The Overstory
By Richard Powers

Reviewed by Margaret Kolb

Kafka said that we should only read books that “wound and stab.” It’s usually not clear, though, how even the most powerful books stab, and what kind of scars they leave behind. Not so for Richard Powers’s latest novel, The Overstory (2018), which will force you to stop whatever it is you are doing and stare, dumbly, at trees. Every trunk and curl of bark, each bump of root, every stump and woodchip—you will see these majestic beings as chroniclers themselves. Curiosity, gratitude, and regret will throb through you.

Like Powers’s previous eleven novels, The Overstory grows from a mind-blowing question. In this case: What if we could hear trees? Long before Richard Powers, George Eliot wondered the same thing. “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life,” she muses in Middlemarch (1871), “it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.” In other words, if we could register even a fraction of the life that surrounds us, we would be overcome. A full-fledged Victorian, Eliot isn’t as interested in squirrels and grass as she is in the hum and buzz of interior human lives. Richard Powers, by contrast, wants to know if we could hear the grass grow, and live to tell the tale. His answer? Yes. For now, through art.

“The tree is saying things, in words before words,” The Overstory opens. Among other things, the tree says “There are more ways to branch than any cedar pencil will ever find.” Powers’s novels branch, too. They have always been forged from the interactions of narrative threads so different that they appear, at first, disjoint. In a novel about trees, this long-standing narrative strategy completes a mind-warping fusion with narrative subject: The Overstory’s strands branch, bend, and fuse, stretching toward one another across generations to arrive at nine central characters, whose varied experiences converge on the vanishing forests of the Pacific Northwest. We watch this disappearance from varied angles and perspectives, tracking—to name a few—a psychologist grappling with the problems of inaction, a scientist researching the sociality of trees (research that leads at one point to her expulsion from the academy), a paraplegic code-whiz whose branching codes grow ever-newer, ever-greener worlds, and a group of activists and tree sitters seeking to slow logging on public lands. The novel is shaped like a tree, not only in its branches, but in its chronology. We move from Roots, to Trunk, to Crown, to Seeds.

It will come as no surprise that a novel about trees is a tragedy. It is, after all, entitled The Overstory, succinctly encapsulating that ultimate readerly tragedy: the story is over. You may take it as a given that the novel chronicles environmental devastation and human unwillingness to accept responsibility for it. At the smaller scales of particular human or plant, the novel is, if anything, more brutal. Chestnut blight strikes a lone, lofty survivor. A young woman is electrocuted. Beloved giants are felled, despite years of occupation by tree sitters. People fall from trees, commit suicide, are poisoned by carbon monoxide. Yet even as the novel trains our eyes on these varied tragedies, it sketches out what hope might look like, as all good stories do. Leave it to Powers to make that germ of hope a mind-warping account of the powers of fiction. “The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind,” Adam, the psychologist, tells the group of activists. “The only thing that can do that,” he says, “is a good story.”

Therein lies this novel’s plan: it will change you, and ask you to share the story outward, or in other words, to sow its seeds. And whether or not The Overstory is itself a good story (more on this below), its seeds will stick to you. You will want your friends to read The Overstory, so that you won’t have to be alone as you look at trees. You will want to branch and reach for new bits of sky yourself, as you hurry to gather The Diary of Anne Frank for its chestnut tree and The Great Gatsby for that “green breast of the new world” elegized so briefly; you’ll flip through Hawthorne for his tangled, sin-laden forests, and Whitman, Thoreau, and Emerson for their prophesies about land and trees, brooks and leaves. You will dust off the tree encyclopedia that fell to the wayside the day after you bought it. Lyrical Ballads will pulse through you as you walk down the street. Perhaps you will even return to Richard Powers’s own Plowing the Dark, just to see if this seed was always there in his writing, waiting to grow. In other words: read at your peril: you will not emerge from The Overstory the same human, and your previous literary touchstones will be rewritten, whatever they may be.

Even for a reader staunchly committed to the power of the novel, this result remains astonishing. It is all the more surprising, given Powers’s relative weaknesses as a novelist, which the novel manages to wear proudly and almost without consequence. In one telling description, forestry expert Patricia Westerford imagines telling not just some of what she knows, but all she knows. Powers is similarly liable to see totality as a narrative virtue; a polymath who is seemingly interested in everything, he is prone to field-specific jargon and cheesy coding metaphors. Embarrassingly thin characters traverse plots that border on the cliché, among them several manic pixie dream girls (few of Powers’s novels escape this class of being). Powers’s enthusiasm can fizz over unsuspecting readers like an over-shaken soda; to choose one example from many similar candidates, try out: “All the razzmatazz of life on Earth is a free-rider on that mind-boggling magic act.” And his close-third person narration, particularly of female characters, will give some readers pause. Consider, for example, this woman contemplating adultery—“She’s going to be bad. Stupid bad. Do things she never imagined she could do. New things”—which sounds for all the world as if Deep Blue were attempting to update Anna Karenina.

What’s most remarkable about Powers is that he can rebound from lines like these, not just shamelessly, but downright gracefully. This novel is rescued from ambition—and other nontrivial infelicities— by aspiration. Less manically eager to knit plot threads together with the precocious ingenuity that readers love, but also love to hate, in Powers’s novels, The Overstory aspires to do what no novel in the Powers canon has yet attempted: stand still. “A thing can travel everywhere, just by holding still,” the trees in the novel insist. In the most powerful act of a novel filled with activism and heroic acts large and small, a suburban couple does just that, letting their lawn go to seed. It is harder than it might seem. “Mobilize your inner will,” Dorothy thinks to herself as she greets a neighbor eager to mow her lawn. “Summon all the memory of a life lived.” For all the grisly deaths, cheesy affairs, and sugar-coated descriptions of gaming, this novel reckons with the natural world with a thoughtful awe that places it gently in line with Whitman, Hawthorne, and Thoreau; at the same time, The Overstory’s broad historical span (from the chestnut blight of the 1860s to Occupy Wall Street) harkens to the form’s sprawling, nineteenth century roots. As always, Powers is simultaneously grandiose and touchingly humble about this achievement. (“Nothing we make will ever match sunlight,” an artist working on VR reflects in Plowing the Dark (2000)). “They also serve who only stand and wait,” Milton said, and Powers gives these lines a narrative heartbeat, as one of our most feverish of novelists allows his novel to stand, and even to wait.

This stillness means that if you can forgive the novel its fizz, abundant recompense awaits. At his best, Powers gives narrative voice to a stunned stutter of wonder: “And then people will do what four billion years have shaped them to do: stop and see just what it is they’re seeing.” This novel is not Middlemarch. It does not strive ever deeper into the inner lives of richly detailed characters. Think instead of The Overstory as a contemporary parable, stocked with coders and academics instead of shepherds and merchants. Like other parables, this one doesn’t tell us much about coders or academics, but instead forces us to reckon with ourselves, and with that question that Eliot bypasses so casually in her great social novel. What if we could hear the grass grow? And why, not having yet heard it, would we ever seek to do anything else? This is, after all, why we turn to fiction, and why we hope, each time we pick up a novel, that it will stab us. Pick up The Overstory. The wound will be fresh long after you’ve finished.