Richard Power’s ‘The Overstory’ is one of my favourite novels. Telling the story of a forest through many protagonists trying to save it made me look at nature and trees completely differently. I will never pass a great specimen without offering up a silent prayer of thanks and gratitude. I was hoping that ‘Bewilderment’ might do the same for astrobiology but although I learned a lot about the subject, there was, for this reader anyway, too much information. The central story of a bereaved father and his son is very touching but the central tenet, reaching the afterlife through AI, was not totally convincing. Nevertheless, if this sounds like a harsh review it should be noted that I remain in awe of Powers- his erudition, writing and bravery to tackle new subjects.
Thank you NG for the opportunity to read this advance copy.

There’s a definite case to be made for Richard Powers to be one of the best novelists living and working today. Certainly, he’s often one of the most interesting. His novels cover an impressively wide array of subjects — from ecology to music to art to science — and he usually has something significant to say about all of them. His 2018 novel The Overstory, for example, is a remarkable work of eco-fiction and wholly deserved to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction that year.

And yet, as I read the description for Bewilderment, I have to admit to feeling a little wary — largely because it sounded a little close to Operation Wandering Soul, Powers’s rather mawkish and by his own admission least successful novel. But I needn’t have worried. It’s not as sentimental as Soul (although it teeters pretty close to it at times) and is as a whole a much better book.

That said, it does at times feel rather more scrappy than Powers’s best work. There’s almost a ‘greatest hits’ vibe to it at times, with significant similarities to not only Soul but the philosophical musings on neuroscience in The Echo-Maker and Galatea 2.2 and the eco-concerns of Overstory. This, in itself, is no bad thing and every writer of course has themes that they return to over and over. And yet, it seems rather overt here. The neuroscience researcher Currier, for example, seems at time rather too similar to his AI-researching counterpart Lentz in Galatea 2.2.

Another slight misgiving is that it feels a little frantic in its desire for currency. It’s clearly highly influenced by the activism of Greta Thunberg (who has a clear fictional analogue in the novel), not to mention an unnamed but decidedly Trump-like present who Powers, depressingly, gives a second term. But then maybe there is a need for urgency here — not only with an ongoing and dramatically worsening climate crisis but a political climate (and just in the US but also here in the UK) of growing anti-scientism and post-truth machination. It just feels that, unlike Galatea and Overstory, these elements have been written with more passion than care and will ultimately age the novel.

The novel centres around widowed astrophysicist Theo Byrne and his attempts to get his troubled son Robbie through the grieving process. (It’s far from being just about this, of course, but this is the surface layer from which Powers delves deeply into science, climate, politics and so on.) It’s established early on that Robbie is autistic and Powers’s representation of the condition did tend to worry me slightly. It’s possible that this is from a personal over-reaction on my part (having been recently diagnosed with ASD myself) but it just seemed that Powers leaned just a bit too closely into the trope as those with autism being otherworldly and unknowably alien savants. It’s something that I feel can be rather counterproductive and it’s made even more overt here with Theo’s flights of imagination to other planets — one of the key ways he continues to relate to Robbie.

However, with these things said, this is still a novel absolutely stuffed with great ideas, expressed with considerable skill and style. I’ve found, particularly with the move to using an ebook reader, that one superficial metric for judging a book’s merit is the number of bookmarks you put in it and I bookmarked a lot in Bewilderment. And it wasn’t just the ruminations on art, politics and science. Powers adds a rather nice layer of SF speculation to the novel, with direct allusions to a number of science-fiction writers, most notably Asimov, Daniel Keyes and Olaf Stapledon.

But it’s not just a novel of ideas. If Powers can sometimes be a little too mawkish for his own good, he can, with a little discipline, very effectively tug at the heartstrings too. I was engaged enough in the father/son relationship at the heart of the book to definitely want to keep reading, despite a growing fear that I was going to receive an emotional punch to the face, much in the style of the ending of Galatea 2.2. It’s with decidedly mixed feelings that I can say I wasn’t disappointed.

Bewilderment is far from being Powers’s best work but it’s also far from being his worst either. It’s an extremely well-written, timely and characteristically smart discussion of a number of topics that really do need to be discussed and it does so in a way that is not only intellectually engaging but emotionally too.

Perhaps Richard Powers' most readable novel to date, Bewilderment draws broadly convincing parallels between the unknowability of humans and the unmappable reaches of the cosmos. It's a quick and involving read, most convincing when dealing with space and technology, marginally less so when focusing on parenthood. But a smart and engaging novel overall, and plenty of food for thought.

Thanks to NetGalley and William Heinemann for an advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I thought it would be hard to follow The Overstory (which I LOVED) but I see that whereas The Overstory was an eco novel that branched out into the expanse, Bewilderment focuses in on the individual looking upwards at that canopy.
I think Powers is an incredible writer and I was thrilled to get this eproof. I read it over the weekend and it flew by. It was quite intense at times with just the two main characters but Powers so it's a good job Powers is so skilled at writing them!
The novel felt timely and as if it could have been written quite quickly compared to The Overstory which was so layered.
I also loved his prose and how he conjures themes of multiplicities or parallel existences out of the everyday.
I still feel down due to the ending :( and would love to know more about why he chose that. I felt that there could have been a bit more hope, or even something that pushed the sci fi themes to the next level.

Hard to admit when you're working in the bizz of books for 10+ years and haven't read a single word by Richard Powers up to now.

So glad I finally did. This book tells a story which seems simple on the surface but it contains everything: life and death. Young and old. Nature and politics. Yesterday, today and tomorrow. What goes on in your head and every single galaxy out there.

Five stars. Easily!

I was very excited to read Richard Powers' latest book having loved his previous novel, 'The Overstory'. 'Bewilderment' shares many of the same concerns as 'The Overstory' - in particular the rapid destruction of our planet - but approaches these in a new and original way, and in a much more compact form.

'Bewilderment' is set in what appears to be the very near future, and is narrated by Theo, an astrobiologist engaged in a search for other Earth-like planets that might support life. Theo's wife Alyssa, an animal-rights campaigner, has died, leaving him to bring up their nine-year-old neurodivergent son, Robin alone. Robin shares his late mother's concern for the destruction of the natural world. At the start of the novel, Theo is resisting calls from Robin's school principal to give him psychoactive drugs; instead, Robin ends up receiving an innovative form of neural feedback treatment using brain patterns from Alyssa, with unforeseen consequences.

This is such an impressive novel, in so many ways. First and foremost, it is a beautiful story of a father-son relationship. Theo always wants the best for Robin but also feels inadequate as a parent compared to his memory of Alyssa, and this absence is at the very heart of the novel. Theo and Robin's conversations are sweet and often very entertaining but also profound. The tenderness of this relationship contrasts with so much of the darkness surrounding it. Robin becomes an increasingly prophetic figure, offering a radical, almost messianic zeal in response to the apathy and wanton destruction of the planet he sees around him. In his innocence, candour and fervour, he resembles Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's Little Prince, and increasingly, rather than wondering why Robin isn't more like us, the novel compels us to ask why we aren't more like Robin.

The novel is also a great piece of science writing - Powers manages to write about ecology, neurology and space exploration entirely convincingly, including very plausible descriptions of developments in these fields that haven't actually happened yet, which allows him to pose some weighty and thought-provoking ethical questions. As well as this, there is a real sense of urgency throughout the novel, which occupies somewhere between the present and the apocalyptic - the world Powers describes still feels recognisable, but is significantly closer to environmental and political collapse, a world in which, "against shamelessness, outrage was impotent.". In this way, Powers suggests that apocalypse may not be as far away as we like to imagine, and the novel burns with righteous anger at the greed and cynicism which is bringing us to this stage.

This will surely be one of the strongest contenders for this year's Booker Prize, and should be recognised as a classic work of ecofiction.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me an ARC to review.

Somewhere between 3 - 3.5

Richard Powers' novel The Overstory (shortlisted for the 2018 Booker prize and winner of the 2019 Pulitzer) seemed to divide readers, and I can see this follow up novel doing the same (although it's already longlisted for the 2021 Booker so clearly Powers is doing something right!).

Bewilderment is ambitious in scope, tackling many themes and covering a lot of ground in its brief 200 and something pages. It's hard to sum up the plot in brief, but I suppose I would say it's a novel about individuals with a reverence and love for nature and science trying to fit into a world which they know is already doomed. It's also the story of a widower trying to parent a child who is something of a misfit the only way he knows how - by helping him escape it through looking to space.

My favourite part of the novel was the writing which was understated but affecting. I found the earlier parts to be more convincing than the ending which didn't work for me. Still, if the plot sounds interesting to you I'd recommend giving this a go - I'm curious to check out more of Powers writing.

Although this is basically a story of a father desperately wanting to protect his autistic son Robin from psychoactive drugs at the age of 9 to the harsh realities of life, but it is so much more. Robin follows in his mother's footsteps wanting to save the natural world from inevitable destruction. Theo his dad is an Astro biologist trying to discover life on other planets and together they escape to galaxies far away, and the life that might be on them. The story encapsulates science funding, modern politics, autism, psychology, experimental medicine and environmental issues, but in a unique way. There was a little too much astrobiology for me but it didn't detract from the story.

"They share a lot, astronomy and childhood. Both are voyages across huge distances. Both search for facts beyond their grasp. Both theorize wildly and let possibilities multiply without limits. Both are humbled every few weeks. Both operate out of ignorance. Both are mystified by time. Both are forever starting out."

Longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize and a book I suspect has a strong chance of winning, one I'd recommend to other readers, but just wasn't for me. It was certainly a quick read, but otherwise shared the faults of the author's previously Booker nominated The Overstory without the depth of story that distinguished that novel.

The reader's reaction may well depend on their like for the narrator's character and his son Robin. I, unfortunately, found the narrator's tone rather cloying - the hagiographic treatment of his apparently universally admired, now deceased, wife ("my wife was admirable the way I was tall"), the way even Robin is apparently universally loved (the repeated 'and everyone on/at the bus/plane/lab laughed' anecdotes), and struggled with the extensive exposition thinly disguised as Sophie's World style narration, something of a Powers trademark. Narrator to 9-year old son:

"Come on, buster. We should try it. He’s doing wild things. The Currier Lab was exploring something called Decoded Neurofeedback. It resembled old-fashioned biofeedback, but with neural imaging for real-time, AI-mediated feedback. A first group of subjects— the “targets”— entered emotional states in response to external prompts, while researchers scanned relevant regions of their brains using fMRI. The researchers then scanned the same brain regions of a second group of subjects— the “trainees”— in real time. AI monitored the neural activity and sent auditory and visual cues to steer the trainees toward the targets’ prerecorded neural states. In this way, the trainees learned to approximate the patterns of excitation in the targets’ brains, and, remarkably, began to report having similar emotions. The technique dated back to 2011, and it claimed some impressive early results."

As for Robin, as an inveterate non-re-reader, I knew he and I wouldn't click when I read early on:

"His pronouncements were off-the-wall mysteries to everyone except me. He could quote whole scenes from movies, even after a single viewing. He rehearsed memories endlessly, and every repetition of the details made him happier. When he finished a book he liked, he’d start it again immediately, from page one."

The rather unnecessary light fictionalisation, again from The Overstory as well, bugged me - why can't a book set in the present day have Greta Thunberg give a TED talk, raising the hackles of the Q-Anon crowd, whereas the book would have 'Inga Alder' give a 'COD' talk, raising the hackles of the 'Theory X' crowd.

"Apparently God had made life on one planet only, and only one country of that planet’s dominant species needed to manage it."

Oddly this is the narrator criticising the Trump figure (who of course isn't called Trump) and his followers, but he seems to only disagree with the first half of the statement, obsessed as he is with extra-planetary life, his interest in the impact of the nationalistic administration on the other peoples of the world limited to whether he himself might lose some students and lab assistants ("continuing to flail against the Asian grad student visa crisis").

Overall - read Gumble Yard's review for a more positive take https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4084720048 but only 3 stars for me.

Thanks to the publisher via Netgalley for the ARC

An exceptional look at grief, astrobiology, environmentalism and the father-son relationship. All typical themes but addressed with so much tenderness, wit and heart. A punch-in-the-gut ending left me in tears.

What’s bigger, outer space or inner?

A wonderful, wonderful, wonderful book. I feel like I should stop there and just tell you all to read it!

Bewilderment is about a number of different issues, science, politics, research, our planet, other planets, bereavement but at its heart it is a story about a man's intense love for his son and the hope of a better life for his son.

The book is heavy on science and astrobiology which I know has put a lot of people off whilst others have found the level of detail unnecessary. I agree to an extent however I feel the science is integral to the story, the exploration of the world beyond us but also an exploration of a world which clearly does not understand Robin.

Theo's constant doubts about his own abilities as a parent are prevalent throughout the novel and I don't think there are any parents out there who could not resonate with this aspect of his character.

It is a relatively short novel (less than 300 pages) which I got through fairly quickly (despite, on occasion, having to read the scientific parts more than once).

It has been longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize which is certainly not a surprise. I would encourage everyone who is fascinated by the planet and parenting to read it!

Thanks to Random House UK, Cornerstone and Netgalley for an ARC in exchange for a honest review

This is a moving and deeply affecting story of love, loss and how a child who is not the same as other children goes about finding his place in the world. It also felt like a scientific treatise at times, which was less convincing for the general reader. I had never heard of Astrobiology, and perhaps know more now than I will ever need, but the very human side of this book is what made it special for me. I fell in love with young Robin - such an appealing boy and I was willing him to find his place in society. Overall, a wonderful book, but the overkill of science keeps it below the maximum five stars.

(Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for an advanced copy of this book)

This was my first Richard powers read and I requested it because I’ve heard good things about his previous novels.

I appreciated the environmental issues that were raised in this book. Although no time era was specified it felt very relevant.

I know astrobiology was a key part of the novel but I found it a bit much at times and wanted to skip over the details as I didn’t think they added to the story on the whole.

I thought the ending was sudden and short although I did feel it coming just before

This is at heart a good story by an award winning author, but for me the narrative is overwhelmed by the science, of which I understood the gist but not the detail. I do not have the knowledge to know if it is science fiction or not - Powers has written books in this genre. The writing style is over-descriptive; one sentence said "I flushed at the back of my legs", which I found a bit bizarre. Robin's father, whilst mourning the death of his exceptional wife, tries to do his best for his son who, being on the autistic spectrum, finds life very difficult to cope with. There are green earth issues and political issues, no names mentioned but it sounds very much like the Trump era. Robin's progress in a brain experiment is reminiscent of Flowers for Algernon, which is referenced in the book. I found it all a bit bewildering.

My first Richard Powers novel and it certainly won’t be the last. I thought it beautifully structured and the right mix of science and story. Astrobiologist Theo is left to bring up his young son Robin alone, his vibrant and charismatic wife having died just before the novel begins. He struggles to know how best to treat Robin - an overwhelmingly sensitive soul who is not coping well at school, wants only to explore the natural world and is desperate to hold onto his few and fading memories of his mother. Homeschooling and enrolment in an experimental neurological study might hold the solution for his difficulties and Robin embraces both eagerly.

The science and astroscience elements to the novel are pitched at just the right level for me to be pleased that I might have grasped a little of it. It certainly makes for riveting reading, along with aspects of climate change, animal rights, Trumpesque cuts to research budgets and hints of social unrest.

I defy anyone to be unmoved by this story of a father and son’s grief and their love for each other and the world around them - their days hiking and birdwatching in the wild and nights camping under the stars are my favourite parts of the book. Just as importantly, we are invited to witness a child’s incomprehension of what humans are doing to ourselves, other ‘sentient beings’ and our planet. Strong stuff and highly recommended.

Powers' last book, 'The Overstory' is a favourite of mine. 'Bewilderment' doesn't share its sweeping grandeur, but I sense intentionality in the contrast between these two books, in the way this one focuses simply on a boy and his father.

It is, of course, beautifully written. Powers is a nature writer as well as a novelist. His love of the wilderness and wildlife of his home country is palpable. His pain is easy to share in. This is a novel about empathy, more than anything else.

I was charmed by the story itself, and I raced through while trying to slow down enough to savour it. My heart broke a little. And in its ending, I could not tell the difference between hope and despair.

(With thanks to Random House and NetGalley for this ebook in exchange for an honest review)

Bewilderment by Richard Powers is an involving novel about science and nature, fatherhood and parenting, bereavement and loss. It reminded me a little bit of another book I enjoyed which was Lost and Wanted by Nell Freudenberger.

Such a rich, multilayered and passionate book that explores astrobiology, the funding of scientific research, man's predations of the planet, US politics around all these issues - but the heart of the story lies in a tender tale of paternal love for a nine year old son deemed different by his school and medical professionals who want to pathologise him and put him on drugs to control his behaviour. I'm not usually one to go all mushy over kids in books but young Robin just stole my heart with his intelligence and his care and his original outlook, and I loved this. Powers wears his learning lightly but some of the science made my head spin - all the same, the very human story that binds this complex book together won me over completely.

The Overstory was a phenomenal book that still has me thinking some years later; now Bewilderment! How to describe this book is not straightforward. This is a multi layered story weaving together so many important issues.Theo is an astrobiologist exploring the solar system for signs of life and searching for meaning whilst caring for his son Robin. Robin struggles to integrate in school and feels passionately about the demise of so many living creatures across the planet and he too is searching for meaning .He views and artistically captures the fragility of wildlife and it’s crucial role in planetary survival, Offered the chance to help Robin with an experiment involving the brainwaves of his dead mother( a form of AI) the young boy begins to change and the story really develops. This is a tale of love and life and how as a species we are losing site of what is most important around us- the natural world all around us. The power and control of the internet and smart phone is an element of the story and our denial of the global environmental changes but there is a bigger message in my interpretation and that is about the “powers that be “ wanting to control and manipulate , the conflict between technology and the impact on nature, and the victimisation upon those who dare to speak out or take an alternative route . The scene with Theo and Robin being confronted by two policemen was simple in its form but magnified a global issue about oppression . But ultimately this is also a tale about a father’s love for his son and how to support him ( often through tough choices ) navigating a world that doesn’t make sense and within a “ system” that is afraid to understand.This is a book you need to talk about with others to open those , “what if …” and “why don’t we ..?” questions . I’ll return to this book as like it’s predecessor it has certainly impacted on my thinking and desire to be even more proactive in my environmental considerations.

I once met Richard Powers at a book reading/signing for The Overstory in London. We had a few minutes to talk and we talked about our mutual love for nature - him writing about it and me photographing it. He doesn’t sign his books but rather writes a dedication on a piece of paper that you can keep with the book and I left our encounter with one of these bearing the words “From one nature lover to another”.

This isn’t name dropping, by the way. It’s more by way of introduction to the fact that, as in The Overstory, nature plays a key role in Bewilderment. In fact, reading those two books can’t help give you the impression that Richard Powers has rather lost faith in humanity. But I should qualify that observation by narrowing it down to humanity’s leaders. When it comes to ordinary people, our narrator at one point says, ”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.”

Our narrator is Theo Byrne, an astrobiologist searching for life on other planets. You’ll have guessed from the quote above that he is no longer with his wife and this is because she died not long before the book starts leaving him to raise their son, Robin, on his own. And Robin is an unusual child: he lives his life on a hairs-width border between creative calm and destructive anger. Theo describes Robin’s condition like this:

”I never believed in the diagnoses the doctors settled on my son. When a condition gets three different names over as many decades, when it requires two subcategories to account for completely contradictory symptoms, when it goes from nonexistent to the country’s most commonly diagnosed childhood disorder in the course of one generation, when two different physicians want to prescribe three different medications, there’s something wrong.”

You will note that this paragraph moves very quickly from Robin’s condition to a criticism of the country. Bewilderment is set very slightly in our future but with several things pushed forward towards some kind of dystopia. The focus is purely the USA, but this is a USA where we have ”the White House’s new decree requiring everyone in the country to carry proof of citizenship or visas”, a USA with a president who shifts election dates until he is confident he can manipulate the system enough to win a second term (this president is not named but is renowned for his tweets - enough said). It’s not just politics that is slightly different - climate change and associated freak weather events, transfer of viruses from the food chain into humans: the natural order of things is breaking down rapidly.

When Robin’s anger erupts at school one day, it sets in motion a chain of events that lead to Robin undergoing some experimental treatment in an attempt to avoid state intervention and psychoactive drugs. Here, an early mention of the classic sci-fi short story “Flowers for Algernon” really comes into play because Bewilderment makes direct reference to that story and then follows the same basic plot. This, I assume, is a very deliberate choice by Powers: anyone who knows the original short story will have a good idea of the overall story arc. I'd recommend reading that short story if you don't know it.

The novel explores external and internal versions of several ideas. For example, Theo analyses spectroscopic signals from other planets building models which will predict the atmosphere, and therefore chance of life. He trains these models on known planets including Earth with the data deliberately degraded to model seeing Earth from a huge distance. Compare this with Robin’s treatment which involves training his brain to develop emotional control by matching it to signals recorded from other people’s brains. Then the novel also makes the point about the vastness of space and we read ”Which do you think is bigger? Outer space…? He touched his fingers to my skull. Or inner?”. At one point we read:

"They share a lot, astronomy and childhood. Both are voyages across huge distances. Both search for facts beyond their grasp. Both theorize wildly and let possibilities multiply without limits. Both are humbled every few weeks. Both operate out of ignorance. Both are mystified by time. Both are forever starting out."

If, like me, you have read Powers other novels, there are references to or reminders of many of these throughout the book. Perhaps the two most obvious are the way Bewilderment continues the themes of The Overstory, and the way Robin’s response to his treatment (and his experience at the hands of the world’s media) echoes Thassadit Amzwar from Generosity. I also found myself thinking about The Goldbug Variations quite a bit. My attention was grabbed by the mention of sandhill cranes that feature in The Echo Maker. I also though quite a bit about a comparison with Gain where a key idea was how well meaning, but necessarily ignorant, business decisions taken over the course of many years can gradually evolve into creation of a toxic environment.

This is by no means a long book (less than 300 pages), but I have barely scratched the surface and I’ve missed out many things that are key to any proper description. My only advice, really, is that you read the book for yourself.