The Overstory

The Overstory, Richard Powers. W. W. Norton & Co. (ISBN: 9780393356687) 2018.

Summary: Eight stories of nine people who lives intersect with trees and forests, whose lives, deaths, and survival are the real story.

I missed this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel when it was first published. But it kept surfacing in friends’ recommendations until I finally picked up a copy. While the story revolves around nine people, it is really the story of trees in North America, the wonder of their existence, and their plight. The novel’s organization into four parts reflects this focus: Roots, Trunk, Crown, Seeds.

In “Roots” we meet nine people in eight stories (one is a couple). In each story, their lives intersect in some ways. They range from a hearing-impaired botanist ahead of her time in discovering how trees communicate, dismissed for many years by the scientific community to a Vietnam vet whose life is saved in a plane crash by a tree. We meet a couple planted a tree in their backyard each anniversary until they began to drift apart. They are on the point of a divorce when he has a stroke. She stays and they bond over studying the forest in their backyard, including the scientist’s book. Another is an Indian boy, paralyzed when he fell from a tree, who invents a hugely successful online game while another engineer is radicalized when the tree outside her office is cut down.

In “Trunk” their stories begin to connect, like the roots of trees in a forest. Five become environmental activists, part of a movement engaged in increasingly risky actions to stop logging companies, including a couple living an amazing existence on a high platform in an old redwood marked for harvesting. Meanwhile, other researchers vindicate the botanist’s research. As an expert, she testifies in attempts to block logging. In the end, money wins over truth.

“Crown” follows a climactic event that resulted in the death of one of the activists and the dispersal of the others, and the subsequent lives of others, and in some cases, their deaths. “Seeds” describes the ways the survivors find meaning as the destruction of forests and our eco-system continues.

Woven through the account are trees. There is the chestnut on an Iowa farm that survived the blight killing all the trees in the east. A farm family chronicles in images its growth over several generations. The scientist travels the world, harvesting seeds, to create a kind of “ark”. A psych researcher is transformed into a radical after a night high up in a redwood. Especially through the scientist, we learn of the wondrous life of trees and the community they form in a forest.

It is this aspect that makes the book so compelling. The novel makes me look at the trees in my own yard differently, including the roots I encounter when I dig in most parts of the yard. It also raises an existential question. How does one live, when we seem hell-bent on destroying the very things on which our lives depend?