Spaced Out

A Review of “Bewilderment,” By Richard Powers. (WW Norton 278 pp. $27.95.)

Movie screens are often tinged with it these days. Fiction and non-Fiction authors seem intrigued by it, when not immersed in the genre. There used to be a category labelled “sci-fi” which traded in imagining this sweet, often hyperemotional space. It was where accepted limits of “life” dissolved into a haze of inter and intra-galactic power and energy exploration. Shorthand for this was “Little Green Men.”

People affected by sci-fi were often dismissed as “loony” or just plain “nuts.” 

And sometimes they got seriously mistreated for their beliefs.

But what if these “nuts” were on to something?

What if “legitimate” science and inquiry were, and continue to be, all wrong? 

Missing something more essential than their fact-bedeviled assessments? 

Could it be that there are energy poles working in a very different nature than the ones we know – our meadows, rivers, mountains? And that there are so many of them – billions, in fact – in comparison to which our planet counts for little or nothing?

It takes a very daring and gifted writer to explore that possibility.

Richard Powers is such person.

The author of twelve previous books, winner of many prizes (including a Pulitzer) and a distinguished teacher, he knows how to tell stories. Living voluntarily well out of literary (and political) circles in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, he has already made a commitment to the extremes of our planet. 

In that very isolated location (see The Guardian 6/16/2018 for a thorough interview) Powers plies his trade. A trade that explores a fabulous universe whose parameters no one knows.

This orientation towards the (for want of a better word) supernormal may make you assume that Powers’ latest fiction, “Bewilderment,” is too over the top, unreal. But if you read fiction to get a sense of character development through challenge, to put you in physical and psychic circumstances you haven’t and won’t encounter, to admire and be moved by very skillful writing, “Bewilderment” will meet and exceed your expectations. As it did mine.

There are three main characters. Two parents and a child. One parent, Adam, the father, narrates. He has ruined a research and teaching career because of extensive involvement in the life of his troubled son. The son’s other parent, his mother Alyssa, dies in an accident when he is four years old. In life, she was an activist/lobbyist for environmental causes. In death, she haunts Adam, her husband of 12 years, and their child, Robin.

The haunting forms the third narrative presence in “Bewilderment.” Both her son who grows into adolescence as the book unfolds, and her husband, are visited by her after her death. In the son, it is an aspect of his vast, nuanced mental life. For the father, it’s the opportunity to relive the twelve years he spent with her and to imagine roads taken and not taken.

It is “normal” to wonder “what if,” when someone dies. But can that wondering become a sickness, a hallucinatory disease? When do others notice, and begin to isolate a person as “disturbed”? Off the spectrum of what we can tolerate, and onto a spectrum that may lead to disaster?

Early in “Bewilderment” Powers tells us that Robin, his then toddler, “wet the bed a few times each season, and it hunched him over with shame. Noises unsettled him, he likes to turn down the sound on the television, too low for me to hear. He hated when the cloth monkey wasn’t on its shelf in the laundry room above the washing machine. He poured every dollar of allowance into a trading card game – Collect them all! - but he kept the untouched cards in numeric order in plastic sleeves in a special binder. He sketched constantly and well, laboring over fine details lost on me. Intricate buildings and machines for a year. Then animals and plants.

“His pronouncements were off-the-wall mysteries to everyone but me. He could quote whole scenes from movies, even after a single viewing…when he finished a book he liked, he’d start it immediately, from page one. He melted down and exploded over nothing. But he could just as easily be overcome by joy.”

 The father seeks help. But the mental health practitioners he finds are diagnosticians, not healers. They all want to put Robin “on the Spectrum.” Adam “wanted to tell them that everyone alive on this fluke little planet was on the spectrum. That’s what a spectrum is. I wanted to say that life is a spectrum disorder, where each of us vibrated to some frequency in the continuous rainbow. Oddly enough there’s no name in the psychiatrists’ ‘Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders’ for the compulsion to diagnose people.”

“Bewilderment” is a formatively political book, though political issues and personalities aren’t often mentioned. There’s a President, a re-elected Trump type, who refuses to conduct a traditional re-election calendar, also refuses to accept the result when he loses. There are legislators who control budgets, but are more concerned with posturing positions than with scientific accomplishment. 

Young Robbie gets invaded by political activity, hard as his father tries to keep him out of such a a contentious zone. One day. Before his father can reach over and change the station, they hear news on the car radio, for example, “Following the fires that had taken out 3,000 homes in the San Fernando Valley, the President was blaming the trees. His Executive Order called for 2,000 acres of national forest to be cut down. The acres weren’t even all in California.” 

Young Robbie doesn’t know what to say. Neither does Adam, his father. But from the car radio comes a voice assuring listeners that “In the name of national security the President could do just about anything.”

Desperately Adam consigns his son to a therapist who specializes in “mindfulness.” Meaning that with mental energy a person can exercise agency over objects and people And it is here that Powers brings his narrative into the very contemporary discussion of Artificial Intelligence. The therapist says Robbie is “basically practicing mindfulness. Like doing meditation but with instant, powerful cues steering him toward the desired emotional state.”

Using a contraption similar to an MRI, Robbie learns to move a dot just by thinking it should move. Then it seems that his freaky exchanges with his (dead) mother are mental gymnastics as well. Robbie becomes calmer, more responsible as he exercises mental control. When he encounters the real world, it can be a frought world. 

One day, as Adam and Robbie navigate a nearby river in a rowboat, “A butterfly more staggering than any stained glass window landed on Robin’s downy forearm. Robin held his breath, letting it stumble, fly, and land again on his face. It walked across his closed eyes before flying away.”

We are granted the privilege of sharing Robin’s notebook, which Adam, his father, accidentally on purpose discovers in his son’s room.

Where do finches go when it rains?

How far does a deer walk in one year?

Can a cricket remember how to get out of a maze?

If a frog ate that cricket, would he learn the maze faster?

I warmed a butterfly back to life with my breath.

I love grass. It grows from the bottom, not the top. If something eats the tips, it doesn’t kill the plant. Only makes it grow faster. Pure genius.”

I watch children a lot. My current accidental disability makes it hard to walk far, but my recuperation makes it necessary to try. One regular destination for me is the elementary school a few blocks away, where I sometimes arrive as families are dropping off or picking up kids. Fresh from my daily, nauseating dose of print and on-line tales of destruction and death (yes, interspersed with chronicles of valor, determination, and heroism) I see kids seemingly oblivious of my universe being read to by adults. Chalking the sidewalk, drawing in pads and notebooks. Still inventing games of tag. 

Where, I wonder, do they pick up their ideas and cues? How much, I wonder, and how do those adults shield and protect them from the fright inherent in the current pandemic? My liberal city’s (Berkeley’s) elected and hired minions have made a confusing mess out of recommendations and regulations in response to this major health crisis. What’s coming next, from it, and from them?

And since most of the adults involved in parenting at this school are Spanish speakers, what is being done, what could be done to reach them?

Powers sees an “endless civil war” going on behind seemingly normal school scenes. Playing out in “Bewilderment” is a bitter fight about educational issues. Research like Adam’s into life on other planets is expensive. His and his secular colleagues struggle for funding. “Our side claimed the discovery of other planets would increase humanity’s wisdom and empathy. The President’s men said that wisdom and empathy were collectivist plots to crash our standard of living.”

“This late in the world’s story,” thinks Adam, as his side loses the funding war, “everything was marketing. Universities had to build their brands. Every act of charity had to beat the drum. Friendships were measured out now in shares and likes and links. Poets and priests, philosophers and fathers of small children, we were all in an endless, flat-out hustle.”

You get to know and care about Powers personages. But the three questions underlying his narrative are not new ones. Among other places, they appear as the title of Paul Gauguin’s famous painting, done in Tahiti.

 “Where do we come from?

What are we?

Where are we going?”

A fitting coda for Power’s brilliant narrative. No answers, and there never will be. So don’t let it make you veer to lunacy to respond “correctly.” The kids, like Powers creations in “Bewilderment,” are here to try that. One develops a strong desire to find out what will happen to Robbie, with his brilliant, disturbed self growing older. 

I won’t spoil Powers’ tale with a spoiler. For me, part of it is to think about the little family’s ethos. Informed by stories like “Bewilderment.”

What can we do to help?