‘Bewilderment’ by Richard Powers
The Pulitzer winner’s open-hearted reworking of Flowers for Algernon, updated for modern times

Nearly 500 pages into Richard Powers’ previous novel, the Pulitzer-winning The Overstory, the reader lands upon these two short sentences: “Species clog every surface, reviving that dead metaphor at the heart of the word bewilderment. All is fringe and braid and pleat, scales and spines.” As an evocation of the frenzied connectivity at the heart of Powers’ work, this description could hardly be bettered. His novels are dense, knotted and ambitious, populated with large casts moving across grand stretches of time, wrestling with intricate intellectual concepts, making the personal historical and vice versa. It’s with some irony then that Bewilderment (William Heinemann), his newest novel, might be the simplest and most elegant he’s published in over 35 years of writing. Something of an unofficial sequel to The Overstory, it returns to that book’s...