Review: Bewilderment by Richard Powers

"i return to the forest and my aura gets renewed" - bladee

Last summer, I read Richard Powers’ 2018 novel The Overstory and really liked it. It’s a sprawling novel about trees in America, with a real optimistic environmentalist core, following a variety of characters many but not all of whom converge on the California redwoods, the oldest and largest trees in America. Its opening chapter about the American chestnut is amazing and should probably go on the website for the American Chestnut Society. It won the Pulitzer despite being an environmentalist book, which I think is pretty impressive since environmentalist fiction is often operating on a pretty big handicap. However, between its very large cast, about a hundred pages of ecoterrorism in the slowest part of the book, and whiplash between different characters and plotlines, it’s not a book with broad potential cultural appeal. 

I was really curious to see how Powers followed up The Overstory. The Overstory was in my opinion the apex of environmentalist fiction, a very difficult genre to work in. Doing the same thing again would probably be a failure, but doing something different would be a betrayal of the calls to action in The Overstory. What he ended up with was Bewilderment, a slimmer (72,000 words vs. 200,000 words) and more accessible book with even more explicit environmentalist themes. 

While The Overstory had a large cast, Bewilderment focuses on two characters: father and narrator and astrobiologist professor Theo, and his young environmentalist son Robin. Theo’s wife and Robin’s mother also plays a large role, although she dies before the plot of the book. The book opens with Theo and Robin taking a trip to the Smoky Mountains to the same cabin that Theo and his wife stayed at during their honeymoon.

Richard Powers loves disability metaphors, maybe to the point where he’s takes it too far. The Overstory has two characters who are crippled and unable to move, and from their stationary positions they become much better observers of the natural world. In Bewilderment, the son Robin is a neurodivergent 9 year old who in his atypicalities is unable to comprehend why humans do so many cruel things to our planet. In the Smoky Mountains at the start of the book he’s fine, but when he returns to school and the rest of the real world he really struggles interacting with other kids. Specific diagnosis for Robin’s condition is never given and Powers very explicitly tries not to diagnose him, giving plenty of negative comments on the overmedication of kids today and how Robin’s condition may be a natural reaction to the way the world is today. 

Robin is truly the main character of Bewilderment, with his narrator father serving as a camera for his story. Robin’s idealism frequently collides with Theo’s practicality, and especially early in the novel that results in tears and Robin smashing things. Robin is in the Greta Thurnberg mode of pre-teen child extremely worried about society on the precipice of collapse. His dead mother was an environmental activist and he tries very hard to live up to her legacy. He draws pictures of endangered animals to sell at the farmer’s market, is always vegetarian and flirts with veganism, stages a protest at his state’s capitol building. But you often get the feeling that this kid is taking the collapse of the natural world around him a bit too hard. He often gets really upset at the state of things, punching walls, smashing toys, punching other kids. That changes in the middle of the book.

In the middle of the book, Richard Powers returns to his traditional techno-optimism. Robin’s principal at school threatens to have him medicated if he doesn’t stop hurting other kids, and Theo, reluctant to put his son on drugs, takes him to an experimental treatment with a colleague at the university. The treatment involves hooking Robin up to a machine that records his brain activity, and then training him to mimic the brain activity of other people who recorded their own activity before through a sort of visual interface. The initial treatment is very successful, but it becomes wildly successful when Robin is allowed to mimic the recording of his dead mother’s brain activity. Spoilers from here because this is where the book cover description ends. With her ecstatic worldview inside of him, Robin loses all of his violent impulses and becomes essentially an environmentalist Prince Myshkin. He has compassion and kindness for all humans, even when they’re doing things that hurt the world, and is comforted by a sense that even if humans fail the planet will go on. He is put in a video advertising the experimental treatment, and his strange and beautiful way of talking (Q: “Did you draw this on your own?” A: “Does anyone ever do anything on their own?”) makes him a “viral sensation”, which you have to forgive Powers for not really grasping since he was born in 1957. People routinely approach Robin on the street with somewhat cruel attitudes, not understanding him, but he completely forgives them to his father shortly after. He lives with wonder at the simple parts of the world, enjoying every last scrap of food at a hotel breakfast, chronicling all the birds in his neighborhood, no longer in fear at the human world’s impending end. 

Of course, not all good things can last, and this book was openly very heavily influenced by Flowers for Algernon, so maybe you can tell where things are going. Funding for Robin’s experimental treatment is cut as a political move, and he gradually loses his connection to his mother’s spirit. The ending is almost way too sad: Theo tries to take Robin out to the Smoky mountains on a trip, to the same cabin as the honeymoon and their trip at the start of the book but it’s too late. Robin’s mental state continues to worsen until he goes out in the middle of the night and drowns himself in the same cold river that his mother swam in with his father. Powers tries to salvage it into a somewhat optimistic ending by allowing Theo to try the experimental treatment and enter into the recording of his son’s mind, but it’s a very short moment at the end of the book and doesn’t really change anything.

The end result is a book that while more accessible than The Overstory is also much bleaker. The Eco-Prince Myshkin worldview that Robin briefly inhabits was what I felt was at the core of The Overstory but in Bewilderment it doesn’t feel like the core; you can briefly enter it but you are destined to lose it and descend back in mundanity and fear. And this book has a lot of mundane fear. The world of this book is a bass-boosted Trump’s America. There’s a man named “the President” who’s clearly Trump, as we get to read his tweets, one of which he sends directly to everyone’s phone as a national alert. He cuts down thousands of acres of trees to prevent wildfires, arrests journalists, cuts funding for all Asian grad students, and really does overturn the results of the election after claiming it fraudulent. And Powers remarks that in recent years as the executive branch gained power everything all the way down becomes the orders of The President. The cancellation of Robin’s treatment for political reasons essentially means that Trump killed Robin. The News is a constant puncturing force in this book, not in an un-self-aware way, the narrator notes how the news is taking him away from the natural world around him, but it definitely lands on the side of “you need to pay attention to current events to stay informed about the state of the world”. The title of the novel is dropped towards the end of the book during the election overturn, where Powers remarks “the only thing that saved us from civil war was bewilderment”, which, uh, I don’t know if I agree with.  While I don’t think there’s any contradiction between the themes of the two books, the more didactic and overtly political aspects make Bewilderment feel less grand and less eternal than The Overstory. 

Regardless of my criticisms, I thought this was a really successful book. It’s probably a better rounded novel than The Overstory is. In 2666 Roberto Bolano talks about two kinds of novels, one where the author is struggling in the mud with something they don’t fully understand, and the other where the author is doing a great and rehearsed act of art they are totally in control of, and The Overstory is definitely the former and Bewilderment is definitely the latter. The father-son absent mother dynamic is way more engaging than any of the grab bag of characters from The Overstory, and the book has a plot with real constant motion. I’m probably going to give it to my mom to read and I think she’ll like it. America really deserves an author who can do environmentalist fiction well, and I’m glad that Richard Powers is there doing it.  Environmentalist fiction can often be preachy and self-affirming but Richard Powers when he sets out to write it really does seem to focus on increasing your depth of knowledge and feeling about the problem. Lots of people say this, but The Overstory really did change the way I look at trees, seeing them not as just a part of the scenery but as a force so much stronger and less fragile than humanity. Where The Overstory was about trees, Bewilderment is about the planet; I didn’t talk about it much in this review but Theo as an astrobiologist has many conversations about planets that are often very good, especially when he invents planets for Robin. Those chapters are similar to Calvino’s Invisible Cities except they blend some science to explain why the imagined worlds are the way they are; they’re kind of buried in the middle of a book with a lot of plot but they’re quite pretty. Ultimately, I don’t know if Bewilderment will have as big of an impact on me as The Overstory, but it does strive towards that same sort increase of depth in its readers. I think you should read Bewilderment and I’m excited to see what Richard Powers writes next.