![]() The novel’s central question is the same one posed in “The Overstory” by Douggie Pavlicek, a Vietnam War vet turned eco-warrior: “What the Went Wrong With Mankind?” It’s Trump’s world out there, and the cork has popped off the shaken bottle of fizzy swill. Theo and Robin bond while they are walking in, and talking about, nature. ![]() “Bewilderment” isn’t cozy, exactly, but it’s got a nubbly sentimentality. Margaret Atwood, summing up the complaints, once said the idea was that he was “not cozy enough at the core.” The rap against Powers’s novels used to be that they were chilly. Theo doesn’t want to put him on Ritalin or other psychoactive drugs. Robin’s about to be expelled from third grade for impulsively clouting a boy in the face. When a pediatrician suggests he might be “on the spectrum,” his father thinks: “I wanted to tell the man that everyone alive on this fluke little planet was on the spectrum. Young Robin is bright and sweet but compulsive and quick to anger. Alyssa, Robin’s mother - birder, vegan, hiker, activist, friend to abandoned dogs - died two years earlier in a car crash. He’s searching for life in the cosmos while raising Robin, his sensitive 9-year-old son. ![]() The narrator is Theo Byrne, an astrobiologist in mourning. “Bewilderment” is equal parts earnest opinion-page essay (humans + nature = yikes) and middling Netflix science fiction product (boy reconnects with dead mother through high tech). Pauline Kael said it about film, and it applies more so to novels: “the good ones never make you feel virtuous.” Good novels are rarely built on good intentions or politics. ![]()
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