Book Review | The Overstory
This review contains spoilers for the novel.
The Overstory by Richard Powers is a celebration of nature that won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Prior to this, Richard Powers is the recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant and a previous finalist for the National Book Award in 1996 for his novel Operation Wandering Soul and in 2006 for The Echo Maker.
Everyone owes their life to a tree, and The Overstory makes that clear from the beginning. The story is broken into parts, Roots (a collection of short stories), Trunk, Crown, and Seeds (the later sections are part of an overarching narrative that brings together the groundwork that is laid in the first section). The first story of Roots details the immigration narrative of the Hoel family setting up a generational farm in Iowa and the unlikely chestnut tree that follows them there. Mimi inherits a ring engraved with a mulberry tree after her father’s suicide. Doug falls out of a cargo plane during his service in the Vietnam War and lands in the branches of a banyan tree. Adam Appich watches the trees planted at his and his siblings’ birth mirror the fracturing of relationships with his sibilngs over time. Neelay Mehta falls in love with computers and then falls out of a tree as a teenager and becomes paraplegic, only to later found a multi-million dollar video game studio. Patricia Westerford’s father teaches her about trees and she falls in love with them so much that she is scorned by academics for investigating the ways in which trees communicate with each other.
I absolutely loved the first section of the book “Roots”, which set up each of the main characters and the trees that shaped them into the people that they are. Each story was written with so much care and each of the main characters felt lived-in, like they were people that I might meet someday. I got to the end of Nick Hoel’s family story, the first story, and even though the story was a more zoomed out look at his family’s history in America and their connection to the last surviving chestnut trees, I wanted to read more about Nick. I felt like I could read a whole novel just about his family history and how it led to his interest in artwork featuring trees. I wanted to read about Nick having to give up the family farm and trying to figure out a new life for himself without his family history. I honestly would have loved to read a full length novel about any one of these characters and I felt that they were almost too complex to be contained within short stories.
But it’s after this first section that I started to lose interest in The Overstory. I wonder if it is because the story that leads into the rest of the novel, which sets up Olivia’s character, feels extremely removed from the other character introductions. I just kept feeling like I was reading multiple books at the same time because the parallel plots felt so disconnected from each other. I think it would have been interesting to read about Olivia in a different novel, because I read her story and had a much easier time understanding where her personal philosophy was coming from but having a harder time connecting it to nature. Olivia is a college student from a privileged background who flounders in university because she doesn’t have a clue of what she wants out of her life. Olivia wanders from party to party, to and from a hasty marriage, until she is electrocuted in her bedroom and almost dies. She now swears that she can see shadowy presences around her that compel her to drop out of college in her senior year and drive west and that her visions have something to do trees. Olivia’s journey west is what kick starts the remaining two thirds of the book. While near-death experiences can be life-changing experiences, I did not find that Olivia’s sudden desire to find meaning in her life lined up well with the rest of the characters and their motivations. In addition, Olivia’s eventual place as leader of the group of main characters made even less sense to me. It seems that the only thing she has going for herself is how sure she is about her greater purpose in life
Additionally, I had a feeling that all of the main characters lost their humanness as the multiple plots introduced in the Roots section started to come together. By that I mean that the characters became less human and more stand-ins for a specific type of philosophy about the role of humans in the context of nature as well as preserving it. Nick provides the artistic perspective that trees are creatures of beauty and should be romanticized by humans. Olivia is meant to represent passionate involvement in activism. Mimi represents rationality and resourcefulness (she takes so much pride in being an engineer and being able to figure things out, after all). Doug represents the pervasiveness of greenwashing– his pride in planting saplings to replace harvested trees only enables lumber companies to take more advantage of forests. Adam is an outsider to the group of activists, but examines their activism activities through the lens of theories of human behavior. Out of the characters that are less central to the main plot, Patricia’s story is a testament to the human pursuit of knowledge, and the set-in-its-ways culture of academia that can make that goal unreasonably difficult. Neelay’s character examines the complicated relationship between humans and technology. And Ray and Dorothy’s doomed romance confuses me as to its relevance among the rest of the plot elements. At times, it felt like the characters were not people so much as they were lessons told through people, which I felt took away from the beautiful setup put together at the beginning of the novel. I honestly feel that one book is not enough space to examine all of these issues together. Though much more labor-intensive, it would have been interesting to experience a series of fiction books about climate change where we get to take a deep dive into one character and how their life is shaped by nature in unexpected ways and how they take action against deforestation. I think the messages of The Overstory could also have been conveyed in a collection of short stories that showcase how people are not separate from nature, even when we convince ourselves of it in the modern world.
To this effect, I wonder who the audience of The Overstory is supposed to be. While one of the main characters is a dendrologist, The Overstory is decidely a work of fiction and does not reference much existing scientific work about trees. On the page, the prose is flowery and complex, which both adds depth to its ideas and at times makes the language inaccessible to the average reader. After writing this whole review, I still don’t know who this book was written for.
Even with the questions I still have about the narrative and certain choices made by Powers in doing justice to the story and characters, I still feel like a more informed admirer of nature after having read The Overstory. What has stuck with me about this book the most has been the setup of the characters and the ways in which their personal and family histories are intertwined with trees. Ultimately, the themes of The Overstory changed the way that I approach nature, but as a piece of writing, it was not for me.