Bewilderment: Getting Modern Parenting Right and Wrong
Last year, the American novelist Richard Powers published his follow-up to The Overstory—a sweeping multigenerational saga about the lives of trees, which won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and made Powers a household name among the NPR set. His latest novel, Bewilderment, was received—in Martin Amis’s phrase—as “the latest gift from genius,” making the shortlist for the Booker Prize and earning Oprah’s endorsement, among other accolades.
Bewilderment invites comparison with another gift from genius: a 1962 short story by Flannery O’Connor. The starting premises are similar. Bewilderment chronicles a year in the life of Theo Byrne, an astrobiologist and atheist, and his nine-year-old son Robin. O’Connor’s story, “The Lame Shall Enter First,” features a secular liberal named Sheppard and his ten-year-old son Norton. Both boys’ mothers have died recently, leaving them in the sole care of their fathers, modern men suddenly tasked with providing a coherent account of life and death. From there, Powers and O’Connor shape the stories according to their own moral imaginations, and the results could not be more different.
Both Theo and Sheppard are fascinated by astronomy, preferring scientific knowledge of the heavens to mumbo-jumbo about an afterlife. O’Connor’s Sheppard is an educated man of the Space Age, and he briskly informs Norton that “[y]our mother isn’t anywhere. She’s not unhappy. She just isn’t.” Sheppard adds that Norton’s mother’s spirit will live on in him “if you’re good and generous like she was.”
A young do-gooder with a “pink sensitive face,” Sheppard urges Norton to forget his loneliness by “helping other people”; Sheppard himself is mentoring a teenaged delinquent named Rufus. Excited by Rufus’ high I.Q., Sheppard brings him home and sets up a telescope in the attic. “Instinctively he concentrated on the stars. He wanted to give [Rufus] something to reach for . . . He wanted to stretch his horizons. He wanted him to see the universe, to see that the darkest parts of it could be penetrated.”
In Powers’s novel, set sixty years later, Theo’s job is building computer models of life-sustaining planets, and he and Robin often tour these worlds in virtual reality. In the aftermath of his mother’s death, Robin is an unhappy, high-strung child, prone to bursts of violence. Rather than putting Robin on psych meds, Theo pulls him out of school to take him hiking and stargazing in the Smoky Mountains. As the novel opens, the boy is gazing through a telescope on the cabin’s deck.
Bewilderment has a lot going for it: a smart and engaging narrative voice, an interesting premise, and a big-picture worldview in which all biological life is fascinating and important. Its plot seems torn from tomorrow’s headlines: In an attempt to help Robin, Theo enrolls him in clinical trials for a new neurofeedback system (DecNef) that helps him model his emotions on the brainwaves of high-functioning adults—including his mother Alyssa, who provided DecNef a digital map of her mind before she died.
Despite all this, Bewilderment is a flawed, unsatisfying novel, as comparison with “The Lame Shall Enter First” helps to reveal. A cultural product of its time, its value is more anthropological than literary. In an ideological age, what do secular, educated parents most want to believe about their kids? Given the trouble and expense of raising them—and the carbon footprint of another human being on the planet—what justifies having kids at all in 2022? What are they for? With an artist’s sensitivity, Powers (who, like O’Connor, is childless) divines the answer from the zeitgeist and faithfully serves it up: The ideal child is a foot soldier in his parents’ cultural tribe, a virtue-signaling lawn sign in human form, a fiery ball of potential energy for political causes.
Yet, Bewilderment fails to portray a believable nine-year-old boy in the 2020s, or any age. Only O’Connor’s story grasps the mundane truth known to any parent: A child humbles and challenges you, as he is a separate person. He is unlikely to arrive at your precise conclusions about life, obsessively loving the things you love and hating the things you hate. As O’Connor’s story opens, Norton is putting peanut butter and ketchup on a stale piece of cake while Sheppard looks on with distaste. In a fog of grief, Norton does not “appear to notice his father” and, when asked a question, “looked at him with a kind of half attention.” When Sheppard attempts to draw the boy into a discussion of his “privilege” (as we’d say now), Norton cries until he vomits, unable to see himself as lucky. Sheppard resolves to morally improve his “selfish” child. He brings Rufus into their home in order to teach Norton “what it means to share.” Even as Norton proves resistant to his father’s wish to change him, it turns out that Rufus—a crippled conniver with his own agenda—doesn’t think much of Sheppard’s charity, either.
While both Rufus and Norton serve to puncture Sheppard’s sanctimoniousness, Robin is his father’s ideological mini-me, and later—through mimicking her brain patterns—his mother’s, too. The novel presents this child-as-clone phenomenon as a good thing, both in general and as a salve for Theo’s loneliness. It’s the parent-child relationship as narcissistic wish fulfillment, and as the pages turn, Robin seems less and less convincing as a real boy. Unlike Norton—an awkward, near-silent child whose desperate need for his mother’s love is piercingly human—Robin is a one-dimensional, precocious chatterbox whose main function is to mirror and amplify his parents’ beliefs.
Not long ago, a strident fourth-grade eco-activist would have made no sense as a character, but today this is a recognizable species of child: the shrill, anxious product of his parents’ manias. Even so, Robin Byrne is a very weird kid. On his ninth birthday, he is upset that his cake contains butter, milk, and eggs, as his late mother—a bisexual, vegan, animal rights activist—would not approve. As his father drives them out of the Smokies, Robin fulminates at tourists gawking at a group of bears, declaring human beings jerk-faces who stole everything from them, Dad. The U.S. President, a science-hating villain who communicates in all-caps tweets (subtlety is not Powers’ strong suit), is a dung beetle who is wrecking everything. Nor does Robin’s own grandmother escape censure. When she says a prayer before Thanksgiving dinner, the boy pipes up:
Nobody’s listening to that prayer, you know. We’re on a rock, in space, and there are hundreds of billions of other rocks just like ours.
Minutes later, he has a screaming fit when Grandpa Cliff offers him turkey:
I don’t eat animals. I don’t eat animals! Don’t make me eat animals!
While many parents would give Robin a talking-to for these antics, Theo is merely bemused, as he agrees with every word. Thanks to his ill-mannered child, Grandma finally got the smackdown she deserved. Theo reflexively dislikes most people in his orbit, and his interior monologue is littered with throwaway insults. Rural counties “have little use for science of any kind”; his son’s nine-year-old peers are “smug” and “vicious.” The late Aly “once damned humanity to hell while throwing a UN report about habitat destruction across the room.” Yet, Theo revels in the fact that their son is exactly like them. “He was so me,” he says approvingly of Robin. “He was so her.”
Theo studies extremophiles—organisms adapted to harsh conditions—and, as it so happens, his own child gravitates to extremes. On every ideological position Theo and Alyssa shared, Robin goes to 11: not just an activist but an extremo-activist with a short fuse. Theo doesn’t really mind Robin’s outbursts of rudeness or violence, as they’re always in service of some higher cause. Sometimes they simply cut the Byrnes’ social enemies down to size. When Robin is suspended from school for threatening to kill two classmates, Theo dismisses them as “the son of some banker” and “the son of a brand executive”—i.e., well beneath Robin Byrne, enlightened scion of the Thinking Class.
This experience of cognitive dissonance plagues Bewilderment, a book whose child-hero is either tiresome or defies belief. Did I mention that Robin is a brilliant artist? When he decides to paint endangered animals and sell his art at the farmer’s market so he can donate the proceeds to an NGO, we learn that Robin is even more special than we knew. According to his awestruck dad, Robin’s daubings of frogs and mussels are extraordinary masterpieces. Of course, the little snots at school can’t appreciate Robin’s gift. As Theo sniffishly remarks: “[Y]our classmates can’t afford to pay you what they’re worth.”
Why is Robin doing all this, again? Midway through the novel, bewildered, one wonders why Robin can’t just be normal for five minutes.
Because if [Mom’s] right, . . . everything will be dead before I get to tenth grade.
Ah, Mom. Though Theo and Robin agree that Aly no longer exists—she’s not unhappy, she just isn’t—her spirit looms over the narrative and is, eventually, piped into Robin’s brain. Robin is thrilled to be plugged into Aly’s brainwaves, not just because it allows him to feel close to his late mother, but because he is becoming her: a superior type of person.
Wouldn’t it be cool if everybody started to do the training?
Robin enthuses to his dad.
Theo agrees it would be cool. He breezily opines that “universal mandatory courses of neural feedback training” should be required so that every person’s brain can be upgraded to Byrne Level. Instead, science-denying government officials shut down DecNef, claiming it violates the “integrity, autonomy, and sanctity of your research subjects.” (“Sanctity?” Theo sputters incredulously. To him, “the new human protection guidelines . . . made no sense.”)
By then, Bewilderment is almost at an end. Unlike in “The Lame Shall Enter First,” there is no shattering epiphany, no moment in which the father’s
heart constricted with a repulsion for himself so clear and intense that he gasped for breath. He had stuffed his own emptiness with good works like a glutton. He had ignored his own child to feed his vision of himself. He saw the clear-eyed Devil, sounder of hearts, leering at him . . . His image of himself shriveled until everything was black before him. He sat paralyzed, aghast.
In its last twist, O’Connor’s story reveals that Sheppard—until that moment, a hero in his own mind—has been the villain of the piece, with devastating consequences. Readers realize with a shock that they can relate to Sheppard’s all-too-human sins: the vanity and pride that make a “nice” man regard his child as a defective object (a mirror that fails to reflect his glory) rather than a vulnerable and unique human soul.
Powers’ novel sees none of this, however. Theo is never presented as a broken, sinful man whose obsessive ecological doom-mongering has driven his boy to despair. His character has no arc, and he learns nothing that challenges his worldview. From soup to nuts, Dr. Byrne (and his loyal sidekick, Robin) are brilliant, virtuous guys surrounded by idiots and malefactors. While this may flatter the pretensions of like-minded readers in the 2020s, it can hardly be called art.
After DecNef folds, Theo and Robin head back to the Smokies. Robin is filled with rage and anguish over the state of the planet. In a grand gesture, he flings himself headlong into danger, trying to save at least one wild stretch of river his mother loved. Unlike with Norton, a child so very real he lives and breathes sixty years on, I was not particularly sorry to see him go.
Maya Sinha’s essays about culture and family life have appeared in numerous publications. Her novel, The City Mother, was published by Chrism Press in 2022. For more on Maya and her work, see mayasinhawriter.com.