Rated 5 out of 5. First posted on Goodreads. More on the reading page.

I can’t remember the last time a book made me feel this much. So much aching beauty, so much heart-rending gut-wrenching poetic profundity, so much beatific ferocious love and the immense suffering when it is taken away. Soaring descriptions of the natural world and vast existential questions of life beyond our pale blue dot and living past our ‘passing’ frame this intimate, terribly moving account of the love harboured between father Theo and son Robin and their continued relation with recently deceased wife-mother Alyssa.

Powers captures the reigning motifs of our current curious period in space-time and distills them in an easy-flowing narrative of silken prose and sharp observations. Our beautiful and imperiled planet, our fractured politic, the inanity of the inertial plodding of a broken society that doesn’t yet realize the path its headed on is one of destruction — all these feature as both the backdrop and the currents that move Bewilderment forward, yet there is no sense of preaching or doomsaying. Powers is never trying to ‘say’ something, this is no moral treatise on the horrors of late-stage capitalism or our collective capitulations to Moloch. Rather, the focus is always on Theo and Robbie and the all-consuming and ever-nourishing task of raising a child in a world where protecting childhood innocence and in-born idealism is neither possible nor, arguably, right.

A big part of Bewilderment’s brilliance lies in its sophisticated exploration of the way technology and the natural world juxtapose and complement in confounding and ineffable ways to give birth to the human condition of the 2nd Millennium. Robin, beset with rage and depression from living in a broken world, undergoes an experimental neurofeedback training that uses fMRI recordings of the emotional states of Alyssa that does wonders to his countenance. Alyssa was an ardent animal rights activist, who despite Sisyphean war-making at the Capitol, was able to find and emanate a fountain of solace that fills Robin with renewed vigour. However, a Trumpian president ends the funding to the program (after Robin’s story goes viral in an incisive storyline on the authenticity plundering albeit collective sharing enabled by social media) and like Algernon’s mouse, Robin slides back from the oceanic boundlessness he inhabited from his mother. Theo, an astrobiologist devising models of life on yet-to-be-seen exoplanets, watches in helpless frustration as his son fades away and the narrative is interspersed with delicate sketches of exoplanets and the murmurs of sentient life-forms wrestling with their versions of the Fermi paradox and why no one else has said hi.

Bewilderment will stay with me for a long time. The title is truly perfect — to return to being wild/a feeling of being perplexed.