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A review by brogan7
Bewilderment by Richard Powers
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
2.5
This is one of those books people must either love or hate. I thought it was going somewhere really interesting for the first third, and then so much oh no.
He made several choices in plot development that felt like an error to me.
The Dad wouldn't have okayed the video, just so he could have an editorial say on it. It's absolutely inconsistent with his character, which makes all the things that happened afterwards less believable. As just one example.
I felt increasingly that Richard Powers was just going off on his ideas, instead of listening for the story.
Early on in the story, I could feel Aly's brain waves rubbing off on me!...and then in his narrative, it all started to go downhill, which, honestly, isn't that the perennial story of our screwed up Judeo-Christian culture, everything goes to shit?
I wanted a little more imagination, a little more nudge in the direction of unforeseen hope, a gap between certainties, which he hinted at at the beginning of the book.
I wanted him to explore the questions of: if we all become happier, does that really help? A blissed-out Robin is attractive on screen, but how does that rob him of his humanity, of which his despair is a part? And also how does the charisma of positivity attract people, but dull the message? Instead, he goes off in a totally other direction, and I ended up not only unwilling to believe the ending but heartbroken in a whole different way. He had a story and he lost an opportunity...
Also I don't get Robin's query about the limits to searching for an alien life form. Maybe the constraint is not on that end....p. 229-230, "Maybe the Great Filter isn't behind us. Maybe it's ahead of us.". ...what is he talking about? I think he was getting at something interesting but I couldn't make sense of it, and that really bothered me.
He made several choices in plot development that felt like an error to me.
I felt increasingly that Richard Powers was just going off on his ideas, instead of listening for the story.
Early on in the story, I could feel Aly's brain waves rubbing off on me!...and then in his narrative, it all started to go downhill, which, honestly, isn't that the perennial story of our screwed up Judeo-Christian culture, everything goes to shit?
I wanted a little more imagination, a little more nudge in the direction of unforeseen hope, a gap between certainties, which he hinted at at the beginning of the book.
I wanted him to explore the questions of: if we all become happier, does that really help? A blissed-out Robin is attractive on screen, but how does that rob him of his humanity, of which his despair is a part? And also how does the charisma of positivity attract people, but dull the message? Instead, he goes off in a totally other direction, and I ended up not only unwilling to believe the ending but heartbroken in a whole different way. He had a story and he lost an opportunity...
Also I don't get Robin's query about the limits to searching for an alien life form. Maybe the constraint is not on that end....p. 229-230, "Maybe the Great Filter isn't behind us. Maybe it's ahead of us.". ...what is he talking about? I think he was getting at something interesting but I couldn't make sense of it, and that really bothered me.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Grief and Death of parent
TW: ecocide, climate grief