The Overstory

The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.

I had a vague idea what Richard Powers' The Overstory was going to be about – a love letter to trees and an appeal for their protection – but after having been so intellectually moved and challenged by my only other Powers read (2014's Orfeo), I was really expecting more from this novel. I appreciate how hard it is to find the right balance between fact and story when writing a work of Ecofiction – and as shown by that opening quote, Powers is certainly aware that a good story can do more to sway minds than would a polemical screed – but this book simply doesn't get the mix right; what starts as an engaging and emotionally satisfying character-driven story becomes, in its latter half, dull and pedantic. The greatest irony is how much paper this 500 page book employed in boring me.

The first section of The Overstory is called “Roots”, and in it we are introduced to nine characters, in eight sections, and through tales of their childhood/early adult lives, we learn who they are; each storyline referencing a seminal tree and what it has meant to their psychic development. This section felt totally organic and provocative and I was prepared to love the whole thing. I was also noting a bunch of neat turns of phrase in this section, and everything about the writing was delighting me thus far:

• The sky is so stupid with blue that it looks like it was slathered on by a primary-schooler with finger paints.

• He's the best worst actor she has ever seen. He just speaks his lines, with a lanky gall and astonishing naïveté, as if he's putting forward the case for his own existence in front of the End of Time Debate Club.

• The cold tests their will to live. Nights in the gap-riddled cabin zero their blood. They must crack the ice in their water basin every morning just to splash their faces. But they are young, free, and driven – the sole backers of their own existence.

And when Neelay falls out of an oak, looking up through its canopy from the ground, I thought, “This is how you make a reader care about the majesty of trees”:

The dome above him hovers, a cracked shell about to fall in shards all around him. A thousand – a thousand thousand – green-tipped, splitting fingerlings fold over him, praying and threatening. Bark disintegrates; wood clarifies. The trunk turns into stacks of spreading metropolis, networks of conjoined cells pulsing with energy and liquid sun, water rising through long thin reeds, rings of them banded together into pipes that draw dissolved minerals up through the narrowing tunnels of transparent twig and out through their waving tips while sun-made sustenance drops down in tubes just inside them. A colossal, rising, reaching stretching space elevator of a billion independent parts, shuttling the air into the sky and storing the sky deep underground, sorting possibility from out of nothing: the most perfect piece of self-writing code that his eyes could hope to see.

But after this engaging beginning, the next section, “Trunk”, begins to entwine the characters' stories, and as four of them meet as environmental activists, this reads as a long and dull infodump as they speak to each other about deforestation and the dangers to humanity of clearcutting the “most wondrous products of four billion years of life”. One of the other characters is working on an MA in Psychology, and he seems only to be present in order to make statements about in-group favoritism and confirmation bias (and other explanations for humans being blind to the effects of their actions). When he meets up with the four activists, the psychologist observes that they “strike him as a Jungian archetypical family: Maidenhair, the Mother Priest; Watchman, the Father Protector; Mulberry, the Child Craftsman; and Doug-fir, Child Clown.” Is it good writing to be overt about such things? 

Another character is a tree fanatic who prefers to live in the woods after her academic career was derailed by her controversial theories, and her offbeat beliefs and enthusiasm seemed lifted from Peter Wohlleben and his The Hidden Life of Trees; yet, the ideas that I found engaging in Wohlleben's nonfiction, I found to be unconvincing in Powers' novel. And this fiction/nonfiction comparison isn't incidental: further to that opening quote about the importance of a good story (which is repeated more than once), two other characters are a long married couple who disagree about whether fiction or nonfiction makes for better reading material (and eventually the nonfiction reader is brought around to the novel). This couple is interesting in that he is a patent lawyer (and therefore believes that ownership is the foundation of civilisation) and she is a free spirit stenographer who refuses to be owned (reinforcing the idea that it is ridiculous for humans to think that they can “own” and dispose of a thousand year old forest). As an aside: As a childless couple, I found it touching when they began to fantasise about having a daughter out in the world when they reach old age, and since Maidenhair/Olivia says early that she likes to lie about her parents' jobs (calling her father a human rights lawyer and her mother a writer [“a fact-like scenario”]), I honestly began to wonder if this “Mother Priest” who talks to trees was supposed to have been conjured from the beyond by this couple's longing. Maybe I'm reading too much into that throwaway line about inflating her parents' jobs? The final character is an early coder who develops one of the first massively popular Civilization-type MMORPGs and he watches in bemusement as this “god game” speeds up all the excesses of Capitalism, with players foregoing fun in the name of accumulating wealth and despoiling the online environment. I also found this character and the analogy of his game to be overt and heavy-handed. With swipes against Monsanto, Israel, and Wall Street, this section of the novel could be lifted from any activist's playbook.

After the “Trunk” section escalates to an act of ecoterrorism, the plot jumps ahead twenty years in “Crown”, with the various characters living out their lives in nonactivist roles. And in the concluding section, “Seeds”, people remember what they once were fighting for and history marches off into the future.

What do all good stories do? They kill you a little. They turn you into something you weren't.

Here's the thing: this story did not kill me a little or turn me into something I wasn't. Powers seems so self-aware about what he was trying to accomplish, and as he has already proved himself capable of challenging and expanding my mind with his writing, I am left disappointed on all fronts. I can't call this a success, despite agreeing with the importance of the message.

One of my Goodreads "friends" began his own review with the statement, "I reckon everyone has a tree story." So, here's mine:

I have always been a townie, afraid of forests and the woodland creatures that lurk therein, and having not grown up with any particularly remarkable tree in our suburban yards or ever a trip to the woods, trees have not played a big part in my life; but, of course, I like them. When, many years ago, I started walking my dog Libby every day, tracing the same 5k route every morning, I couldn't help but be visually drawn to a huge oak tree that stands at the entrance to a small green space (the "Portuguese Swamp") that abuts one of the subdivisions that we walked through. A couple of times Libby and I veered from our route to see how this natural area changed with the seasons, but the stony mud pathway was hard on her paws and didn't really lead to anything; we didn't often venture in, but I did regard that massive oak just about every day.

It eventually occurred to me that I could take a picture of that tree at its pinnacle of every season -- from snow-laden winter, through budding spring, full-leafed summer, and blazing fall -- and one year, I began that photography project. Every day as we walked into view, I would consider that oak and whether it was, indeed, at its seasonal pinnacle, and in that way I took a picture in the winter, in the spring, and in the summer. And then that August, three years ago now, Libby died rather unexpectedly. I stopped walking. I never took my fourth picture of the oak that continues to stand, with an overstory looming far above and oblivious to the pain of earthbound human loss.

In The Overstory, Richard Powers makes much of the passage of time on a nonhuman scale -- how could greedy lumber companies cut down redwoods older than Christianity to make planks and shingles? -- and I couldn't help but think of my own centuries-old oak tree that has already outlived my beloved dog and my walks and my project, and will no doubt outlive me as well. Had Powers kept his story at this human level, I might have liked it better.


Man Booker Longlist 2018:

Snap by Belinda Bauer

Milkman by Anna Burns

Sabrina by Nick Drnaso

Washington Black by Esi Edugyan

In Our Mad And Furious City by Guy Gunaratne

Everything Under by Daisy Johnson

The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner

The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh

Warlight by Michael Ondaatje

The Overstory by Richard Powers

The Long Take by Robin Robertson

Normal People by Sally Rooney

From A Low And Quiet Sea by Donal Ryan

I just barely squeaked in reading the Man Booker Prize shortlist this year - after having to order half the titles from England - and I really don't know if any of them stand out to me as "a real Booker winner to stand the test of time". In order purely of my own reading enjoyment, I'd rank the shortlist:

The Long Take
Washington Black
The Mars Room
Everything Under
The Overstory
Milkman 

* The prize was eventually won by Milkman, my least favourite of the shortlist, so what do I know? *