The Overstory

If you boil The Overstory, Richard Powers' novel that won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize, down to one word, it would be "trees." To expand that a little, it would be how we as humans react to trees. It's a sprawling epic that at times gets too involved in flights of fancy, but after reading it you won't look at a tree the same way ever again.

"Trees know when we’re close by. The chemistry of their roots and the perfumes their leaves pump out change when we’re near. . When you feel good after a walk in the woods, it may be that certain species are bribing you. So many wonder drugs have come from trees, and we haven’t yet scratched the surface of the offerings. Trees have long been trying to reach us. But they speak on frequencies too low for people to hear." So writes Powers, who spins a tale covering several years and featuring a handful of characters who are introduced in the first portion of the book. They include an artist in Iowa whose family had one of the last healthy chestnut trees; an engineer whose Chinese father had an affection for a mulberry tree; the paralyzed designer of video games; a professor of forestry who posits that trees can communicate with each other; a psychology student who sets out to write a thesis on protesters and ends up joining their cause; a young woman who is technically dead for a few minutes and afterward feels a call to join protests in California to stop the harvest of old-growth forests, a wounded Vietnam vet who joins the front line of protests, and a married couple in Minnesota who, after a medical tragedy, set out to discover the plant life around them.

Some of these characters will meet each other--the artist and the young woman will spend several months together in the branches of an ancient redwood, trying to keep it from being chopped down, and the vet and the engineer will team up to chain themselves in front of a government building, and these four will team with the psychology student to plan an act that is defined as domestic terrorism. Powers weaves through these characters and teams deftly, although some of the storylines are more interesting than others.

Powers is known for experimental novels, so I was wary of this one, but it is a page-turner. He uses the trick of giving us a little information about what will happen to keep us going, such as mentioning that the engineer will one day be wanted for arson and "The boy who'll help change humans into other creatures is in his family’s apartment above a Mexican bakery in San Jose watching tapes of The Electric Company. 

Throughout the whole book is the characters' devotion to saving trees. We get some science: we share twenty-five percent of our DNA with trees (every living thing is related, after all) and: "The world had six trillion trees, when people showed up. Half remain. Half again more will disappear, in a hundred years." Powers doesn't mince words, as the corporate and government interests in clearing old-growth forests are villainous. This novel is in line with the likes of Edward Abbey, who wrote The Monkeywrench Gang, a book also about eco-terrorists, and Abbey was an unapologetic tree-hugger. If The Overstory is any evidence, so is Powers.

While the novel has a lot of plot, it does take wing at times, sometimes a bit too high. But there are several sterling passages, such as this one, of a boy's collecting items from the woods: "Months pass in amassing specimens. Owl pellets and oriole nests. The shed skin of a corn snake, complete with tail tip and eye caps. Fool’s gold, smoky quartz, silver-gray mica that flakes like sheets of paper, and a shard of flint he’s sure is a Paleolithic arrowhead." Or this one, about a group of protesters: "It’s grannies with guitars and toddlers with space-age water pistols. College students out to prove themselves worthy of one another. Preppers pushing baby carriages like all-terrain Hobbit Humvees. Grade school kids carrying earnest placards: RESPECT YOUR ELDERS. WE NEED OUR LUNGS. A rainbow alliance of assorted footwear makes its way up the trunk to the haul road—loafers and cross-trainers, backward sloping sandals, cracked-toe Chuck Taylors, and, yes, logger caulks."

The Overstory, despite needing a bit of a trimming, is still one of the best books I've read recently, and is highly recommended, especially to those who love trees and would like to see them saved.