Richard Powers got on the National Book Award longlist for Bewilderment before the book was even officially published – and according to critic Heller McAlpin, he deserved the nod. “With this novel, Powers continues to raise bold questions about the state of our world and the cumulative effects of our mistakes,” she says. Check out her full review here.
An artist, an engineer, a psychologist, a lawyer and his wife, a veteran, a college kid, a programmer, and a scientist encounter a tree…
A friend recommended this book to me as “It’s a story about trees, but it’s also not about trees. It’s about people, but not just people.”
This book… I’m going to be thinking about it for a while. I think this goes on my list of “books you wish you could experience for the first time again.” It’s a very slow start, and then a rush of story growth and branching, and then it slows again - not wholly unlike the trees that make up such a huge part of the story.
My only complaint, and trying to avoid spoilers as much as possible, would be not dealing head on with Dr Westerford’s choice in her last speech. I feel it would have been a much more powerful end to her story for her end to be clearer, an unambiguous action, and without the weird Mimi’s Magic Eyes scene. A clearer decision would have helped strengthen one of the book’s themes that death sustains life (e.g. a rotting log becoming a seed bed), rather than the narrative looking away and giving you a choice as to what happened.
Overall, I loved this book so much. It made me think of The OA several times - and honestly if you loved that show, then you’ll probably love this book.
Science is not about control. It is about cultivating a perpetual condition of wonder in the face of something that forever grows one step richer and subtler than our latest theory about it. It is about reverence, not mastery
