Bewilderment: A Novel

"This novel is about a world-renowned scientist who has lost his wife and is struggling to understand his son, who is undergoing complex neurological issues. The father is working in space. He spends every day looking at the stars. He and his son are processing their grief together, and he’s bonding with his son by teaching him about stars. The father is a genius whose work means everything to him. He starts to think about ways he can apply his training to mending his son’s brain and trying to help his son to find joy in life again. The novel explores the concept that it’s fine to give things up if they’re no longer necessary to live a happy and wholesome life. At one point, the scientist unveils an eco-protest poster in DC, risking his career, because his son has become passionate about biodiversity. It’s reminiscent of the scene in The Sound of Music in which Captain Von Trapp realizes that being a colonel isn’t everything, and he starts to value spending time with his children. Bewilderment shows us that our lives are continually in flux, and we can choose the direction that we want to move in. We don’t have to be an award-winning scientist to experience joy. This man now finds joy in caring for his son. It’s a beautiful reflection on how society penalizes workers who choose a different path to success. Their image of success may differ from the one they would have chosen at the start of their careers."

"Powers is a writer for whom the ideas are very close to the surface—he makes them part of the plot. In this book he’s engaging with ideas about neuroscience and the brain, like: where does emotion reside? Where does reason reside? How do these relate to each other? And how does this fit into our ideas about what counts as ‘normal behaviour’. And he’s exploring all of that, in a landscape, a created world that is itself clearly shaped by the present realities of climate change . What is considered normal human behaviour is then understood against a global set of circumstances in which what is considered normal is being disrupted by the “abnormal” conditions of climate change. It’s a tension that I think he uses very fruitfully in the novel. We certainly responded to all of that, and then, against that, he manages to make a novel that is very much engaged with these ideas about what’s normal, what’s abnormal, what’s typical, and what’s not. It is also a moving portrait of single parenthood, a father trying to make a go of it with his son, who is not the easiest child to raise in certain ways. The father is trying to process his own grief against the backdrop of raising this child. I think that the combination of the emotional dynamics of the father-son relationship, as set against the more metaphysical dynamics—I’m not sure if that is quite the right word—of how to relate to a world that is seemingly itself at imminent risk of going off the rails is quite powerful."