On "Bewilderment"

Matthew Wong, See you on the Other Side (detail), 2019.

1. “Why are there so many books titled with abstract nouns?” my friend asked me, when I told him I was reading Richard Powers’ Bewilderment. It’s a good question—there’s Atonement, Persuasion, Disgrace, even It. Why not The Life and Times of Briony Tallis? Why not Pennywise and his Murderous Mania?

I think one answer is that the lengthier a title is, the more specific and more confining it feels. I never much liked the title The Sun Does Shine for Anthony Ray Hinton’s memoir about his time on death row, for example. It forcibly imposes optimism upon a narrative that is, in reality, sometimes hopeful, sometimes discouraging, sometimes deeply harrowing. The breadth of a single word—‘atonement,’ which packages dozens of connotations into three syllables; ‘persuasion,’ which captures each of the forceful, delicate ways we exert influence on others—is sometimes more inclusive of different interpretations.¹

Bewilderment is one of these profoundly multivalent novels. It’s told by an astrobiologist, named Theo, raising his nine-year-old son, named Robin, in a dystopian American future. The story is about environmental loss and the erosion of American democracy. It’s peppered with intricate, aching descriptions of life on fictional planets—a planet whose orbit is just barely out of tilt, causing life to be destroyed and regrow every few million years; a planet where life is frozen under ice. Perhaps more than anything, it's about parenthood—about what it means to protect a child growing up in a gratingly unempathetic world; how to do so without patronising them and without lying to them.

The book is served well by its title, I think. In each thread, Powers manages to capture the wide-eyed, painful confusion we feel when things go wrong. There's the bewilderment of watching fragile things be carelessly destroyed, and there's the bewilderment of watching someone you care about transform. “I’d missed something obvious,” Theo narrates, “in over thirty years of reading and two thousand science fiction books: there was no place stranger than here.”

2. There are moments when Bewilderment feels a little artificially political.

Robin, for example, is described at various points by reviewers as “behaviourally challenged,” “volatile,” “acutely sensitive,” and “intense.” (Which are all true but also sound vaguely like a primary school teacher's attempt to write a report card for a truly menacing first-grader without getting fired.) He’s mostly angry about how people treat the environment. He hits his head against a wall when cows are put in such close proximity that they develop brain-eating diseases and degenerate. He walks into a glacial river to take down stone cairns, because their construction dislodges micro ecosystems beneath them.

These fits of anger sometimes read as contrived. To be sure, people’s anxiety, frustration, confusion over climate change is real. Still, I don’t know how many nine-year-olds there are whose severe anger management issues are triggered almost exclusively by seeing environmental crises in the news—who have few interests or friends or pet peeves that are unrelated to climate change. Maybe there are a few. Maybe this is what a lot of neurodivergence is like. To me, Robin occasionally feels a little too neatly carved to fit the degrowth-return-to-earth-anticapitalism mold of Powers’ recent fiction. In these moments, the novel’s politics pick away at its sense of integrity and realism.

And if we treat Bewilderment as a piece of political media, it seems remarkably unempathetic to other points of view. The book is probably set in a second Trump administration, with constant tweeting and deportations and defunding of academia. We rely on Theo for fearful descriptions of this securitised state. There are no characters who seem remotely supportive of the government, people who could explain how we got there. 

The job of a novel is not to represent all perspectives equally. I’m not suggesting that Richard Powers writes his next novel about a lumberjack who relies upon deforestation for a living. I do think it might feel more psychologically realistic (and more politically useful too) to write characters who see the world in more shades of grey. 

The word ‘bewilderment’ itself implies not just a political disagreement, but an inability to understand where the other side comes from. I don’t think that most environmental destruction is bewildering, per se. I understand a lot of it, actually: people are profit-driven, or are trying to make a living, and we don't see whales or old-growth forests very often, so the problems sort of recede comfortably to the back of our minds. I feel frustrated about the lack of change, and sad about the loss of wonderful things, but I don’t think this loss is beyond understanding. Sometimes Bewilderment makes the political gulf wider than it needs to be.

3. “‘What’s the ocean like?’

What was the ocean like? I couldn’t tell him. The sea was too big, and my bucket was so small.”

I get a particular feeling when I learn something unexpected about someone I’ve known for a long time. My mother flew small planes, as it turns out. A friend from boarding school is the child of a prominent airline executive. A friend from high school, who never struck me as particularly anxious, wakes her older sister up every day at six in the morning to take the dog out because she’s too scared to go outside alone when it’s quiet. Small and large things.

The feeling is a kind of gentle bewilderment—surprise, and a brief scraping of previous interactions to search for unappreciated evidence. Mostly, these moments make me think about what a narrow aperture we have into other people’s lives. We don’t know most of what other people are thinking. More fundamentally, we can’t feel the precise things that other people feel—we can only hear words and read faces, and imagine what these signals might translate to. What if another person’s sadness or anger feels completely different than mine?

Sometimes these imprecisions matter. There’s a very quotable John Steinbeck quote from The Winter of Our Discontent: “I wonder how many people I’ve looked at all my life and never seen.” I occasionally mull over this when I walk down streets, looking at passersby, or when I return from a long day with a friend—what am I not seeing?

I think this is why so much of speculative fiction focuses on people inhabiting the lives of others, in one way or another. Freaky Friday, where a mother and a daughter switch places for a day, comes to mind. Or John Wyndham’s protagonists in The Chrysalids, who share thoughts and feelings without speech. Or the ‘empathy boxes’ in Philip K. Dick Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? that, when touched, allow people to vicariously experience another person's suffering. We are imagining what it would be like to fill this gulf in experience. 

In Bewilderment, Robin participates in a fictional neuroscience study. He sits in a scanning machine and is made to imitate the brain signals of people who feel happier and calmer than him. Eventually, he reproduces his late mother's brain signals too, and becomes progressively more like her. I think Powers depicts something powerful here—a child who feels displaced among others, his longing to fully understand other people, a sense that normal relationships rarely allow for this complete form of empathy. And what it might look like if they did. 

4. Powers’ 2018 novel The Overstory asks a lot of questions about how we can live amidst a destructive, changing environment. Bewilderment is a courageous attempt to answer these difficult questions, perhaps a little more dogmatically than I would’ve liked. What resonated with me the most, in the end, were the things that least resemble my experience of Earth—a futuristic kind of parenthood; Powers’ beautiful faraway planets that now infiltrate my dreams; his speculations on how empathy can be technologically invented and diffused. Sometimes it’s nice when literature isn’t just a mirror but a window to someplace else.

1. The other and probably better reason is that the one-word versions sound a little more sophisticated. I often think that Twain must have had to fight a real uphill battle with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Mostly for political reasons, but also, and less importantly, because that's a really odd title for a book. It conjures (at least in my mind) images of large anthropomorphised berries dancing on a boat down the Mississippi River, and I have to remind myself that this is a Serious Novel About Racism. Maybe he should have named it Absconsion or something like that and then we would have ourselves a real classic of the 19th century. But I digress.