"Remember the trees… Remember all who tried to save them."

August 20, 2018 8:06 AM

The People In The Trees. Lynne Feeley reviews Richard Powers' novel The Overstory

The Novel That Asks, ‘What Went Wrong With Mankind?’

Powers is the rare American novelist writing in the grand realist tradition, daring to cast himself, in the critic Peter Brooks’s term, as a “historian of contemporary society.” He has the courage and intellectual stamina to explore our most complex social questions with originality, nuance, and an innate skepticism about dogma. At a time when literary convention favors novelists who write narrowly about personal experience, Powers’s ambit is refreshingly unfashionable, restoring to the form an authority it has shirked. A former computer programmer and English major at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Powers has written novels about the history of photography, artificial intelligence, nuclear warfare, race and miscegenation, the Holocaust, neuroscience, virtual reality, the chemical industry, and genetic engineering. It was only a matter of time before he took on the greatest existential crisis human civilization faces: the destruction of the natural conditions necessary for our own survival.

The most exciting novel about trees you’ll ever read

As is so often the case in Powers’s books, “The Overstory” includes a radical expert who hypnotizes us with the provocative implications of her field. Patty Westerford is a young botanist in the 1960s who discovers that “trees are social creatures”: They communicate with each other and react to their environment in dynamic and ingenious ways. (Patty’s ideas echo those of Suzanne Simard and Peter Wohlleben, popularized in the best-selling book “The Hidden Life of Trees.”) As we follow Patty’s tumultuous career from initial success to professional exile to eventual sainthood, she becomes the novel’s — and, one suspects, the author’s — green prophet. Like a double helix of Jane Goodall and Rachel Carson, Patty is that rare, cutting-edge scientist whose work reaches far beyond the lab and inspires a kind of mystical awe.

Review: The Overstory by Richard Powers

For a cadre of protesters, five of the novel’s principals, their work escalates into eco-terrorism. Halfway into the book, they begin blowing up the loggers’ equipment depots. The violence—in its extremity unlike anything the author has done—makes the skin crawl. The tragic consequences linger for years, affecting even the peaceable figures. Powers keeps the connections subtle, as in a teeming woodland, where interaction takes place “always as much belowground as above.” Two Midwestern stay-at-homes find themselves drawn into the bombers’ legal defense, and a Silicon Valley whiz, though wheelchair-bound, gives the tree scientist reason to live. In their own ways, every character confronts the question raised by a tree-sitter: “Do you believe human beings are using up resources faster than the world can replace them?” The answer, for everyone, comes “like an unblinding: ‘Yes.’”

Speaking for the Trees: Richard Powers’s “The Overstory”

However, as Powers indicates, the human lives are only the novel’s “understory”: the layer of vegetation beneath the forest’s main canopy. The overstory of the title is the story of the trees and the forest ecologies they create; throughout the novel, Powers zeroes in on the perspective of nonhuman nature, describing its lived experience closely and at length. Powers is a master of language, and the meditative prose throughout the novel is utterly engrossing, but the descriptions of these nonhuman worlds give the novel its startling impact. Take Powers’s account of the Franklin Experimental Forest, ensconced in the Cascades of the Pacific Northwest:

All the world she needs is here, under this canopy — the densest biomass anywhere on Earth. Steep, steely streams scour through rickles of rock where salmon spawn — water cold enough to kill all pain. Falls flash over ridges turned jade by moss and tumbled with shed branches. In the scattered openings, shot here and there through the understory, sit secret congregations of salmonberry, elderberry, huckleberry, snowberry, devil’s club, ocean spray, and kinnikinnick. Great straight conifer monoliths fifteen stories high and a car-length thick hold a roof above all. The air around her resounds with the noise of life getting on with it.

LOST IN THE WOODS: RICHARD POWERS’S THE OVERSTORY

I share all of the concerns animating The Overstory and agree with its implicit arguments, as well as the explicit arguments Powers himself has made, often eloquently, in interviews regarding the subject of this book. But I do not read novels to have my already existing beliefs affirmed; if anything, I read fiction hoping to have my unexamined beliefs challenged, fiction that compels me to view those beliefs from a productively skeptical distance. Most essentially, I want to read works of fiction that offer an aesthetically abundant reading experience, that remind me there are still unfamiliar practices and undiscovered forms to encounter in fiction. Until recently, I was able to find all of these things in Richard Powers’s novels, and it is the greatest disappointment of The Overstory that it suggests they may no longer be available there.

The Overstory – Richard Powers

If the “learners” don’t deliver their saving overstory soon, we are going to need “imaginers” more radical — a word with its origin in “roots” — than the characters in The Overstory. Despite the disappointing election results for Jill Stein and the Green Party in 2016, eco-activism — or even eco-terrorism — may not be as futile as the recent history in Powers’s novel seems to imply. Westerford shows that forests migrate as a response to threatening conditions. Ray Brinkman gets interested in trees by playing one that moves in Macbeth. Imagine a hundred thousand humans dressed as trees and migrated to Washington. This would be an event the “learners” and maybe politicians would register. How about a “War on Christmas (Trees)”? Fleet-footed activists come out at night and spray the trees for sale on city streets with orange paint, recalling Agent Orange and disrupting wasteful tree farms. The Kochs’ estates have trees. Could they be girdled by laser-equipped drones? Eco-suicide is also mass murder. Ray Brinkman — a man on the brink — is a lawyer who argues that if the planet is our home, humans have the right to defend it. Florida has a “hold your ground” law. Imagine protesters breaching the fences at Mar-a- Lago and taking back our home. Twenty years ago, I published a novel (Passing Off) in which an eco-terrorist intends to bring down the Parthenon, which she considers a symbol of building mania in a city surrounded by deforested mountains. A scholar has recently claimed that a scene on the Parthenon frieze approvingly depicts human sacrifice. I have begun to wonder if only the sacrifice of human lives can slow down, if not prevent, environmental catastrophe in the future.

The Overstory review: A ranter’s sermon

His characters are in the main idealists, and in the main they are unexamined. They preach the sermon of trees to others and they preach it to themselves when they are alone. This high-octane earnestness is self-defeating. The authors lyricism thrown away in the pursuit of another assertion of the essential nature of trees, the tree lore, tree science, tree philosophy, tree wonder, and their elaborate vocabularies. You want it to work but have your doubts. Rapture is inward-looking. How Americans see the ground under their feet, the colonisers’ unfulfilled desire for absolute possession. An insistence on wrestling meaning from the land, shaping it to templates, expecting it to carry meanings, turning nature into self-regard.

The only response is to leave it to its own devices and humans can’t and won’t do that.

Richard Powers: 'We're completely alienated from everything else alive'
'We've yet to figure out how to live here, in this world,' says Richard Powers, author of the powerful novel 'The Overstory.' Writing it, he says, 'quite literally changed my life, starting with where and how I live.'

Feeley was a student at Cornell during the Redbud Woods controversy in 2005. The grove is marked by a plaque.

posted by the man of twists and turns (16 comments total)

I'm not going to read any of the links yet (in fact, I didn't even read the quoted paragraphs) because I'm only a quarter of the way into it, but it's a great novel, totally unlike anything I've ever read, and my wife and I are acquiring a much greater appreciation for the greenery around us. I'll come back and investigate the links when I've finished it; meanwhile, thanks for the post!
posted by languagehat at 8:12 AM on August 20, 2018 [3 favorites]

If you read only one link, read the first.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:22 AM on August 20, 2018 [2 favorites]

I FUCKING LOVE THIS BOOK, and Richard Powers' work in general. Do yourself a favo(u)r and pick it up!
posted by lalochezia at 8:26 AM on August 20, 2018 [3 favorites]

I’m huge Powers fan and I’ve had The Overstory sitting untouched on my coffee table for months. Thanks for the kick in the pants to get reading.
posted by not_the_water at 8:54 AM on August 20, 2018

As the review in the first link notes, "A reader of Richard Powers’s new novel The Overstory may find herself baffled by the structure of the narrative." That was my experience - I gave up after 100+ pages - I won't say any more, so as not to offer any spoilers for those who are going to (or currently) reading it....
posted by PhineasGage at 9:23 AM on August 20, 2018

As Lynne Feeley's piece in the first link says: "The novel does not rise, grow tense, combust, resolve, and fall as we expect novels to do."

Upon finishing, I had been disappointed by the lack of resolution but now I see it as Powers's deliberate choice to make the story stick with the reader, perhaps planting the seeds for a generation of Loraxes.
posted by whuppy at 9:58 AM on August 20, 2018 [1 favorite]

I read Galatea 2.2 in '97 or '98 and then went back, read everything he wrote before it, and have read almost everything since. I saw a review that called the experience of reading his books "the reward of a liberal arts education," because he sweeps up so much-- biology and computer science and music, mostly, but art and history and philosophy too.

If you've not read him before, maybe start with Gain. It's probably the most accessible of his books and I find myself thinking of it more often than anything else I've ever read. Or maybe Echo Maker. Just try one!

Somehow I completely missed this book's arrival, though, so thanks to MoTaT for the post-- now I know how I'll spend my evenings for the next few weeks!
posted by martin q blank at 10:40 AM on August 20, 2018 [1 favorite]

If you've not read him before, maybe start with Gain. It's probably the most accessible of his books

I just made this recommendation 3 days ago to my cousin, in almost these exact words. Are you my dopelganger?
posted by lalochezia at 10:50 AM on August 20, 2018 [1 favorite]

I'd bet Kathleen Turner is a fan based on the last line from her Vulture interview: "I’m a tree now where the trunk is strong enough, and the roots are deep enough, that I can branch out in any direction: teaching, acting, my cabaret endeavor. And I’m getting stronger all the time. So let’s find out what I can do."
posted by chavenet at 11:07 AM on August 20, 2018

I loved this book. It's wonderful storytelling. I read it months ago, and had to remind myself that I really felt that Powers cares much more for the trees than for the people, and while he just takes the work to the edge of being preachy, his message is clear -- trees sustain us, but will not be there forever if we don't wake up and take care of them in return. I found that the ending was not satisfying, but that that in itself is a call to arms, not to be satisfied that we care enough about the natural world.
posted by OHenryPacey at 11:17 AM on August 20, 2018 [1 favorite]

I loved this book, and the first link- it's an essay-review- is really excellent.
posted by hap_hazard at 11:34 AM on August 20, 2018

I want to read this, adding it to a wishlist now. I don't want to spoil too much now, but is this book really examining the lives of plants? I've long suspected our attitudes towards living things without faces has been dangerously ignorant. If any life is supposed to be precious in some way, we should never exclude plants.
posted by GoblinHoney at 1:47 PM on August 20, 2018

I'm reading this now, though so far just the first three chapters/stories. I confess I haven't read the links or reviews so I don't know if the stories are connected--other than the theme of trees--but at this point it seems a collection of short stories. He's a good writer!
posted by zardoz at 2:55 PM on August 20, 2018

The Woman Redeemed By Trees, Richard Powers

Real life starts in graduate school. Some mornings in West Lafayette, Patricia Westerford’s luck scares her. Forestry school: Purdue pays her to take classes she has craved for years. She gets food and lodging for teaching botany, something she’d gladly pay to do. And her research demands long days in the Indiana woods. It’s an animist’s heaven.

By her second year, the catch becomes clear. In a forest management seminar, the professor declares that windthrow should be cleaned up and pulped, to improve forest health. That doesn’t seem right; a healthy forest needs dead trees. They’ve been around since the beginning. Birds use them, and small mammals. More forms of insects live on them than science has counted. She wants to raise her hand and say, like Ovid, how all life is turning into other things. But she doesn’t have the data.

Soon, she sees. Something is wrong with the entire field. The men running American forestry dream of producing straight, clean grains at maximum speed. They speak of thrifty young forests and decadent old ones, of mean annual increment. These men will have to fall, next year or the year after. And up from the downed trunks will spring rich new undergrowth. That’s where she’ll thrive.

posted by the man of twists and turns at 5:04 PM on August 20, 2018 [1 favorite]

The Woman Redeemed By Trees, Richard Powers

FYI, This is a short story that makes up a significant part of the book (the overstory).
If you don't want to read spoilers/mess with the flow of the book.... don't read this!
posted by lalochezia at 8:27 PM on August 20, 2018

Excellent post and I'm off to buy the book. Thanks!
posted by WalkerWestridge at 9:09 AM on August 22, 2018