Review by Robert McCool
Richard Powers' (Gain, The Goldbug Variations) 11th novel is titled “The Overstory”, ISBN 978393635522, and it displays his powerful storytelling in his best effort to date.
Barbara Kingsolver (The Poison Bible; Unsheltered,a Novel) has called the book, “Monumental.... A gigantic fable of genuine truths.”
The novel is, in fact, about the life of trees and the nine people whose lives are shaped by them. An artist in the Midwest, a Chinese- American family, one underwhelming college student, a lawyer and his partner, an Air Force veteran, a computer programer who's code branches much farther than its organic origins, an Environmental Scientist who lives amid her wild wards, and a student who dies, then is reborn as a tree activist.
But it's the trees whose story needs to be told. How they grow, communicate with each other, and supply medicines and food for us.
They do talk, through their roots and branches, at a speed much slower than we can perceive, and they protect each other from invasive infestations and weather, and from us, as it were.
They live under valued by us. They serve as the cleanser of our air and water, pulling carbon out of the environment while we pour more at them at an alarming rate.
And they die, leaving behind corpses that feed other insects and saplings on the forest floor.
They die from disease, like the holocaust of the American Chestnut blight. And they die by our hand, such as clear-cutting the Pacific Northwest, and the holistic raping of the giant redwoods in the west. It's not just happening in the Brazilian rainforest and Thailand, it's happening here, in our own country.
It's this wave of death that calls to the humans in the story, making them urgent activists. Two of them live in a giant redwood for almost a year, until their abode is cut down as they escape. Six of them form a movement of confrontational resistance, which leads to burning down an under construction ski resort and the death of one character in that violence.
The book is about the aftermath of that fierce passion they poured out of their lives. Lives that are altered forever by the unintentional death they flee from into hidden existences. Still, two are captured and imprisoned.
The Scientist finds her work finally appreciated, a life validated by a new perception of her subject.
The computer programmer builds a vast game that expands with each new version, aiming to at last code a model of the world with all its incredible complexity.
The lawyer suffers a stroke, and looks at his backyard trees with a new type of perception, with a newly defined care-giving relationship from his spouse.
The Chinese-American woman sheds her past life of outrage and becomes a new identity as a counselor who feels deep pangs of guilt because of her two imprisoned ex-patriots. She searches for meaning in her new life and the reason for her past life.
This book can cause strong reactions, for one way or the other, but it makes you think like a novel rarely does. The fiction is the characters who inhabit the very real truth of the trees. The words flow effortlessly on the page and into your mind, a spark of intellect that Richard Powers writes like a gift from God.
Read this book and never look at a tree in the same old way again.
