Richard Powers’ novel Bewilderment is easy to view as one of those mainstream literary works that people buy and never read because it is a critical darling that gets “shortlisted” for major awards won by books that people buy and never read. And, yeah, to a point, sure, it is that. But forget for the moment that Bewilderment did get shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize and focus instead on the year it was nominated. The book was published on September 21, 2021, meaning it had been completed, printed and released to stores less than a year after the controversial 2020 Presidential election.
Which turns out to be a pretty amazing timeline considering that another way to look at Bewilderment is that it was the first serious mainstream work of literature to fictionalize the events surrounding that election. One could even go so far as to say that what Powers actually wrote is a work of speculative fiction about what might have happened to America had just a few key people in a handful of key positions been more willing to circumvent the law, violate the Constitution, and commit to the darkest insane fantasies at work inside the loser of the 2020 election. The centerpiece of the narrative about a father and son trying to deal with premature loss of a wife and mother is set against contextual backdrop that is inescapably intended to read as a worst-case scenario for how the election aftermath not only might have gone, but came perilously close to going:
“The minority Senate leader called the action the gravest constitutional crisis in our lifetime. But constitutional crises had become commonplace. Everyone waited for Congress to move. There was no movement. Senators in the President’s party—old men armed with polls—insisted that no laws had been broken. They scoffed at the idea of First Amendment violations. Violent clashes rolled through Seattle, Boston, and Oakland.”
The really baffling part about Bewilderment is how a very respected writer crafted a very serious work of literature able to be released in old-fashioned printed form to bookstores around the world in September of 2021 that seems to be a story—allegorically told—about the year 2021. It is not just the backdrop to a President who refused to leave office that lends it this strange reality, but the story itself. It is partially a tale about a father who rejects psychology and pharmaceutical medication that have both proven to be effective in treating the symptoms of an unidentified disorder affecting his son in favor of an experimental treatment called Decoded Neurofeedback.
Not to take anything away from any real-life analogue to the particulars of this treatment in the book, but within the context of its relationship to 2021, it is impossible to look at the father’s desperate rejection of established medical treatments in favor of not-yet-proven treatment and not have the word “ivermectin” spring to mind at one point or another. Make no mistake: the protagonist of the story is most assuredly not a red-hat wearing conservative, but a full-fledged liberal in every sense of the word.
Regardless of whatever else Bewilderment may be described as—environmentalist lit, a boy and his dad tale, near-future speculative fiction—it definitely earns the title of what is likely to prove to be a rather robust and fecund sub-genre in the years which followed its release. It is the first work of serious literature to fictionalize the aftermath of the 2020 Presidential election and posit a horror story about what might have been were it not for a just a few key folks in a few key positions who remained unwilling to violate the Constitution merely to salve the insane fantasies of a man who lost that election fairly, squarely and bigly.
