Review: The Overstory

The Overstory by Richard Powers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ve spent a lot of time in recent years thinking about what I like to call the “rhizomatic novel,” novels structured so that their different characters are never fully conscious of being part of the same larger story. It’s a kind of bird’s eye, or even god’s eye, view of experience. Some of the practitioners of it include many of our leading novelists: Colum McCann, Jennifer Egan and Joan Silber among them.

Richard Powers’s The Overstory is partly in that vein, but its very premise is an exploration of the rhizome – in contrast to the more apparent, geometric unfolding that we historically associate with nature. That is, even though the main characters of this book are, essentially, trees, the real science of it deals with the ways that trees interact with each other and the larger world.

One scientist character here is part of the pioneering work of uncovering the ways that trees use pheromones to communicate with one another, signaling, for instance, to their neighbors if they’ve been attacked by insects and giving those neighbors time to prepare advance defenses. Another (or perhaps it’s the same – the humans here are ultimately less interesting than the forests they seek to preserve) wonders over the way their roots sometimes merge into larger shapes, giving additional dimensions of their communication and creating a webbed, rhizomatic underground tangle that links them all.

So, I admire the fundamental architecture of this book. It’s very shape – let’s go with rhizomatic for the moment – echoes its inquiry. Forests are not collections of individual trees, we’re told, but vast ecosystems that interact. They’re richer and more wondrous than we could have imagined, or at least than we were taught to imagine.

Powers often writes with stunning beauty, and I can easily see why it’s won the National Book Award and been nominated for a Man-Booker. This is fiction as ambitious as fiction gets. It’s a novel that challenges us to see humans as nothing more than supporting players in a drama overseen by trees that, in their age and magnificence, dwarf us.

To put it in his terms, the debris that falls to the forest floor – a debris that one character describes as “mothering” the rest of life into existence – is called the understory. Powers asks us to imagine the “story” that takes place ‘over’ that, to give voice to the literal and figurative canopy that the separate trees of a forest create.

With all that upside, though, I confess I enjoy it a bit less than much of its seemingly deserved hype tells me I should.

First, I like to think that novels are, at bottom, inquiries into possibility. The ones I admire most are the ones that put all their presuppositions on the table, the ones that often end up critiquing their authors as much as the world those authors see. In this case, though, Powers makes it clear from the start – and increasingly throughout – that we are wrong and the trees are right. We are never called on to question the basic premise here. These trees are extraordinary, but I don’t think it’s as easy as the novel implies to see them as the “good guys” as against our species as the “bad guys.”

That’s oversimplifying things a bit. The different characters of the novel come to different conclusions. Some turn to violence, some to quiet support, some to academics, some to computer modeling, and some to scientific activism. In the end, though, most come to realize how limited their efforts are. They are the best allies our few remaining great trees can have, but they can do little to fight against the virus that is humanity. Our great academic, for one, eventually comes to answer the question of how we can best help the environment with a simple answer: we can allow ourselves to die so that the trees can heal themselves.

So, there’s a bleakness here that seems to be inserted into the structure of this book rather than discovered within. That puts it in the tradition, say, of The Jungle or The Grapes of Wrath, but it keeps it (for me at least) from asking to be part of that other tradition that follows the novel where it leads.

Second, I found I got the idea pretty early and then wanted more. The first half of this is gorgeous as we see the back stories of several characters who are all somehow called to take part in activism to save the great trees. The second half brings some of those characters together, and then separates many later, but their stories are never all that compelling. The real heroes are the trees; the different people we see never quite emerge as central enough to command our attention. John Dos Passos tried a similar experiment two or three generations ago to greater success (it’s no shame to say this book is less good than Manhattan Transfer or the USA triology – you can be less good than those and still come close to being a masterpiece) but he had the same challenge of making peripheral characters matter enough for us to care about them. Part of his point, as I remember it, is that we can care only so much. Some do emerge as meaningful, but many others pass by without our being allowed to invest in them.

So, as powerful as Powers’s work is here, I’d like to see it give us a little more to hold onto, a little more of human life to care about.

I admire this effort tremendously, and I’d like to take a shot at another of his novels, but I find this a notch below the best and most inspirational work I’ve read in the last several years.


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