Is Richard Powers trolling Sally Rooney? In reality, you’d have to say no. But it can appear, when placing their last two novels side by side, that Powers is swatting away the concerns that used to keep Rooney busy and now seem to keep her up at night. Powers’s astonishing saga The Overstory (2018) appeared a few months before Normal People. His ensemble cast – nine central characters – and emphasis on arboreal science might have seemed like a rebuke to pokier subject matter even without the moment when Ray, a lawyer, laments that fiction too often mistakes life for “something huge with two legs” and that “no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people”. The Overstory and Normal People both made the Booker Prize longlist, but Powers got one stage further, and even Rooney’s commercial success may be said to prove Ray’s point.
If, the last time around, Powers torpedoed Rooney in advance, then his slighter but similarly far-reaching new book, Bewilderment, is arriving late to spoil a party. In the Irish author’s Beautiful World, Where Are You, the Rooney-like writer Alice bemoans the ethical complacency of “the contemporary Euro-American novel” and fears that to place global suffering next to invented characters would be “deemed either tasteless or simply artistically unsuccessful”. Yet Powers, without any apparent self-consciousness, has set the relationship between two characters – a 30-something widower, Theo, and his troubled, possibly autistic son, Robin – against an unspecified future landscape marked by chaos and collapse. Theo’s work as an astrobiologist involves finding planets that might offer an alternative to this one – research that seems to grant Robin his only refuge from a life of anger and isolation, until a neuro-feedback experiment turns him into a popular eco-warrior.
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