Book review: ‘Bewilderment’ by Richard Powers

By LARRY BALLWAHN | Wilton

“Bewilderment” was the May choice for the Ontario Public Library Book Club. It is fiction, but it reads like author Richard Powers is relating experiences from his own life. Chapters lack headings or numbers, and initially I puzzled over the travel to other planets.

Theo Byrne is the narrator, an astrobiologist. He is employed by UW-Madison and teaches and searches for planets in the universe that could support some form of life. His son is Robin, Robbie, a 9-year-old who has many problems in school. Both suffer the consequences of the recent death of Theo’s wife, Robbie’s mother. 

Robbie’s brain is too active to build friendships or to function effectively in school. The school wants him to be put on Ritalin or something similar to control his actions. He tends to strike out at people who speculate about his family. Both his dad’s job and his mother’s death are very hard to explain, and he doesn’t want to anyway. Besides that, he refused to eat the meals provided at school because they were not vegetarian.

Robbie’s mother was a vegetarian. Robbie was too. The idea of killing an animal for food, or for any reason, was abhorrent. When his father couldn’t avoid hitting a squirrel, a major confrontation ensued. His mother had spent her life campaigning against carnivore eating habits and what they entailed. The Byrnes had video tapes of several of her speeches to legislatures. Robbie often asked to watch one.

Theo did not want his son on psychoactive drugs. The school saw the need and felt the father was derelict in not helping his son to function in school. Theo found an answer at the UW from one of his wife’s former colleagues. Robbie could participate in a neurofeedback treatment which would enhance his emotional control, in part using recorded patterns from his mother’s brain. This met the school’s expectations, but even so, Robbie wanted homeschooling.

The treatment worked well. Robbie became a poster child for the neurofeedback program. His father appreciated the progress being made but feared the involvement of others as it related to his relationship with his son. As Robbie improved, he undertook his mother’s causes. The publicity, as it turned out, was not a good thing.

Publicity did not help the neurofeedback program, either. Health and Human Services ordered all treatments stopped while they checked for human subject protection violations.

What’s going to happen to Robbie without the treatments?

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