Bewilderment (2021) by Richard Powers

Book Review

Bewilderment (2021)

by Richard Powers

   Is Richard Powers a potential Nobel Prize winner?   It might have seemed highly unlikely before The Overstory won the Pulitzer Prize in 2018.   Before that he had only some longlist/shortlist nominations and a single National Book Award for The Echo Maker.   Now he's got the National Book Award, The Pulitzer and a legitimate shot at the Booker Prize this year after Bewilderment made the shortlist.   I was surprised by the shortlist pick, if only because nominating an American writer with a large popular audience for the longlist as a way to drum up interest in the lesser known writers seems like a very Booker thing to do.

   I think if Powers actually wins a Booker he'd have to be considered as a Nobel Prize contender.   Surely, if a novelist is picked because of the importance of novels and their relationship with the hard sciences, Powers would be one of a select few.  Historically, the Nobel seems to favor "political" or "socially conscious" writers over those concerned with science, but perhaps the times are changing. I mean really, after handing the Literature award to Bob Dylan, it really feels like anything is possible.

   The elevator pitch for Bewilderment is "Richard Powers does Flowers for Algernon."  Flowers for Algernon is the famous and oft read short story turned novel about Charlie, a "retarded" janitor who receives life changing intelligence boosting surgery.   In Powers' take, the narrator is the single father of a "neurodivergent" pre-teen boy who suffers from non-specified differences that combine aspects of ADHD with Austism/Aspergers syndrome.  Powers is scrupulously aware of avoiding labels, probably because he understands how distracting the labelling process can be in the course of attempting to tell a story.

   It's obvious that there is a slot for neurodivergency in the canon, presumably to be meted out either to an Author who is actually nuerodivergent themselves or some kind of cross-over writer who first nuerodivegency and some other slot- gender/sexuality seems like a likely pairing.  Alas, that writer has not emerged, leaving the field to interpreters of neurodiversity like Powers.   Speaking as the older sibling of a neurodivergent child, I think that Powers gets it right.  

   It should come as no surprise to anyone that the flag-wavers in the neurodiversity movement  tend to be otherwise socioeconomically privileged individuals.  Specifically, the overlaps between parental/societal expectations that a specific child should "do well" in school and the failure, for whatever reasons, of said child to do so frequently leads down the path depicted in Bewilderment, whereas less advantaged children simply stop going to school or even up in alternative scenarios.   Just speaking from my own personal experience, the overriding obsession with the special needs of a neurodivergent child to the exclusion of all other concerns seems to be the prerogative of a very particular (white, well educated, financially secure) type of parent.

   So in that way, Bewilderment, with it's tenure level Astrobiologist single father is par for the course.  Although the narrator himself is the child of a schizophrenic mother and the husband of a deceased life who struggled with serious depression, he never appears to question the wisdom of having a child in the first place, and seems genuinely surprised with how everything turned out.   My experience is that, even when the raising of a neurodivergent child goes well, it's basically a life ender, in that the parent ends up just spending the rest of their life dealing with it.  It's enough to put you off wanting children, but not this guy.