Bewilderment

By Richard Powers

Oh this planet was a good one. And we, too, were good, as good as the burn of the sun and the rain’s sting and the smell of living soil, the all-over song of endless solutions signing the air of a changing world that by every calculation ought never to have been.

Richard Powers has a way of dealing with extremely tough issues, with both humor and hope. In Bewilderment, his most recent book, he takes on autism, the environment, planetary exploration, and love. He starts right off echoing the frustration I’m sure many parents experience when feeling desperate for solutions to a child’s anguished suffering. Powers portrays his protagonist using a sense of humor to cope when seeking a diagnoses for his son’s disparate cluster of symptoms. He says:

The suggestions were plentiful, including syndromes linked to the billion pounds of toxins sprayed on the country’s food supply each year. His second pediatrician was keen to put Robin “on the spectrum.” I wanted to tell the man that everyone alive is on the spectrum. That’s what a spectrum is. I wanted to tell the man that life itself is a spectrum disorder, where each of us vibrated at some unique frequency in the continuous rainbow. Then I wanted to punch him. I suppose there’s a name for that, too.

Oddly enough, there’s no name in the DSM for the compulsion to diagnose people.

That in just the first few pages. And Powers’ protagonist Theo Byrne goes on to say,

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.

My wife would have known how to talk to the doctors. Nobody’s perfect, she liked to say. But, man, we all fall short so beautifully.

Theo Byrne is a university-entrenched Astrobiologist, who has lost his wife and is trying to understand his son from his own framework of the world. I’m not a huge fan of science fiction, but Powers weaves sci-fi ideas into this book so deftly that I hardly noticed them as futuristic. As Byrne struggles to understand, and to get the world to understand, his son, Powers posits an entirely creative and expansive view of what it means to be human in the vast expanse of the universe. I especially love how he creates the interplay between the scientific universe, so rife with possibility in its mystery, and the landscape of the internal human universe, also potentially expansive with creativity. How he demonstrates the way we impose limits on our ability to access imaginal worlds and beckon them to serve us. How he paints the anguish of loving, the demands of letting go, and the possibilities of connection.

I’m fascinated with his ability to paint so many beautiful truths, so many unanswered questions, and so many sweet moments into just 278 pages. As we end the year, I can easily say this is my favorite book of 2021.