The Overstory (2018)
Richard Powers (1957)
502 pages
Richard Powers’ The Overstory provides a striking reminder of why novels can so often present a more impactful reckoning of a topic than non-fiction texts. In a complex portrait of our present-day world that offers both a paean to the profound interconnectedness and sublime beauty of nature, and a lament of humankind’s indifference to our escalating destruction of it, Powers manages to evoke a remarkably broad range of feelings – from transcendent awe to (borrowing the phrase of a friend of mine) homicidal rage.
As the book’s title and cover art suggest, trees play a central role in Powers’ story. Indeed, he introduces readers to his main characters in an opening set of chapters – gathered under the section heading Roots – by developing each of their stories around a particular species of tree present in their lives. These chapters have the feel of a series of apparently independent, if entertaining, short stories, however, and the trees in them serve as little more than interesting props, with the characters, for the most part, only dimly aware of their existence.
Then, however.
Some third of the way in, with the transition to a section titled Trunk, the tone shifts dramatically. The separate story lines begin to coalesce into a gradually tightening maelstrom, as each character comes to a dawning recognition of the profound wonder of trees and their central place in nature and human life, as well as of the rapidly accelerating devastation of the natural world and its implications for humankind. This epiphany occurs in different ways and at different speeds for each of them, but with it, each comes to recognize their own complicity in the on-going destruction, and to varying degrees, to become radicalized by it. And so, what began as a series of charming short stories built around interesting connections to trees, becomes a breathtaking exploration of how trees lie at the intersection of human civilization and the natural world.
Reaching back toward the very beginnings of life on Earth, Powers recalls the split that led one branch of life to evolve into trees, and another into humans, and he decries the myriad destructive consequences that have come from humankind having forgotten this common origin. Too many, he makes clear, have come to view trees as a part of the scenery as opposed to recognizing them as fundamental to the web of life; trees have become a resource to be exploited, with an assumed zero-cost to humankind. But, as one of his characters observes, this common view is not so much a rationally arrived at choice, as a path our civilization has blindly come to agree to follow:
it’s [his] growing conviction that the greatest flaw of the species is its overwhelming tendency to mistake agreement for truth. Single biggest influence on what a body will or won’t believe is what nearby bodies broadcast over the public band. Get three people in the room and they’ll decide that the law of gravity is evil and should be rescinded because one of their uncles got shit-faced and fell off the roof. (84)
Certainly, an observation that applies far beyond the topic of human understanding of the importance of our treatment of the natural world, all too accurately describing the metastasizing info-demic we currently face.
The catastrophic impacts of taking a utilitarian view of trees and forests drives the plot over the last two-thirds of Powers’ story. His characters find themselves increasingly at odds with the fundamental goals and beliefs of civilization, from economic interests that view forests, and nature generally, as a cost-free consumable resource, to consumers who view the resulting cheap products as a birthright. Late in the novel, one of the characters, having shifted repeatedly between normal life and spending significant time in the wilderness, considers the challenge of altering an economic course so deeply engrained in our civilization:
We’re cashing in a billion years of planetary savings bonds and blowing it on assorted bling. And what [he] wants to know is why this is so easy to see when you’re by yourself in a cabin on a hillside, and almost impossible to believe once you step out of the house and join several billion folks doubling down on the status quo. (386)
With their newfound appreciation for the danger the natural world faces from our present-day lifestyles and economic systems, the characters begin to actively engage – to various degrees and in various ways – in defense of the forest. Through their evolving beliefs and increasingly aggressive actions, Powers explores the question of whether humankind as a whole can be made to realize the irreparable damage being done to the natural world and its implications for our future. Can a few committed souls redirect the powerful and seemingly inexorable engine of civilization? And, how best does one bring one’s own recognition of the catastrophic devastation underway to the awareness of others?
Through what was clearly extensive research into what has relatively recently come to be understood about trees and forests, Powers provides a fascinating introduction in The Overstory to trees and their role in the natural world. For those deeply wedded to a utilitarian view of nature, this newfound awareness of the role of trees could present an opportunity to rethink their beliefs. But the readers who will perhaps find Power’s story the most challenging are those who already have some concern over the human exploitation of the natural world, and have already sought to make a difference: such readers are forced to confront the difficult question of whether they are doing enough to change a system they recognize as broken, and to reckon with the many ways in which they compromise their concerns in the daily choices they make in their lives.
Other notes and information:
It is fairly common, when reading a well-told story, to not want it to end, to want to continue to engage with the characters and find out what will happen next. Well into my reading of the The Overstory, I had a much more potent version of this feeling: it suddenly occurred to me that I didn't want it to end, that I could be content just reading <i>this</i> story – this remarkable, enthralling, disturbing, amazing tale – for the rest of my life. Powers' story feels somehow universal, encompassing the sublime wonder and infinite variation of the natural world and the stunning variety of human interactions with one another and the nature we often forget we are an integral part of.
Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf
A Review of The Overstory, by Richard Powers
ReplyDeleteBy Carilee Moran
August 8, 2021
There are lots of reasons to read books: to pass the time, letting the words go in one eye and out the other; to learn new information critical to your career; to broaden your acquaintance with the world; to escape the world; to enjoy a formulaic story that you know will turn out well in the end; or to feel your heart thump with every twist and turn of a completely unpredictable tale.
Sometimes you aren't really sure why you are reading a book, other than on the recommendation of a friend. Perhaps the book is out of your normal reading zone. Maybe it feels like Literature, and you aren’t sure that you read Literature anymore. And yet you soldier on, because you do not want to have to tell your friend that you couldn’t finish the book.
You read on. And suddenly, the entire eight-dimensional Rubik’s cube of the book’s disparate story lines snick into place, and the rest of the book hurries by like a cross between On Walden Pond and The Hunt for Red October. The Overstory, by Richard Powers, is such a book.
Do you ever throw down a book after ten pages and say, “I can’t read this tripe!” No? Well, I do. I like beautiful language, and I’d rather watch a dripping faucet for an hour than read lousy writing for ten minutes. Fortunately, while Powers’ writing may inspire envy or admiration, it will never inspire contempt. He is a fine craftsman. The reader finds himself on one bank of a small, clear stream of words, mesmerized by the current rippling over bright stones, swerving around boulders, ably moving the toy canoe of the story down to the sea. I can crack the book open anywhere and find a sentence that speaks to me:
“A three-foot cast-iron fence now surrounds the scattering of graves. The tree above casts its shade with equal generosity on the living and the dead.”
“Eric shows the print to the old man. It’s easier than trying to tell his father he loves him.”
“Sounds at all distances, a thousand volumes, mezzo and softer. There’s a bird Adam can’t name, beating its wings on the blackness. Sharp scolds of invisible mammals. The wood of this high house, creaking. A branch falling to the ground. Another. A fly, walking across the hairs of his ear. His own breath echoing inside his collar.”
The story carried by this sparkling stream is organized into four sections. Despite the main section titles - Roots, Trunk, Crown and Seeds – I believed that this was a book of short stories for about the first 150 pages. I couldn’t understand why it was billed as a novel. The endings of each of these short stories were jarring – a whole family but one dying of carbon monoxide poisoning; a Chinese immigrant committing suicide in spite of a successful career and three prospering daughters; a college senior electrocuted in her room.
I considered that perhaps the book was not about trees at all, but rather, about the oldest subject in the world: man’s inhumanity to man. I do see this as one of the themes. Man is cruel not only to other humans but is mindlessly cruel to his own complex life support system – Earth.
Cruelty ricochets off the propane heater that killed the young artist Nick Hoel’s entire family; pings off the gun that Mimi Ma’s father used to kill himself; rockets around Adam Appich’s odd-man-out childhood; stops in to make would-be lovers Ray Brinkman and Dorothy Cazaly miserable; then looses itself on Douglas Pavlicek, the archetype of the aimless, war-wounded Vietnam vet; bangs around Neelay Mehta’s young life, turning him into a paraplegic; stokes a considerable amount of unearned misery in the life of the otherwise sympathetic character Patricia Westerford; and comes to rest in the body of Olivia Vandergriff, who is electrocuted and dies – if only for a little while.
CONTINUED IN NEXT COMMENT
CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS COMMENT
ReplyDeleteWhat do all these people have in common? Apart from all being damaged on their way through life, all of them, one way or another, hear trees. Oh, not like that, most of them. The trees only really talk to one or two of them. But they all hear something – a sigh, perhaps - and they all respond. And that is what the book is really about: people who listen to trees. The pain the characters experienced on their journeys from Root to Trunk was just to soften them up a little, put them on the margins of society, where they could detect quiet sounds more easily.
I would love it if I could leave everyone to discover the most astonishing thing about this book for themselves. But I can’t. Because once the reader passes from the section entitled Roots to the section entitled Trunk, that magical thing that I described as an “eight-dimensional Rubik’s cube snicking into place” occurs. And it happens only once, for you instantly understand the structure of the rest of the book, and you understand that nothing else about the book matters as much as its structure. In fact, I do not think anything else mattered as much to Richard Powers, either, and I think his determination to follow the structure he had conceived of in advance presented certain stumbling blocks in the telling of the story that he couldn’t always shove aside.
I found the last section, Seeds, a real slog – a mechanical tying up of loose ends that did not satisfy me that seeds had been planted, or even fallen. In fact, only one of the main characters even had the human version of seeds – children - and they didn’t serve any real purpose in the story.
By the end, all the main characters were either literally or spiritually dead, crushed by the events of the story - with the possible exception of Nick Hoel. He ended up on the Arctic tundra making large, temporary works of art that I would have found meaningless had I gone to see them. So even if he made meaning for himself, he did not succeed in making me care much about him.
And this is a good question to ask about a sprawling novel: what characters most affected you? With whom did you sympathize?
Three characters kept me reading: Patricia Westerford, Ray Brinkman and Dorothy Cazaly. Patricia Westerford had a hearing problem that made her life a bit difficult, but she managed. Unlike most of the other characters, she grew up with a loving father who encouraged her passion for natural science, and she became a forester. Perhaps I should have a better motive for identifying with a character … but while I am an engineer on the outside, like Mimi Ma, I studied forestry before I took up engineering, and on the inside, I am all roots and shoots and leaves.
I left forestry for exactly the reasons that Richard Powers describes:
“Something is wrong with the entire field, not just at Purdue, but nationwide. The men in charge of American forestry dream of turning out straight clean uniform grains at maximum speed. They speak of thrifty young forests and decadent old ones, of mean annual increment and economic maturity.”
I worked for the US Forest Service for a summer and realized that I did not want to spend my life planting monoculture red pines for harvest. I quit, and instead, I spent it helping to devise ways to reduce air pollution from automobiles. But Patricia Westerford was wiser than I. She maneuvered herself into the field of forest ecology. It took several decades for me to realize that I could have done that too, but by then, it was too late. I was more Mimi Ma than Patricia Westerford. Well, maybe this is all to the good, as Mimi Ma was still alive at the end of the story, while Patricia, who never involved herself in the violent protests to save old growth forests that are the major topic of two thirds of the book, shot her bolt in one spectacular act of self-sacrifice. Noble as her act may have been, it turned me against her. So maybe I am not a forester at heart after all.
CONTINUED IN NEXT COMMENT
CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS COMMENT
ReplyDeleteI found the story line of Ray and Dorothy to be the most powerful one in the book. They affected me not because I could identify with them, but because they grew. I admire growth. Their life started out hard in trivial, self-centered ways, and ended up hard in ways that demanded everything from them. They may have had the happiest ending, and in letting their city yard go to pot, they were the only characters other than Patricia Westerford to produce literal seeds. Maybe I am a forester at heart after all!
The Overstory feels both profound and unfinished. Like a tree, it cannot be enjoyed or comprehended all at once. It takes time, and therefore patience. Is the message, finally, that there is hope? Or is it that all human endeavor is useless vanity, and life – and trees – will go on with or without us? Like all really good novels, this one has no definitive answers for the reader – only possibilities. Read it and decide for yourself.
END
Thanks for posting your review of the story here, Carilee!
ReplyDeleteNice that you pointed out Powers' wonderful writing in the books, something I, at best, obliquely touched on in my review. It can be too easy to get wrapped up in the power of his story, and not realize the contribution his amazing prose brings to it.
I, too, felt the last section wrapped things up a bit too quickly. But, I wasn't sure if my prejudice was because I simply didn't want the book to end, didn't want to have to be finished with Power's portrayal of our world.
It could be argued, I think, that the story of the various characters limped to an end in the final section because their lives largely did. The power of the change they underwent in the opening vignettes and into the beginning of the next section, and the power they gradually assumed they had to change the world was eventually spent with little to show for it, each realizing their ultimate powerlessness to alter the course of a civilization largely blind to the destruction being caused and it's many varied impacts and dangers. The 'seeds' Powers plants in that final section are bit like real seeds in that sense - bits of hope and promise that may portend great things, or may fail to grow.
One detail about your review. I read the paragraph of Patricia's final act in the auditorium several times, trying to clarify for myself Powers' intent. At first, I read it as you mention in your review, but, upon rereading, I came away with her not having drunk from the glass, particularly based on the "this one" in the line "Down another branch, this one...".
Well then I must re-read that piece. I was pleased at how different our approaches to the reviews were. You focused on the big picture and implications, while I nearly ignored those, though they were obvious, and wrote about other aspects. Taking the two reviews together, a reader would know exactly what he was getting into with this book.
Delete