The Overstory

This book is divided into four parts. The first part has the structure of an anthology, telling several different stories of unrelated characters, whose stories are all thematically intertwined in the way by which their relationship with the natural world typified by the presence, use, and destruction specifically of trees, affects their lives. The subsequent two parts of the novel weave all of these disparate characters together, and creates a unitary narrative in which they become eco-terrorists, which is totally awesome. The final section has them again coming apart, with a healthy dose of commentary on the disparity in their lives and the outcomes of their actions bases on their past and status. When reading the first section, it wasn’t clear to me what structure the book would settle on. I thought it would continue to be structured like an anthology, which to me, assuaged the risks of setting the book down for a long period to focus on other tasks. A fatal error. When I returned to the book, and it expected me suddenly to remember all the characters I had supposedly just read about, I was in a deplorable stupor. This might explain why I loved the first 1/4th of this book, but struggled through the following 3/4ths. Allow this quote to serve as a thesis statement:

“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….

He has no other way to say what so badly needs saying. Our home has been broken into. Our lives are being endangered. The Law allows for all necessary force against unlawful and imminent harm...

In mounting excitement, he sees how he must win the case. Life will cook the seas will rise. The plants 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.”

When this argument is proffered, near the end of the novel, the concept of “the speed of trees” has been being slowly constructed under your nose. The speed of trees spans generations of families and society, tying them together in surprising ways, tearing them apart in others. It recalls the Overview effect, a shift in worldview reported by some astronauts after viewing the blue marble of the Earth from a figuratively bird’s-eye view. That we are temporary members of nature contextually embedded in an ecosystem, for which we are responsible, is well-known and uncontroversial. The Overstory effectively imbues that somber reflective overview with charged human emotion, tying our whole society as intimately as it ties our individual life with the natural world. The Overstory is far from a perfect book. The irritants in its lofty writing style are munificent. It’s not even really a vital or pivotal book: Only the most benighted among us need any convincing at this point that the environment is like, good, dude, and only the most fervently mawkish among us need a narrative involving specific characters to come to that realization emotionally. It would be like someone suddenly thinking that the Vietnam War is bad because they just watched Star Wars. Still, the book is filled with passions and paeans that are likely to speak to you if you, like me, quake in the night with apprehensive vexation for the fate of the Earth.

Loved the scope of this and its overall kind of aura. But, man, the back third really dragged ass. Satisfying conclusion and it's the kind of book that has forever changed my brain in good ways. Really wish I could read The Secret Forest— but maybe The Hidden Life of Trees will suffice.

It could be the eternal project of mankind, to learn what forests have figured out.

The Overstory is really a lengthy love letter to trees more than it is a novel. Almost everything in the book is tied to trees in one way or another. The characters and plot all seem secondary to this tree theme. At the same time, though, the book follows nine different characters. It can be hard to keep them all straight and stay invested in all of them. Really my biggest complaint is that the book is probably twice as long as it needs to be to tell the same story. You'll find yourself reading a loving and vivid description of a tree or a laundry list of tree facts about every 10 pages. However beautifully written, these tree digressions wear thin after some time. The book is spread so thin across its many characters that many of them felt flat to me.

Despite all my complaints, the beginning of the book works pretty well as a collection of short stories. I think you also get the overall message that we should respect trees more from just those first 150 or so pages.

This is a fascinating book with agenda: we're fucking up the planet in the name of “progress.” Furthermore, the people who try to do something about it are persecuted (and prosecuted). It's hard to disagree with that, unless you assume, as some do, that destruction of the environment is inevitable and that human invention will give us ways to cope (although the book suggests we're not capable of dealing with the catastrophe we're creating.

Having said that, the book is confusing, with loads of characters that are, at first, hard to distinguish. The first third of the book is made up of separate narratives as each character or set of characters is introduced. Only a third of the way in do they begin to intersect, although even from the beginning the tree theme connects. Lots to think about.

This complex novel is structured like a tree. The section headings tell you that as soon as you look at the table of contents. In the opening section, Roots, you're introduced to a group of characters from several different walks of life who are all drawn (Close Encounters style) to the West Coast, where a fight is underway to save ancient stands of redwood and Douglas fir trees. Some of them meet in activism while others seem to be on the periphery of the story. However, they are all struggling in one way or another with prevailing attitudes about the importance of trees in the world.

Following sections, Trunk, Crown, and Seeds deal with the characters' activism, a cataclysmic event, and the results years later. I don't want to give too much away.

The characters are all fascinating and it's easy to get caught up in following them and feeling their feelings. On another level, though, the human characters are not the most important part of the story. This book reminded me of a non fiction book I read called Stone: an Ecology of the Inhuman, by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Cohen portrays stone, a seemingly inert substance, as active, dancing, even collaborating with people, but in a time frame that we have trouble appreciating. So it seemed to be in The Overstory. It is hard for humans to appreciate the close connection between themselves and trees when trees move at such a comparatively slow rate (and can live for so much longer than humans, which makes them look even more like mere material). The book asks us to step back from our human perspective and look at life on earth from a more expansive place—from the perspective of tree time, or even geologic time.

So, there is a definite story, a plot which is structured in a certain way, and which is engrossing, with interesting characters. There is a point, or a moral (don't read this book if you object to obvious points to the story). The two work together to make a rich, layered book that I found satisfying to read.

A huge book about a group of humans trying to save the living sentinel of our earth - trees. Richard Powers's writing is beautiful and lyrical, bringing trees to life in a way no encyclopaedia nor textbook ever could.

The human characters are nowhere near the number of trees that populate this book, but for a novel, there are many: 9. We meet them individually then together: the descendant of a farming family, a second generation Chinese American, a bright but odd kid, a lawyer and the woman he can't live without, a young, scarred soldier, a crippled tech genius, an academic, and a beautiful uni drop out.
Many of them meet within the second half of the book and become members of a radical green movement to save the earth from human plunder.

I normally shy away from books with a strong message but the writing is so evocative, the information on trees so fascinating, and the author's presentation of the human experience so unique that the 500 plus pages didn't feel heavy.

This was not an easy book to read, but it is one that will make you look at trees and plants with a lot more respect and wonder, and it could be the one to make you realise the real cost of our neglect of the environment.

I'm one-handed this week, so typing is a difficult, hunt-and-peck sort of adventure. But that's just an excuse thrown out there; the truth is that I'm one-brained and I'll never be anything more than one-brained, and that is reason I'll never be able to share with you the amazingness of Richard Powers and his incredible multi-brained, multi-dimensional novels. To read a Richard Powers novel is to leave this world forever (know this: you'll never be able to sit through another tedious sit-com, another banal lunchroom chitchat, without wishing you could transport to quietly reread a page, a paragraph of one of his books instead...it may destroy real life for you) for the beauty of words. I can do no more than sit, with my hands folded, in admiration of the rush of words and ideas in this novel, like I'm enrapt on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon at dawn.

So just ignore this review; I'm not worthy of reviewing this book,. I feel privileged to have read it. You read it. Anyone can, in the last remaining democracy, the democracy of the written word. Please read it, and think about it, and try to share it with others.

A few beautiful quotes:

“If he could read, if he could translate....If he were only a slightly different creature, then he might learn all about how the sun shone and the rain fell and which way the wind blew against this trunk for how hard and long. He might decode the vast projects that the soil organized, the murderous freezes, the suffering and struggle, shortfalls and surpluses, the attacks repelled, the years of luxury, the storms outlived, the sum of all the threats and chances that came from every direction, in every season this tree ever lived.”

“He pacing, filled with that stomach-flop feel that comes with leaping into the blue. Half terror, half thrill: Everything scattering on the air. We live, we get out a little, and then no more, forever. And we know what's coming—thanks to the fruit of the taboo tree that we were set up to eat. Why put it there, and then forbid it? Just to make sure it gets taken.”

And this warning:
“What you make from a tree should be at least as miraculous as what you cut down.”

Challenge accepted.

The most irritating book I've ever read. Irritating in that uniquely American way, with all the usual faux pas related to identity. It's schmaltzy, overwrought, and littered with sentences that pained me to read.

“It's what his muscles know, especially that largest muscle in his inventory - his soul.” 

🤮🤮

This is a book that introduces a cast of very interesting characters, all of which I'm curious to see how they will interact with trees (this book's main focus is trees) and how they will interact with each other. 
It loses me a bit after the halfway point, mainly because I found things were getting a little convoluted, and it was somewhat hard to keep up. The latter third of the book is terribly bleak in ways I didn't quite feel prepared for, and in very humane ways that I felt had been distanced for so long in this book that it almost felt out of place.
That being said, I did find myself intrigued and interested in the characters and what they were doing and trying to accomplish, which is why I overall found myself enjoying this.

This was my Award Winning Book (2019 Pulitzer Prize Fiction) to read for May and it took me 20 days. If you like to read about trees and how their existence intertwines with our own lives and future of mankind then this is the book for you. Nine characters are involved in the story line and tells how trees affected their lives. Read this for the story and education of what this planet is losing!
DN