A guest review from DJ Dycus
Bewilderment, by Richard Powers, is the story of a widowed father struggling to raise his nine–year–old, special–needs son: “I never believed the diagnoses the doctors settled on my son. When a condition gets three different names over as many decades, when it requires two subcategories to account for completely contradictory symptoms…there’s something wrong.” And those last three words would serve as a good thematic summation of the novel. Our lives provide beautiful experiences, but there’s very little that we can know for sure and there are few parts of our lives that don’t present some sort of challenge or confusion.
The narrator, Theo Byrne, is an astrobiologist working at a university in Wisconsin. His wife died two years before the opening of the novel in an automobile accident. He is plagued by doubts about the future of federal funding for his work, his ability to parent a high–needs son, and even his past relationships with his deceased wife. You can see just how fitting the title of the book is.
Bewilderment, by Richard Powers, is the story of a widowed father struggling to raise his nine–year–old, special–needs son: “I never believed the diagnoses the doctors settled on my son. When a condition gets three different names over as many decades, when it requires two subcategories to account for completely contradictory symptoms…there’s something wrong.” And those last three words would serve as a good thematic summation of the novel. Our lives provide beautiful experiences, but there’s very little that we can know for sure and there are few parts of our lives that don’t present some sort of challenge or confusion.
The narrator, Theo Byrne, is an astrobiologist working at a university in Wisconsin. His wife died two years before the opening of the novel in an automobile accident. He is plagued by doubts about the future of federal funding for his work, his ability to parent a high–needs son, and even his past relationships with his deceased wife. You can see just how fitting the title of the book is.