The Overstory
Author: Richard Powers
Publication Date: April 2018
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Monuments are traditionally created for that which is past. The Overstory is a monument to that which currently surrounds us – sentience, in thousands upon thousands of forms. This is a novel full of people, but truly peopled by trees. And trees talk a lot. They warn each other about infectious species. They share food. Old trees even help new seedlings grow. This is a novel about how trees survive, and how we fail to learn from them.
Powers’ story alternates between the viewpoints of nine characters. Each character enters the story with an inclination for detachment, and experiences a life-altering form of fundamentally displacing root shock. There is Adam, the psychology student who knows everything and believes nothing. Nick loses his entire family. Patricia loses her calling and community. Everyone has an identity crisis; everyone, at some point, feels lost, alone, is temporarily blinded by fury or despair. What brings them together is trees, and what forests show them is the necessity and authority of time.
Environmental stewardship is immensely challenged. Telling people to behave differently implies that they are behaving wrongly. In The Overstory, by placing human motivations in the context of “tree time,” the concept of the individual breaks down into a sum of largely selfish and unimportant actions. Social hierarchies and material values appear as irrelevant and petty when a tree as old as Christianity is butchered to put money temporarily in pockets. Creating empathy so far removed from our sense of want, immediacy, and personal relevance is difficult. So Powers utilizes the lens of greatest possible empathy – that of his characters. He creates characters that are fundamentally broken, and then heals those characters with the patience, dignity, and generosity of trees. Each person pours themselves into that new form of life they discover in a mutualistic relationship between their own salvation and that of the trees. It is this mutualism that makes the loss of trees devastating, and that enables the weight of each non-human death to impact readers. Ironically, the magic of the characters is that they allow us to empathize not just with their excruciating experience, but also with their ultimate insignificance in comparison to the trees they each come to love.
Through his storytelling, Powers delivers something more powerful than any polemic manifesto. As much as any activist, Powers illuminates the reciprocities of nature. He is both a romanticist, believing in and striving for harmony, and a student of potential apocalypse, advocating the transformation of human relationships. The effect is more comprehending and resigned than hopeful. He devastates readers into responsibility, into idealism, and into the combination of the two that must exist to save the forests he imbues with a life richer than our own.
- D. K. Nuray
