"Twice Asperger's, once suspected OCD, once maybe ADHD": When a neuroscientist asks him about the medical diagnosis for Robin, his father Theo answers laconically in "Amazement", the new novel by American author Richard Powers, with what he is "Voting result" of the doctors calls.

One thing is certain: nine-year-old Robin is struggling.

With his feelings, with sensory impressions, with people around him.

But that's not all: his mother Aly died in a car accident less than two years ago, and her beloved dog died a little later.

The father, an astrobiologist involved in the modeling of extraterrestrial life, does everything to give him stability and to save Robin from the psychotropic medication that the school principal is pushing for.

Fridtjof Küchemann

Editor in the Feuilleton.

  • Follow I follow

For many years Richard Powers has dealt with behavioral problems in his novels.

In "The Echo of Memory", published in 2006 in German translation, it was the Capgras syndrome, in which the most familiar loved ones can no longer be recognized, in "The Greater Happiness" three years later hyperthymia, genetically determined love of life.

This time he uses a diffuse diagnosis to present a neurological training method that, as Powers describes it, can be used in pain therapy and the treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder and could also be useful in dealing with depression, schizophrenia and autism.

In “Amazement”, Martin Currier, Theo’s colleague on campus as a neuroscientist, works on such a development: He puts a group of test subjects in certain emotional states with images and music, which are then recorded by a magnetic resonance tomograph.

A second group of test subjects are given sound and image impulses with the support of AI, which put them in the neuronal state of the original person: "In this way, the brain of a representative of the second group largely adjusted to the excitation pattern of the original person in a kind of training, and the Those who exercised – and that was the remarkable thing about it – stated that they felt very similar emotions.” Theo and his wife had once belonged to the first group of test subjects.

Now he sees his colleague's approach as a chance to save his son.

Currier gives him hope of improvement after a few sessions and says the risks are low.

They would still be below those when visiting a school canteen.

Robin had just lost his nerve one last time after a classmate remarked about his mother.

Richard Powers draws the portrait of a child who is at risk of despair from his grief, but also from the realization that what he believes is urgently needed is not being done to save the world.

He paints the picture of a father who wants to save his son by any means necessary and ultimately loses him.

He creates the family drama against the social background of a reactionary America that bears unmistakable features of the Trump presidency.

Research here – whether it is concerned with extraterrestrial life or neurological stabilization – is subject to political and ideological suspicion.

Both Theo's and Currier's work fail because of this.