Bewilderment is distressing, both in the sympathetic and less sympathetic meanings of that word. For one, Powers writes evocatively as ever, this time without the fluff of metaphors or language flairs but with simple, cutting dialogue.
On the other, this book feels too contemporary, too close to the hue of reality. There are facsimiles of Greta Thunberg and Trump, with the former character so close to her real counterpart that you may wonder why Powers provided her a pseudonym. The Trumpian character is slightly dialled past reality but of course that’s hard to tell. This doesn’t feel like a book that will last the next few years, let alone the next decade.
My primary disagreement with Bewilderment is that it builds on the meme of anxiety and despair. We are supposed to stand in for the characters that are bewildered by the state of the world and the scale of animal suffering and environmental devastation, but it’s hard to do so when the events in the book are excessively doomsaying. It feels like a false bell ringing flat. There’s a lot wrong with the world, but the scale and extremity portrayed in Bewildered make me turn away.