Bewilderment

A Novel

Hardcover, 304 pages

Published Sept. 21, 2021 by W. W. Norton & Company.

ISBN:
978-0-393-88114-1
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4 stars (23 reviews)

The astrobiologist Theo Byrne searches for life throughout the cosmos while single-handedly raising his unusual nine-year-old, Robin, following the death of his wife. Robin is a warm, kind boy who spends hours painting elaborate pictures of endangered animals. He’s also about to be expelled from third grade for smashing his friend in the face. As his son grows more troubled, Theo hopes to keep him off psychoactive drugs. He learns of an experimental neurofeedback treatment to bolster Robin’s emotional control, one that involves training the boy on the recorded patterns of his mother’s brain…

With its soaring descriptions of the natural world, its tantalizing vision of life beyond, and its account of a father and son’s ferocious love, Bewilderment marks Richard Powers’s most intimate and moving novel. At its heart lies the question: How can we tell our children the truth about this beautiful, imperiled planet?

7 editions

Touching but needed an autistic editor

3 stars

Gorgeously written and heartfelt, up until the point of a major flaw, which is the inability to reconcile autism biases and ableist tropes.

The son is pretty aware that the dad also has autism but the dad repeatedly denies his son’s condition and doesn’t get him any autistic community support — you can tell the dad is projecting his autistic tendencies on his son, as the dad is often passive and unfeeling in his grief yet accuses his emotionally explosive and very feeling son of doing this

This could’ve been a great autistic parent coming to realize they’re autistic and helping their kid separate natural trauma from grief for climate change and personal loss from autistic issues, but it fell through (please hire autistic editors like me! We can help)

Overwhelming this book left off vibing that autistic people (kids especially) won’t be able to cope with or survive climate …

Review of 'Hämmästys' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

Olihan tämä ihana. Kamala, surullinen ja kaunis. Paikoin ehkä hiukan naivi, ja isän rakkauden kaikkivoipuus paikoin jo ärsytti, etenkin siltä osin että lapsen mieli (joka olikin ”aikamoinen”) voisi/saisi/koskaan pitäisi olla ja missä määrin vanhempien muokattavissa. Mutta tarinat maailmankaikkeudesta ja elonkirjosta olivat päätähuumavia! Väkisinkin tuli opittua myös uusi termejä.

Review of 'Bewilderment' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

It explores everything in one book — space, existentialism, disability, environmentalism, and politics. It's the first time that my fixation on the Fermi paradox became useful to me, as the book referenced it a few times in its questioning of humanity's loneliness. This was a brilliant read, with references to past works and current events. I could not put down the first half of the book. However, exaggerations on the incompetence of the government (with ~everyone~ in authority seemingly against science, and the president having full-control on all three branches of the gov) chipped away at realism rather than contributed to it. The broadness of the book's themes is its strength as well as its weakness, as the development of its political aspect paled in comparison to the exploration of Robin's differences through his relationships with people.

Review of 'Bewilderment' on 'Goodreads'

1 star

Edit (26 May 2022): I just learned that neurofeedback therapy is not only real, but FDA-approved. Here I was, naively thinking that this book was near-future science fiction. But no, it is pretty much now.

‘Every one of us is an experiment, and we don’t even know what the experiment is testing.’



This was my first experience reading Richard Powers, and it was unfortunately somewhat underwhelming. The epigraph had a line from Lucretius which got me very excited, because who doesn’t love De rerum natura? But… this book is nowhere near that level; in fact, go read Lucretius instead, you’ll be better off for it. Sure, there are some clever turns of phrase, but the prose is filled with them to the point that they seem mundane, not revelatory. The characters are somewhat stocky; once you meet them, it’s not hard to understand their personalities, and they don’t experience …

Review of 'Bewilderment' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

 [b:Bewilderment|56404444|Bewilderment|Richard Powers|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1632843882l/56404444.SY75.jpg|87106649] is [a:Richard Powers|11783|Richard Powers|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1263155076p2/11783.jpg]'s thirteenth novel and coming after his 2018 [b:The Overstory|40180098|The Overstory|Richard Powers|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1562786502l/40180098.SY75.jpg|57662223], which won a Pulitzer Prize, and is the only other of his novels I've read, I approached it with that uh-oh, he's-got-a-high-bar mentality. But they're completely different kinds of books, so I lost that view quickly.
 I loved everything about Bewilderment. The prose borders on poetry, and parts border on [a:Kurt Vonnegut Jr.|2778055|Kurt Vonnegut Jr.|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1433582280p2/2778055.jpg] territory, which is a compliment. (Remember that English teacher you had in ninth grade who pooh-poohed Vonnegut? That teacher was wrong.)
Bewilderment is, technically, science fiction, which is a better way to say science fiction, but it's so grounded in things that are happening now that its view of life in the very near future (I'd guess around seven years) is accurate. Many books, TV shows and movies that try to do things …

Review of 'Bewilderment' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

Nope. Nope. Nope. Just, uh uh, no way. No can do.

The only reason I am giving this 2 stars and not 1 is because the book, in spite of itself, did give the reader some things to ponder. About the natural world and humans place in it. About the way we alter it even as we revere it. About who we are, nature vs nurture, the way we alter our "real" selves through drugs, therapy, etc... Does it make us "better" even though we are not truly "ourselves" any longer? Stuff like that is worth examining.

But the rest was schlock. Pure cornball. And the ending. Just nope, nope, nope.

Read it if you are a corny, sentimental type. I, myself have had a life-long adversion to corny and the obvious. I am a life-long contrarian and refuse to be lead. Oh you might get me to follow along …

crushing

4 stars

An intimate parental dive into the wonder of the natural world and urge to activism in the face of our wide-eyed trance walk to species destruction. This felt narrower and less rounded than The Overstory, which may be fitting to cataclysm, and the traumas and some obvious referents may irk (mostly they didn't interfere here). The middle half's beauty justified it all for me.

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