Bewilderment

Genre

Science Fiction & Speculative Fiction

Publisher

W. W. Norton & Company

Publication year

2021

ISBN

9780393881141

An astrobiologist raising his troubled nine-year-old son after his wife's death enrolls the boy in an experimental neurofeedback treatment, even as ecological collapse and political turmoil press in. Father and son find fragile solace in imagining life on other planets. Richard Powers's novel...

Theo Byrne studies the possibility of life on distant planets; his grief-struck nine-year-old son, Robin, is preoccupied with the dying life on this one. After the death of Theo's wife, an environmental activist, the boy's escalating distress leads them to an experimental neurofeedback therapy that trains Robin on recordings of his late mother's brain - a quietly speculative premise Richard Powers uses to devastating emotional effect. Following his Pulitzer-winning The Overstory, Bewilderment is a smaller, more intimate book, but no less impassioned about ecological catastrophe and the wonder of the living world. Father and son's bedtime voyages to imagined exoplanets become the novel's tender heart and its widening lens on cosmic solitude. Powers writes with lyrical intensity, and if the political backdrop is drawn in broad strokes, the central relationship is rendered with piercing love. For readers who want speculative-tinged literary fiction that fuses science, grief and environmental urgency, it is a heartbreaking, luminous novel - one of the most affecting of its year.