them to ignore.  That some feel compelled to deny literary legitimacy to this novel, which is less than a frontal assault on human supremacy, is telling.  There is a vital movement in law to assign rights to non-human life and the natural environment as a whole.  That may happen before those captive to a Manhattan mind get an inkling.

 Readers seem far ahead of them.  More important than being short-listed for the Booker, Bewilderment was selected for the Oprah book club.