The Overstory
Some books beg for fast reading as characters, dialog, and even setting quickly compel the reader into the plot; others long to be savored over time. Some books are slow because it takes page and pages of reading before a reader fully connects with the story, but the most delicious books are simply too rich of prose and complex crafting to read quickly. With its beautiful writing and many story lines, Richard Powers’ The Overstory (2018), winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2019, definitely belongs to the latter category. I began the journey through The Overstory (for a journey it most certainly is) last fall as my family set off on a camping road trip which would take us through California’s Giant Sequoias and Coastal Redwoods. I knew enough about Powers’ novel to think it a fitting book to pair with the trip. Of course, in knowing that the redwoods feature in Powers’ undeniable brilliant novel, I foresaw only one small portion of this book’s masterpiece. After reading it slowly over the course of nearly six months, I realized that The Overstory is in many ways a book that defies categorization. It is so novel in its craft and so touching in its humanity. The Overstory challenges its human reader to look beyond the human and greet all the living.
Powers organizes The Overstory into four arboreal parts: roots, trunk, crown and seeds. The book begins with a page and a half of italicized rambling interweaving a simple scene—a woman sitting against the base of a park’s pine tree—with big questions, thoughts, ideas: “The tree is saying things, in words before words [. . .] A good answer must be reinvented many times, from scratch. [. . .] A thing can travel everywhere, just by holding still” (3). This opening, in its simplicity of action and grandiosity of thought, sets the tone for the entire novel. Powers creates a novel in which trees play an active part and dwarf the brief lives of humans. But to succeed in a project this complex, The Overstory first must put down roots by establishing the stories of various human characters. The first third of the book introduces characters like Mimi Ma (the daughter of a Muslim Chinese immigrant), Douglas Pavlick (a Vietnam veteran who finds himself planting trees out west after the war), Neelay Mehta (the son of Indian immigrants who learns to code as a child growing up in what will become Silicone Valley), and a host of others equally as human and unique. Powers tells each of their stories in intimate and subtle terms, and, unsurprisingly, trees play in a role in each vignette. As I read “Roots” and met one character after another, I began to jot down notes on each, certain that as the novel progressed their stories would resurface and connect, and wanting to keep track of the eight stories that comprise “Roots.” Because I read the novel slowly over the course of many months, I greatly appreciated having done so (allowing for a memory refresher when hundreds of pages later a character pops back up in the narrative). I hadn’t miscalculated, The Overstory does ultimately connect it all.
Like the rings of a tree, this novel has many layers and tells many stories. It includes love stories (of every variety), war stories, family stories, tragedy, and comedy. As the novel builds all the stories move closer and closer to current day, and the characters’ lives begin to form a web that eventually all connect with some plot line or character. In this, The Overstory is masterfully crafted. And while I can’t say I loved any character in particular (except perhaps for Patricia Westerford), I appreciated each for his or her contribution, just as anyone who hikes through the woods can appreciate the subtle ways in which individual trees combine to form a forest.
Beyond the many characters and their individual conflicts, climax and resolution, Powers’ eloquent descriptions of trees included in The Overstory were educational and moving. Having taken my last biology class over two decades ago, I take Powers’ word for the science inserted into The Overstory. I hope the novel’s tree science reflects fact as I loved some of the details included. I wonder what someone with a background in dendrology, forestry or ecology makes of The Overstory, as I have no expertise on which to compare Powers’ descriptions. While The Overstory hones in on certain tree species—American chestnut, Douglas fir, coastal redwoods— it touches on dozens of varieties from mulberry trees to banyans. Somehow Powers winds metaphors wound around all the trees as they appear in The Overstory. The novel is indeed a celebration of trees on so many levels that a reader might make a career of contemplating all the layers of meaning Powers includes.
Powers’ tree theme grows with the story and by midway through the plot has become self-consciously environmental as several characters gravitate toward environmental movements. Through their narrative, Powers explores radical environmentalist movements and the psychology of those who dedicate themselves to living in old growth redwoods or driving Forest Service roads to chain themselves to logging equipment. His characters connect to the movement in numerous ways—activists, a tree scientist, and even a psychologist—and through these characters The Overstory provides an intimate (albeit fictional) case study of environmentalism, particularly when it radicalizes.
Only a few characters fail to connect with the others in some way during the “Trunk” and “Canopy” sections; Powers continues to construct these separate story lines toward resolution in “Seeds.” The Overstory concludes as its various characters find peace, albeit in very different places: a video game platform, a backyard sanctuary, a jail cell. A recognition that supersedes the novel’s human themes finds its way to each of Powers’ diverse characters. The human melodramas of loss, pain, betrayal, and grief somehow burn off into the atmosphere of this novel when compared to the longer, slower, more grand drama of life on earth, as seen by trees and forests. Some characters’ messages from the novel’s first section percolate in its conclusion: Mimi Ma’s immigrant father recalls telling a bear once, “‘Don’t worry. Human being leaving this world, very soon’” (38), or Adam Appitch realizes as a child, “Humankind is deeply ill. The species won’t last long. It was an aberrant experiment. Soon the world will be returned to the healthy intelligences, the collective ones” (56). Powers leaves his reader contemplating the microcosm that is humanity and the sustained life beyond the anthropocentric. And while this might sound defeatist or depressing, it is not. In fact, The Overstory’s message is hopeful, even soothing. It suggests we ought not to sweat the small stuff; and we—our entire species—exist in that small-stuff category. Powers’ words can best articulate this concept: “To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one, and to mistake life for something huge with two legs. No: life is mobilized on a vastly larger scale, and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people” (383). Near the close of the novel, this passage pinpoints the project at work in The Overstory.
As Powers strives to portray that “vastly larger scale” of life, the theme of collective vs individual repeats through The Overstory. Interestingly, by its conclusion Powers’ novel highlights the collective forms of data and seed banks in the digital age. I am still unpacking the subtleties and layers of Powers’ overall messages about human technology as a means for salvation; and I’m troubled by the word salvation, it seems too loaded, too anthropocentric. Life isn’t a good vs. evil narrative; it is simply a story of change. The fruit of the digital age may be, as Powers’ novel puts it, “[e]volution in stage three” (375). Human-engineered computers that can collect mass data (and learn in the process) play a thought-provoking role in the final “Seeds” section. The reader finds various seeds planted in the final section of The Overstory, of which collective data is only one, but as I have contemplated the novel for over a month, this one continues to nag at me.
It is likely that until I sit down to read the book again (which I plan to do in time), I will continue to ruminate upon some elements of its conclusion. Like many books that rise to the occasion of their ambition, The Overstory is a novel that may make more sense with every reading; once you have seen the canopy and its seeds, you will no doubt find more connection when you revisit the roots.
A Few Great Passages:
“The sole remaining chestnut goes on flowering. But its blooms have no more blooms to answer them. No mates exist for countless miles around, and a chestnut, though both male and female, will not serve itself. Yet still this tree has a secret tucked into the thin, living cylinder beneath its bark. Its cells obey an ancient formula: Keep still. Wait. Something in the lone survivor knows that even the ironclad law of Now can outlasted. There’s work to do. Star-work, but earthbound all the same” (9).
“[F]armers are patient men tried by brutal seasons, and if they weren’t plagued by dreams of generation, few would keep plowing, spring after spring. Jim Hoel is out on his rise again on March 21, 1904, as if he, too, might have another hundred years or two to document what time hides forever in plain sight” (12).
“Sketching, he wondered what his brain would have to be like to distinguish each of the hundreds of lancet leaves on a given branch and recognize them as easily as he did the faces of his cousins” (19).
“He leaves no note except a calligraphic copy of Wang Wei’s twelve-hundred-year-old poem left unfurled on parchment across the desk in his study:
An old man, I want
only peace.
The things of this world
mean nothing.
I know no good way
to live and I can’t
stop getting lost in my
thoughts, my ancient forests.
The wind that waves the pines
loosens my belt.
The mountain moon lights me
as I play my lute.
You ask: how does a man rise or fall in this life?
The fisherman’s song flows deep under the river.” (41)
“There are trees that spread like fireworks and trees that rise like cones. Trees that shoot without a ripple, three hundred feet straight skyward. Broad, pyramidal, rounded, columnar, conical, crooked: the only thing they do in common is branch, like Vishnu waving many arms. Among those spreaders, the wildest are the figs. Strangler trees that slip their sheaths around the bodies of others and swallow them, forming an empty cast around their decomposed hosts. Peepal, Ficus religiosa the Buddha’s Bo, their leaves tapering into exotic drip tips. Banyans that plump out like whole forests, with a hundred separate trunks fighting for a share of the sun” (95).
“These people are nothing to Plant-Patty. And yet their lives have long been connected, deep underground. Their kinship will work like an unfolding book. The past always comes clearer, in the future” (132).
“Years from now, she’ll [Patricia Westerford will] write a book of her own, The Secret Forest. Its opening page will read:
You and the tree in your backyard come from a common ancestor. A billion and a half years ago,
the two of you parted ways. But even now, after an immense journey in separate directions, that
tree and you will share a quarter of your genes . . .” (132).
“He can’t remember when the Web wasn’t here. That’s the job of consciousness, to turn Now into Always, to mistake what is for that was meant to be. Some days it feels like he and the rest of the Valley of Heart’s Delight didn’t invent online life, but just cut a clearing into it. Evolution in stage three” (375).
Bibliography:
Powers, Richard. The Overstory. W. W. Norton & Co.: New York, 2018.
