A Review of The Overstory by Richard Powers
James E. Lassiter
Richard Powers
2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Buy and read this book. Within you will
find yourself as you presently are. That is, your understanding of Life and
humankind’s place within it. From reading it you might also find and become a better
person.
Who are you now? Here are two reviews of The Overstory that reveal some of you,
standing above and separate from nature:
The Atlantic called
the novel "darkly optimistic" for taking the long view that humanity
was doomed while trees are not.
The Guardian was
mixed on the novel, claiming that Powers mostly succeeded in conjuring
"narrative momentum out of thin air, again and again." (Wikipedia)
Others of you stand here, within, a part
of nature:
Library Journal* called the book "a deep
meditation on the irreparable psychic damage that manifests in our unmitigated
separation from nature.”
Ron
Charles of The Washington Post offered up
effusive praise, writing that this "ambitious novel soars up through the
canopy of American literature and remakes the landscape of environmental
fiction." (Wikipedia)
Other Reviews (Amazon.com)
“Should be mandatory reading the world over.” - Emilia
Clarke
“The
best book I’ve read in 10 years. It’s a remarkable piece of literature, and the
moment it speaks to is climate change. So, for me, it’s a lodestone. It’s a
mind-opening fiction, and it connects us all in a very positive way to the
things that we have to do if we want to regain our planet.” - Emma
Thompson
“An
ingeniously structured narrative that branches and canopies like the trees at
the core of the story whose wonder and connectivity echo those of the humans
living amongst them.”
“This
book is beyond special.… It’s a kind of breakthrough in the ways we think about
and understand the world around us, at a moment when that is desperately
needed.” - Bill McKibben
“The
best novels change the way you see. Richard Powers’s The Overstory does this. Haunting.” - Geraldine Brooks
“A
towering achievement by a major writer.” - Robert Macfarlane, author
of Underland
“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.” - Nathaniel
Rich, The Atlantic
“Monumental… The Overstory accomplishes what few
living writers from either camp, art or science, could attempt. Using the tools
of the story, he pulls readers heart-first into a perspective so much
longer-lived and more subtly developed than the human purview that we gain
glimpses of a vast, primordial sensibility, while watching our own kind get
whittled down to size.… A gigantic fable of genuine truths.” - Barbara
Kingsolver, The New York Times Book
Review
“A
big, ambitious epic.… Powers juggles the personal dramas of his far-flung cast
with vigor and clarity. The human elements of the book―the arcs his characters
follow over the decades from crusading passion to muddled regret and a sense of
failure―are thoroughly compelling. So are the extra-human elements, thanks to
the extraordinary imaginative flights of Powers’s prose, which persuades you on
the very first page that you’re hearing the voices of trees as they chide our
species.” - Michael Upchurch, The Boston
Globe
Characters
Nicholas Hoel - an artist of Norwegian and Irish
descent who comes from a long line of farmers and whose great-great-great
grandfather planted a chestnut tree that survived blight for decades and
enthralled the Hoel family for generations.
Mimi Ma - the eldest daughter of Winston Ma, born Ma Sih
Hsuin, who fled China and became an engineer in America. Mimi falls in love
with the Mulberry bush he plants in their backyard and is deeply affected when
her father eventually commits suicide.
Adam Appich - an inquisitive boy who is
fascinated with insects and later becomes interested in human psychology and
how humans can only understand things that are put into narratives. His father
planted a tree before the birth of Adam and each of his four siblings; as a
child, Adam conflated the characteristics of each tree with his siblings.
Ray Brinkman - a conventional property lawyer
and Dorothy's husband who later in life falls in love with nature.
Dorothy Cazaly - an unconventional stenographer
who falls in love with nature late in life.
Douglas Pavlicek - an orphan who enlists in
the Stanford prison experiment before
enlisting in the Air Force. After being discharged he wanders across America,
realizing as he does so that deforestation is
ruining the country. He signs up to plant seedlings, only learning after the
planting of his fifty thousandth seedling that this effort does nothing to help
the trees and only contributes to their destruction at the hands of logging
companies.
Neelay Mehta - the child of Indian immigrants,
Neelay spends his life building computers and creating computer programs in
Northern California. Despite being paralyzed when he falls out of a tree as a
child, he goes on to become a computer programming marvel, eventually creating
a series of video games called Mastery inspired by trees,
deforestation, and colonization.
Patricia Westerford - a dendrologist with a hearing
disability, Patricia spends most of her childhood and adulthood enthralled with
trees. When she accidentally discovers that trees are capable of communicating
with each other, her research is widely mocked leading her to contemplate
suicide. She eventually finds work as a park ranger where, years later, she
discovers that her work has been redeemed and expanded upon.
Olivia Vandergriff - a young woman in her early 20s
who lives an impulsive and reckless life until dedicating her life to
protesting deforestation. (Wikipedia)
Nicholas
Hoel, Mimi Ma, Adam Appich, Ray Brinkman, Dorothy Cazaly, Douglas Pavlicek,
Neelay Mehta, Patricia Westerford, and Olivia Vandergriff are people who had
unique relationships with trees which occasionally led to tragedy or salvation.
In
1989, when Olivia Vandergriff is one semester away from finishing college, she
gets high and is accidentally electrocuted, briefly dying. Upon being revived,
she comes to believe that higher powers are trying to give her a message. After
seeing a news story about a group of activists trying to protect the remaining
3% of giant redwood trees, she decides that her
purpose is to join them. On her way there, she meets Nicholas Hoel, now 35
years old, and at a loss of what to do with his life as the life insurance
money he lived on is gone. He has sold the Hoel farm, the Hoel tree is dying,
and his art is a commercial failure. After talking to Olivia, he decides to
join her in her mission.
At
the same time, in Portland, OR, Mimi Ma, the daughter of a Chinese engineer who
dies by suicide, is rising up the corporate ladder when she sees that a small
group of trees by her building are scheduled to be destroyed by the city. She contemplates
attending a town hall meeting to protest their removal but before she can, the
city cuts down the trees in the night. Douglas Pavlicek, a veteran who has
spent 5 years of his life replanting trees for major companies only to become
disillusioned when he discovers that his work actually enables additional
logging of old-growth stands, walks by the trees and sees them being cut down.
He tries to prevent their destruction and is arrested. When he returns to the
trees he is confronted by Mimi Ma, who quickly realizes he is not a city
employee but an environmentalist. The two band together to start joining in
protests against environmental destruction.
Nick
and Olivia join a group of nonviolent radicals and give themselves
"tree" names, Nick becoming Watchman and Olivia being Maidenhair.
When they are asked to tree sit in a giant redwood called Mimas for two weeks,
Olivia leaps at the chance. Their stay ends up lasting for more than a year,
during which they watch as the forest around them is clear-cut. They are
eventually joined by Adam Appich, who is doing a thesis on environmentalists.
The night he is there Nick and Olivia are finally forced out of the tree and
arrested so Mimas can be cut down. Nick and Olivia decide to do more work in
Oregon.
Mimi
Ma and Douglas continue going to protests where they are brutalized by the
police and arrested. Mimi is eventually fired from her job and, like Douglas,
becomes a full-time activist.
Changed
by his time with Olivia and Nick, Adam goes to Oregon to rejoin them, and meets
Mimi Ma, now going by the name Mulberry, and Douglas, going by Doug-fir, who
are part of the same activist camp. He stays with them a month and they believe
that they are finally achieving something until their camp is destroyed by the
forest authorities and law enforcement. In the altercation Mimi and Douglas are
both badly injured. In retaliation the group sets fire to logging equipment.
Pleased by the results, they set two more fires intending the third to be their
final act. During the final arson Olivia is injured and dies, and the four
remaining activists burn her body and scatter. The fire is deemed the work of a
crazed killer and the logging continues.
Mimi
Ma sells a priceless heirloom her father passed down, which ensures that she can
reinvent herself. Nick becomes a vagrant, Douglas a BLM ranger, and Adam
returns to academia.
Douglas
is still haunted by what happened and writes down everything in his journal
using everyone's forest names. Nevertheless, his journal is discovered and the
FBI arrests him. In order to protect Mimi Ma he decides to give up one name and
goes to New York City where he locates Adam and reminisces with him about the
fire. Fingered by Douglas, Adam is arrested and sentenced to 140 years in
prison, which strikes him as a small price to pay as it is barely any time in
tree life.
Mimi
Ma, who is now living and working as an unconventional unlicensed therapist of
sorts, hears about the arrests and realizes that Douglas turned in Adam to
protect her.
Living
in the forest, Nick creates a giant message from branches and dead logs that
can be read from space. He is helped in this project by a Native American man
who happens to be passing by, and later by some of the man's family. The
message, which reads "Still," will be legible from space for 200
years before it is absorbed into the forest. (Wikipedia)
Excerpts
84¶3&4
“When
you spend all your hours with horses, your soul expands a bit until the ways of
men reveal themselves to be no more than a costume party you’d be well advised
not to take at face value. … The greatest flaw of the species is its
overwhelming tendency to mistake agreement for truth. Single biggest influence
on what a body will or won’t believe is what nearby bodies broadcast over the
public band. Get three people in the room and they’ll decide that the law of
gravity is evil and should be rescinded because one of their uncles got
shit-faced and fell off the roof.” (Douglas)
106
¶4ff
“We’re
evolution’s third act.” … “Biology was phase one, unfolding over epochs. Then
culture throttle up the rate of transformation to mere centuries. Now there’s
another digital generation every twenty weeks, each subroutine speeding up the
next.” 1. Biology, 2. Culture, 3. Digital. (Neelay)
108¶1
“The
[free internet commons] are becoming enclosed. The gift culture will be
throttled in the cradle.” Me: by private companies – a capitalization of
one-on-one freedom. (Neelay)
142¶1
“Her
trees are far more social than even Patricia suspected. There are no
individuals. There aren’t even separate species. Everything in the forest is
the forest. Competition is not separable from endless flavors of cooperation.
Trees fight no more than do the leaves on a single tree. It seems most of
nature isn’t red in tooth and claw, after all. For one, those species at the
base of the living pyramid have neither teeth nor talons. But if trees share
their storehouses, then every drop of red must float on a sea of green.”
(Patricia)
144¶1
“They
[the trees] aren’t self-reliant. Everything out here is cutting deals with
everything else.” (Patricia)
Me: All persons featured in the book are in
search of true meaning in and purpose for their lives. Not just any purpose or
meaning but one that respects and promotes the sacredness, the specialness of
Life.
220
“She
marvels again at how the planet’s supreme intelligence could discover calculus
and the universal laws of gravitation before anyone knew what a flower was
for.” (Patricia)
221¶3
“The
smell of her red cedar pencil elates her. The slow push of graphite across
paper reminds her of the steady evaporation that lifts hundreds of gallons on
water up hundreds of feet into a giant Douglas-fir trunk every day. The
solitary act of sitting over the page and waiting for her hand to move may be
as close as she’ll ever get to the enlightenment of plants.” (Patricia)
222¶1
“Hope
and truth do nothing for humans, without use.”
233¶2
“The
psyche’s job is to keep us blissfully ignorant of who we are, what we think and
how we’ll behave in any situation. We’re all operating in a dense fog of mutual
reinforcement. Our thoughts are shaped primarily by legacy hardware that
evolved to assume that everyone else must be right. But even when the fog is
pointed out, we’re no better at navigating through it.” (Adam’s undergrad
prof.)
235¶1
“Legacy
cognitive blindness will forever prevent people from acting in their own best
interests.” (Adam)
282
“The
judge asks, ‘Young, straight, faster-growing trees aren’t better than older,
rotting trees?’”
“’Better
for us. Not for the forest. In fact, young, managed, homogenous stands can’t
really be called forests.’ The words are a dam-break as she speaks them. They
leave her happy to be alive, alive to study life. She feels grateful for no
reason at all, except in remembering all that she has been able to discover
about other things. She can’t tell the judge, but she loves them, those
intricate, reciprocal nations of tied-together life that she has listened to
all life long. She loves her own species, too – sneaky and self-serving,
trapped in blinkered bodies, blind to intelligence all around it – yet chosen
by creation to know.” … “I sometimes wonder whether a tree’s real task on Earth
isn’t to bulk itself up in preparation to lying dead on the forest floor for a
long time.”
“The
judge asks what living things might need a dead tree.
“’Name
your family. Your order. Birds, mammals, other plants. Tens of thousands of
invertebrates. Three-quarters of the region’s amphibians need them. Almost all
the reptiles. Animals that keep down the pests that kill other trees. A dead
tree is an infinite hotel.’”
297¶4
“This
cause they have given themselves to - this defense of the immobile and
blameless, the fight for something better than endless suicide appetite – is
all they have in common.” (Mimi thinking of Douglas)
305¶9ff.
“I
want to start a seed bank. There are half as many trees as there were when we
came down out of them.” … “One percent of the world forest, every decade. An
area larger than Connecticut, every year.” … “A third to a half of existing
species may go extinct by the time I’m gone.” … “Tens of thousands of trees we
know nothing about. Species we’ve barely classified. Like burning down the
library, art museum, pharmacy, and hall of records, all at once.” “I want to
start an ark.” … “I don’t know [what I’ll do with the seeds]. But a seed can
lie dormant for thousands of years.” (Patricia)
336¶8
“The
best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that
can do that is a good story.” (Adam)
345
“A
little time must be bought from the approaching apocalypse. Nothing else
matters more than that.” (author on Adam)
348
“What
the hell am I doing? The clarity of recent weeks, the sudden waking from
sleepwalk, his certainty that the world has been stolen and the atmosphere
trashed from the shortest of short-term gains, the sense that he must do all he
can to fight for the living world’s most wondrous creatures: all these abandon
Adam, and he’s left in the insanity of denying the bedrock of human existence.
Property and mastery: nothing else counts. Earth will be monetized until all
trees grow in straight lines, three people own all seven continents, and every
large organism is bred to be slaughtered.” (author on Adam’s thinking)
364¶2
“Reason
is what’s turning all the forests of the world into rectangles.” (author on
Douglas’s thinking)
386
On
“Failure” and “What the Fuck Went Wrong With Mankind” … “We’re cashing in on a
billion years of planetary savings bonds and blowing it on assorted bling. And
what Douglas Pavlicek wants to know is why this so easy to see when you’re by
yourself in a cabin on a hillside, and almost impossible to believe once you
step out of the house and join several billion folks doubling down on the
status quo.” (author in Douglas’s thinking)
389¶3
“The
reporters ask why her group, unlike every other NGO seed bank on the planet,
isn’t focusing on plants that will be useful to people, come catastrophe. She
wants to say: ‘Useful is the catastrophe.’ Instead, she says, ‘We’re banking
trees whose use haven’t been discovered yet.” … “But their eyes glaze over when
she tells them how all these threats [plant diseases in areas of forest
decline] are made fatal by one single thing: the ongoing overhaul of the
atmosphere by people burning once-green things.” (Patricia)
394¶3
“Myth.
Myth. A mispronunciation. A malaprop. Memories posted forward from people
standing on the shores of the great human departure from everything else that
lives. Sending off telegrams composed by skeptics of the planned escape, saying
Remember this, thousands of years from now, when you can see nothing but
yourself, everywhere you look.” (Patricia)
395
‘The
first two great rolls of cosmic dice: the one that took inert matter over the
crest of life, and the one that led from simple bacteria to compound cells a
hundred times larger and more complex. Compared to those first two chasms, the
gap between trees and people is nothing at all.” (life…eukaryotes)
432¶10
“The
world had six trillion trees, when people showed up. Half remain. Half again
more will disappear, in a hundred years. … Reason is just another weapon of
control. How the invention of the reasonable, the acceptable, the sane, even
the human, is greener and more recent than humans suspect.” (author on Adam and
Adam)
448¶1
“Defiant
hope.” (Adam’s scholarly interest)
453-54
“‘We
scientists are taught never to look for ourselves in other species. So we make
sure nothing looks like us! Until a short while ago, we didn’t even let
chimpanzees have consciousness, let alone dogs or dolphins. Only man, you see:
only man could know enough to want things. But believe me: trees want something
from us, just as we’ve always wanted things from them. This isn’t mystical. The
‘environment’ is alive – a fluid, changing web of purposeful lives dependent on
each other. … Our brains evolved to solve the forest. We’ve shaped and been
shaped by forests for longer than we’ve been Homo sapiens.’
“‘Men
and trees are closer cousins than you think. We’re two things hatched from the
same seed, heading off in opposite directions, using each other in a shared
place. That place needs all its parts. And our part…we have a role to play in
the Earth organism.…’
“‘Trees
are doing science. Running a billion field tests. They make their conjectures,
and the living world tells them what works. Life is speculation, and
speculation is life. What a marvelous world! It means to guess. It also means
to mirror.’
“‘Trees
stand at the heart of ecology, and they must come to stand at the heart of
human politics….’”
“‘If
we knew what green wanted, we wouldn’t have to choose between Earth’s interests
and ours. They’d be the same!’”
“First
there was everything. Soon there will be nothing.”
480-81
“Wilderness
is gone. Forest has succumbed to chemically sustained silviculture. Four
billion years of evolution, and that’s where the matter will end. Politically,
practically, emotionally, intellectually: Humans are all that count, the final
word. You cannot shut down human hunger. You cannot even slow it. Just holding
steady costs more than the race can afford.
“The
coming massacre was their authority – a cataclysm large enough to pardon every
fire the five of them set. The cataclysm will still come, he’s sure of it, long
before his seventy plus seventy years are up. But not soon enough to exonerate
him.” (Adam thinking in his prison cell)
496¶2
“This
is how it must go. There will be catastrophes. Disastrous setbacks and
slaughters. But life is going someplace. It wants to know itself; it wants the
power of choice. It wants solutions to problems that nothing alive yet knows how
to solve, and it’s willing to use even death to find them. (Neelay thinking
about a new computer ‘game’)
497¶7-8
“Stand
your ground. The castle doctrine. Self-help. If you could save yourself, your
wife, your child, or even a stranger by burning something down, the law allows
you. If someone breaks into your home and starts destroying it, you may stop them
however you need to. … Our home [Earth] has been broken into. Our lives are
being endangered. The law allows for all necessary force against unlawful and
imminent harm. (Ray, one-time property lawyer now paraplegic, thinking) Life
will cook; the seas will rise. The planet’s lungs will be ripped out. And the
law will let this happen, because harm was never imminent enough. Imminent, at
the speed of people, is too late. The law must judge imminent at the speed of
trees. (author on Ray’s thoughts) Me:
This is why the band plays on, lawfully, righteously.
501¶4
“The
word tree and truth come from the same root.” (Nick)
502¶6
“This.
What we have been given. What we must earn. This will never end.” (Nick’s
thoughts)
__________________________
*
- Finnell, Joshua. "The Overstory
[review]." Library Journal 143,
no. 2 (February 2018): 96.
