Richard Powers, _Bewilderment_

 AFTER THE GRAND opera of The Overstory, this is Powers in chamber music mode. A slim volume by Powers standards, a bit under 300 pages. Just two characters, narrator Theo Byrne and his nine-year-old son, Robin, or three if you count Theo's beloved wife and Robin's adored mother, Aly, who died in a car accident some while before the novel begins. Just one point of view, Theo's, and just one plotline, the story of Theo's valiant but frustrated efforts to do right by Robin. 

Robin is brilliant but also on the autism spectrum (a diagnostic concept to which Theo objects). Robin flies into sudden rages in which he can inflict real damage. Unsurprisingly, his behavioral problems have gotten worse since his mother died, and seem on course to grow worse yet. Managing his education is proving too much for the patience and resources of the public school he attends, so, with reluctance, Theo agrees to home-school him, difficult though home-schooling is to balance with Theo's teaching and research responsibilities as an astrophysicist at the University of Wisconsin.

Then, a breakthrough. Through some experimental (and fictional, I think) biofeedback based on brain scans of his mother, Robin starts to do better, then a lot better, then becomes a miracle cure story and an internet celebrity. 

Powers drops a reference to Daniel Keyes's Flowers for Algernon way back on p. 41, before Robin's innovative therapy is even suggested, tipping the alert reader that Robin's dramatic improvement will be temporary. The treatment that is enabling him to flourish gets shut down about the same time that a major research project investigating extraterrestrial life, in support of which Theo had testified to Congress, loses its funding.

It's a brutal, heartbreaking spiral down from there.

Bewilderment has something in common with Powers's earlier short novel, Generosity, in its depiction of a radiantly good woman and and the avid quest to capture the bio-chemical signature of her goodness. Aly is even more radiant than Thassadit Amzwar (not altogether credibly so, I would say, though it makes sense that her bereaved husband and son would recall her as a kind of goddess). Here, though, the story is darkened by the storm cloud of Trumpian America and its war on science, intellect, curiosity, and imagination. It's a sad story. Sigh.