tl;dr

An essential, vital novel.

opening remarks

James Bradley was insistent that I read The Overstory by Richard Powers.  I’m not saying he’s been asking me every second day if I’ve read it, but I’ll be asleep or in the middle of a meeting, or taking a dump, and suddenly there’s James Bradley, on Facebook Messenger, enquiring as to whether I’ve started The Overstory.  So, just to shut him up, I’m going to read this vast novel.  Apparently, it’s about trees.

knee-jerk observations

The opening chapter is set around the 1850s, where newly arrived immigrant Jorgen Hoel meets Vi Powys in Brooklyn.  They get married, travel out to Fort Des Moines in the newly established state of Iowa and begin to farm the land.  Vi becomes pregnant, but it doesn’t end well.

In the space of four or five pages, fifty years pass by.  Jorgen Hoel dies, his eldest son takes over the farm and all the while the one remaining chestnut tree watches on.  However, in 1904 chestnuts are under attack from a blight that eradicates them in the thousands.  (This is the first time I’d heard of the great chestnut blight of 1904).

Horrible and fascinating in equal measure. 

Since 1903 three generations of Hoel’s have taken a single photo, every month, of their lone chestnut tree.  I provide that context so you can experience the full, astonishing effect of the following excerpt:

The Hoel chapter ends in tragedy – for the family, not the chestnut tree – but rather than linger, the next section of the book concerns Winston Ma who left China before Mao’s Communist revolution.  He brings with him to America three jade rings and an ancient scroll.  In this scene, Winston’s daughter, Mimi, is shown the rings for the first time.

The centuries-long life-cycle of the fig, beautifully depicted by Powers.

This is the opening sentence of Neelay Mehta’s chapter:

Not every tree in this novel is made of wood.

I’m only a quarter of the way through The Overstory, but I’ve learnt more about trees and the eco-system than at any other point in my fourty-three years on this planet.  That’s both an indication of how passionate the novel is on the subject and an indictment on how little I know.

College University student, Olivia Vandergriff was dead for a good minute after accidentally electrocuting herself.  Since her heart restarted, she’s been guided by ‘beings of light’ who have a mission for her.  I assume it has to do with trees.

“So stupid with blue…”

A third of the way through and our narratives are starting to converge.  Olivia meets Nick Hoel – it’s his family who photographed the chestnut tree – and both of them head off to protest the cutting down of redwoods.  Mimi’s office looks out on a small pocket of pines that are also facing the axe.  She loves these pines, their scent of vanilla reminds Mimi of her father. At the same time Doug Pavlicek (introduced to us earlier in the novel), whose plane was shot down during the Vietnam War and who now spends his days planting trees, sees the announcement for a Town Hall meeting about the very pines that Mimi so loves. 

All those twirling blades and talk of shredding and grinding.  The suggestion of an abattoir is deliberate.

One massive tree:

“Our brains evolved to solve the forest…”

The Gist Of It

There isn’t an ounce of subtlety in Richard Powers’ novel Overstory.  This is not a bad thing.  I hate confrontation, but when anti-vaxxers, flat-earthers and climate change deniers are influencing public policy (well, maybe not the flat-earthers) its time to shoot for the heart rather than the head.  Richard Powers does precisely that.  His passion for the environment, his fury at the wanton destruction of the forests, his deep love for trees in all their variety and complexity makes abundantly clear as to how poorly we’ve treated the natural world.  Given the novel is 500 pages long, it’s astonishing that Powers can sustain the intensity, pitched at 11, and maintain the reader’s interest.

He achieves this by introducing us to eight very different but sympathetic characters.  Nick Hoel is an artist living in the crumbling ruin of his family farm; Mima Ma is an engineer haunted by the suicide of her father; Adam Appich is an autodidact whose life changes when he reads the work of a famed psychologist; Ray Brinkman and Dorothy Cazaly are a married couple drifting apart; Douglas Pavlicek is a Vietnam veteran looking for a cause; Neelay Mehta is a disabled software developer who creates complex, insanely popular, virtual worlds; Patricia Westerford is an academic ridiculed by her colleagues when she posits that trees communicate with each other; and, finally, Olivia Vandergriff, is a student who, following a near-death experience, believes spirits are communicating with her.  Olivia is the lynchpin that draws most of these characters together.  Her desire to save the trees becomes an obsession for followers like Douglas, Nick and Mima.

The majority of environmental novels I read are science fiction dystopias where the climate is fucked, the forests have vanished, and half the planet is flooded.  There’s a pessimistic (and to be fair realistic) tone to these stories (unless, of course, it’s written by Kim Stanley Robinson) that strive to understand how we will survive as a species.  Reading a book that provides a recent history of how humanity has gradually destroyed the ecosphere isn’t so much pessimistic as anger-inducing.  For a good chunk of this book, I was in a state of apoplexy as capital and greed take precedence over conservation and protection of our resources.  This is a novel that not only opened my eyes to the glory and majesty that is a single chestnut tree but also reinforced how little I know about the intricate connections and interactions that make-up the natural world.

The novel does run out of puff toward the end, it’s possibly 50 pages too long, but that doesn’t undermine how essential and vital this book is.  Maybe it’s all too late; maybe The Overstory is a pointless scream into a deep, uncaring void, maybe those science fiction dystopias are all we have to look forward to.  Still, I’m heartened that this book exists.

Finally, take a bow, James Bradley.  You drove me mad, but you were right about this book.