Literary fiction

Review: I Cheerfully Refuse

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Cover image of "I Cheerfully Refuse" by Leif Enger

I Cheerfully Refuse

I Cheerfully Refuse, Leif Enger. Grove Press (ISBN: 9780802165190) 2025.

Summary: In a dystopian America, Rainy and Lark carve out a joyful life until tragedy sends Rainy on a Lake Superior odyssey.

I don’t typically select books this way. Looking at a table of new works at my local store, the cover art of this book caught my eye. The description sounded like a modern day odyssey. And the author was from Minnesota. Having had a good experience with another Minnesota author, William Kent Krueger, I thought I’d give Leif Enger a try. I’m so glad I did, though amid the goodness, truth and beauty of the story was heartbreak and terrible darkness.

The setting is Lake Superior in a not-too-distant future America. Societal order, the economy, and the climate have collapsed. The country is controlled by sixteen multi-billionaire “astronauts.” Some semblance of societal order is maintained by pharmaceuticals developed aboard “ships of horror.” Children are rated on a “feral scale” and medicated. And if it all becomes intolerable, a little slip of paper with a drug called “Willow” will help you end it all. And some are having “Willow” parties. Libraries have closed and books are becoming an increasingly scarce commodity.

Rainy and Lark have somehow carved out a joyful life together. He’s a big bear of a man who paints houses, plays bass guitar, often with a local band, but sometimes just to comfort his friends. Lark is a former librarian with a big heart and a passion for books. She runs a second-hand bookstore in a bakery, scouring estate sales for book collections. Lark taught Rainy to sail, going to a place called “The Slates,” where they had a somewhat mystical encounter they believed was with Molly Thorn, thought to be dead. Consequently, they buy and re-hab an old sailboat.

Lark, in her open-heartedness brings home a fugitive, Kellen. He has run away from one of the pharmaceutical ships. Perhaps the fact that he had in his possession an unpublished work of Molly Thorn’s, I Cheerfully Refuse, sufficiently seals the deal and he stays with the couple. But tragedy strikes the night of Lark’s birthday. Kellen has disappeared. After a futile hunt, he returns home to find his home destroyed, and Lark brutally murdered. A stranger, an older gentleman, who he later learns is Werryck, ran the ship Kellen had fled, and has been around the town, and through the book, has traced Kellen to their house. That’s why Kellen has gone.

Not only that, Werryck is after Rainy. Whatever they tore up the house looking for is still missing. So, Rainy takes to his boat. The only destination he can think of is “The Slates,” hoping perhaps he will find Lark there. Along the way, he is joined by Sol, a young girl he rescues from an abuser, buying her with his bass. Together they endure Superior’s terrible storms, scrape together an existence, outsmart a corrupt bridge operator, and search for an old relative who once cared for her.

The novel asks the question what kind of people will we become and what kind of communities will we form when the societal order fails? Along the way, amid the corruption, Rainy and Sol will find outposts of goodness. But what kind of person will Rainy, who has lived by goodness, supporting his friends, become? He faces his greatest test when he becomes Werryck’s captive.

Rainy’s sailing journey on Lake Superior strikes me as a modern-day Odyssey. Will he, in the end, find home? And how will the journey have changed him? Also, not unlike Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Enger confronts us with a very possible dystopia, asking us what kind of people we would be in such times. He does all this in a compellingly beautiful story.

Review: Early Autumn

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Cover image of "Early Autumn" by Louis Bromfield

Early Autumn

Early Autumn, Louis Bromfield. Open Road Media (ISBN: 9781504073394) 2022, first published in 1926.

Summary: Olivia Pentland, in a loveless marriage in a rich old family, faces choices as the early autumn approaches when she turns 40.

I’ve long had an interest in Ohio-born author Louis Bromfield. Bromfield was a best-selling novelist in the 1920’s, winning the Pulitzer Prize for this work. In the 1938, he returned from Paris to his home town of Mansfield, Ohio, purchasing a worn out piece of farmland that he renamed Malabar Farm, building an elegant home that was the site of the wedding of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. I’ve toured the home, camped with Boy Scouts on the farm, and read two books on his early experiments with sustainable agriculture, Pleasant Valley and Malabar Farm. But until now, I’ve not read any of his fiction, which I suspect is largely neglected these days.

The story is set in the fictional town of Durham, Massachusetts at the estate of the Pentlands, a rich but declining old New England family. The central character is Olivia Pentland. Though Scotch-Irish and of a lower class, she had a dark beauty and her own wealth. As a young girl, a marriage to Anson Pentland appeared promising. Twenty years on, she found herself in a loveless marriage. Anson was in love with writing his family’s history but no longer slept with Olivia, Their daughter, Sybil was turning 18, their son and heir, John, was sickly, and the shadow of death hangs over this narrative.

The one person Olivia shares the deepest bond with is Anson’s father, John. He is still in many ways the family head at the Pentlands, even as Olivia makes the household work. His wife is still living, but confined to a wing of the home, having descended into insanity and cared for by Miss Egan, who is secretly having an affair with Higgins, their groom. While visiting his wife every day, John Pentland also has had a close companionship with Mrs. Soames.

During the summer before Olivia is to turn forty, John’s niece, Sabine Callendar and her daughter Therese have come for a visit, staying at a cottage owned by Michael O’Hara, an upstart Irish politician who has built a new estate nearby. Sabine represents the family scandal, having lived a libertine life in France. She is resented by Aunt Cassie, the family Puritan determined to maintain the rectitude and reputation of the Pentlands. But Sabine’s presence is the catalyst for Olivia to realize the confining character of her own life at Pentlands. The loveless marriage, the strictures of what’s appropriate, and the secrets lurking behind the pious appearances. Not only that, Olivia fears her daughter will inherit all this.

Not only that, Sabine brings Olivia together with Michael O’Hara. O’Hara had been riding horses with Sybil. When Olivia joins to discover his intentions, she learns his interest is in her, not the daughter. Through the summer, romance kindles between them. Meanwhile, she finds a bundle of letters revealing a family secret that will wreck the pretensions of the Pentlands. That includes Anson’s book. Then a young man arrives from France who had met Sybil during a visit and is seeking her hand. He’s a man of character and the two really love each other. But this won’t go down well with the Pentlands.

Things come to a head as autumn and Olivia’s birthday approaches. What will she do about O’Hara? About her daughter? About the messed up household of the Pentlands, which somehow has ended depending upon her? Among all those trying to influence and define her, she is confronted with what she wants in her life at this important juncture, and what kind of person she will be.

I liked the way Bromfield builds up to the crisis we all see is coming. In addition, in developing the character of Olivia, we come to appreciate her strength, quiet beauty, and deep sadness. The novel harks back to a different time, a blend (or clash?) of Regency, Victorian, and Continental sensibilities in a New England setting. Written a century after Jane Austen’s novels, I found it had more in common with these than more recent works. Perhaps that is why people aren’t reading Bromfield these days. But this is Bromfield at his best, and well worth the read.

My reviews of Bromfield’s non-fiction:

Pleasant Valley: https://bobonbooks.com/2015/10/08/review-pleasant-valley/

Malabar Farm: https://bobonbooks.com/2015/10/26/review-malabar-farm/

Review: It’s A Battlefield

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Cover image of "It's a Battlefield" by Graham Greene

It’s A Battlefield

It’s A Battlefield, Graham Greene. Open Road Integrated Media (ISBN: 9781504053976) 2018, first published 1934.

Summary: The private “battles” of those connected with Jim Drover, a bus driver convicted of murder for killing a policeman.

Jim Drover was convicted of the knife murder of a policeman about to bludgeon his wife, Milly, during a demonstration. He was sentenced to die by hanging. The action in this story involves the people who know Drover and their efforts to secure a reprieve. As they do so, we see figures involved in private battles. The title refers to a battle in the Crimean War where a fog isolated soldiers from the larger battle, so they ended up fighting individually, without a sense of the whole but just trying to survive.

The Home Secretary has asked the nameless Assistant Commissioner to give him a report of what effect an execution will have on Communist demonstrations. Jim’s brother Conrad, the “brains” to Jim’s “braun” tries to find a way to secure his release. He solicits the efforts of the Communist party with only desultory results. Conrad urges Milly to persuade the policeman’s widow to sign a release, which she does under pressure. However, no one holds out much hope for the petition. Milly’s sister Kay goes to bed with Mr. Surrogate, a widower who is an influential Communist economist to solicit his support, but also to satisfy her own urges. Both Surrogate and the Assistant Commissioner try to persuade Caroline Bury, a society influencer to use her influence. All of this is to no avail.

The reports the Assistant Commissioner receives suggest that the response to Drover’s impending execution will be indifferent. There is the question of doing justice, since Drover was defending his wife. But he hides behind his duty to enforce the law, and that the determinations of justice lay with others.

Meanwhile, as Conrad Drover and Milly recognize the apparent futility of their efforts, they end up in bed, a release but unsatisfying. This was not the “look after Milly” he promised his brother…or was it? Struggling with guilt and ineffectuality, he buys a gun and begins stalking the Assistant Commissioner.

Greene portrays a group of people with no great purpose or vision, who are just trying to get through life, and survive the battle that is life. Conrad, in his desperate plan at least strives for something more–if nothing else to do “something” for his brother. Even the usually conscientious Assistant Commissioner sits on the report. In the end, Jim Drover, who defended his wife, looks the most heroic. But over all seems to hang the bleak curtain of a faithless and indifferent modernism.

Review: Shadow Ticket

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Cover image of "Shadow Ticket" by Thomas Pynchon

Shadow Ticket

Shadow Ticket, Thomas Pynchon. Penguin Press (ISBN: 9781594206108) 2025.

Summary: Private detective Hop McTaggart hunts down a missing cheese heiress, from Milwaukee to Europe, in a series of madcap capers.

Hicks McTaggart, a one-time strikebreaker, has tried to settle down into a more sedate life as a private detective, working for Unamalgamated Ops in Milwaukee. Instead of bashing heads, he gets the goods on wayward spouses. He has a colorful bunch of “associates”, from mobsters to Nazis. He frequents speakeasys and bowling alleys. Then, along comes the request to track down a missing cheese heiress, Daphne Airmont. Her father, Bruno, is the “Al Capone of cheese” but as the cheese wars heat up, he’s skipped town on a sub, taking him to Europe.

After avoiding a car-bombing and wanting to evade the local authorities investigating a murder he didn’t commit, Hicks decides to take the case. Daphne is following her lover Hap Wingdale, a clarinetist, to join his swing band. But Hicks is one step behind. He lands in Chicago to find she’s off to New York. He heads to New York to find she’s on a boat to Europe. After a night out, he wakes up to find himself on another ship.

Pynchon is just warming up. Hicks gets involved in a series of escapades with Interpol agents and spies, traveling from Belgrade to Budapest, hunting down Ace Lomax, Bruno Airmont’s right hand man, strikes up a relationship with Terike, a woman motorcyclist, and finally finds Daphne in a club in Budapest. I’ll leave the rest for you to discover.

All this is set with the 1930’s as backdrop–Communism appealing to workers and radicals, Europe trying to recover from the great war only to face and in some cases welcome) the rise of Hitler. Some reviewers try to draw parallels to the present day. I’m not so sure that Pynchon isn’t just playing with us. But I do see various figures trying to grab for money or love before it all goes to hell.

One of the challenges of the book is the dialogue, the “argot” as it were of this particular type of underworld. And scenes shift rapidly as various characters move in and out of the narrative.

I’ve not read Pynchon before, so I had no idea of what to expect. Vineland sits on my “to read” pile. We’ll see if I keep reading Pynchon after that. I’ll leave it to others to recommend what’s best to read of Pynchon’s. But I suspect that, despite the achievement of publishing this at 88, this is not his best. But at least he’s alive and writing!

Review: Emma

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Cover image of "Emma" by Jane Austen

Emma

Emma, Jane Austen. Penguin Classics (ISBN: 9780141439587) 2003 (first published in 1815).

Summary: A beautiful, rich young women with no interest in marriage makes a series of disastrous assumptions in matchmaking for her friend.

I went through most of this work viewing Emma Woodhouse as a most unlikable character–rich, class-conscious, and with an exaggerated estimate of her ability to understand others. As it turns out, that was Austen’s intent. Before beginning to write, she wrote, “I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like.” On that count alone, Austen succeeds.

Emma Woodhouse is the younger daughter of Henry Woodhouse, a wealthy but frail (or at least he believed himself to be) and fussy old man. Emma’s mother died when she was young. Her older sister Isabella is married to John Knightly and they live in London with their five children. Emma is the lady of Hartfield, wealthy and lacking for nothing and attentive to her father. She insists she is content to remain single.

She also thinks she played an important role as matchmaker with her former governess, Ann Taylor, who marries a widower, Mr. Weston. As a married couple, they live nearby and visit regularly. Mr. Weston has a son by his first marriage, Frank Churchill, raised by his uncle and aunt at Enscombe. The latter plays a controlling role in his life, keeping him close by through her ill health. However, when he finally visits, he manages to stir up trouble.

But Emma does well enough on her own account. She becomes a mentor to Harriet Smith, who supervises younger girls at Mrs. Goddard’s boarding school. The daughter of a successful tradesman, she is attractive, winsome, but untrained in the ways of society. While boarding, she stayed for a summer at Abbey Mill Farm, at the invitation of Elizabeth Martin, one of the students. During this time, she became acquainted with Elizabeth’s brother Robert, who took a liking to her.

Robert Martin was a young, hardworking farmer, well-esteemed by those who knew him. For someone like Harriet, it would have been a good match and he proposed. Enter Emma, who has befriended Harriet. Before Emma tries to make a match for Harriet, she helps break one, influencing Harriet to believe she could do better. That is, she could marry a higher class of person. So, she turns down the match.

George Knightly thinks Emma has misguided her friend. George, who is called Mr. Knightly throughout, is a leading figure in Highbury and owns Donwell Abbey, a large estate. Abbey Mill Farm is part of the estate and so he knows and thinks highly of Robert Martin. He believes Robert would have been a good husband to Harriet. Throughout the novel, Knightly is a friend to Emma, the kind who sees more wisely than she, though it will take some time for her to accept that.

Much of the novel unfolds the successive misguided schemes of Emma to make a match for Harriet. First there is Reverend Elton, who Knightly correctly realizes wants to marry into money, which Harriet doesn’t have. Then there is Frank Churchill, who instead seems to flirt with Emma. Finally, because he acted kindly toward her, Harriet thinks Mr. Knightly might care for her, which Emma supports until she discovers that Mr. Knightly loved another.

In addition to failing her friend, the appearance of two other women give Emma her comeuppance. One is Augusta Elton, who is even more unlikable, arrogantly so, than Emma, who is gracious and pleasant if misguided. Emma gets a brutal lesson in class pretensions when she sees Harriet heartlessly “cut” by the Eltons. The other is Jane Fairfax, who arrives on the scene at the same time as Frank Churchill. She is distinctively attractive, intelligent, and a far more talented musician than Emma.

Emma is young and the novel turns on whether she will go the way of Augusta Elton or become a humbler, better person. And her insistence that she will remain single? Here as well, she will face the chance to know herself better.

The issue of class pretension runs throughout the novel, particularly in the tension between Emma and Mr. Knightly. It’s also subtle, but there is nothing spiritual about the minister, who even “comes on to” Emma during a carriage ride. He only seems concerned with status. Is Jane Austen conveying her low opinion in general of clergy?

In sum, Austen’s title character, unlikable as she comes off, keeps us wondering, and reading, to find out if she will “get a clue” that will enable her to see others, and herself, in a truer light.

Review: Vigil

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Cover image of "Vigil" by George Saunders

Vigil

Vigil, George Saunders. Random House (ISBN: 9780525509622) 2026.

Summary: Jill Blaine is a spirit who consoles the dying but her current charge needs no consoling, leading her to reexamine her short life.

She’s descending to earth, her body and clothing reconstituted as she falls. “She” is Jill “Doll” Blaine, an “elevated” spirit whose task is to console the dying in their last hours, helping them to come to terms with their regrets, fears, the unfinished. She’s done this 343 times.

But K. J. Boone is different. Lying in his bed in his stately Texas mansion, he doesn’t think he needs consolation. As she searches his thoughts she found “a formidable stubbornness. A steady flow of satisfaction, even triumph, coursed through him, regarding all he had managed to do, see, cause, and create, especially given his humble origins.” And she found no doubts, even as he lay dying of cancer.

Boone was an oil tycoon who rose from working on rigs to leading one of the largest oil companies. At the height of his powers, he gave a speech “debunking” the science of global warming that became a standard reference for deniers. He was a fierce defender of his industry, and all that it had made possible.

But she was not to be left alone with him. Other “spirits” attempt to show him the error of his ways. The Frenchman who invented the internal combustion engine. People who suffered the effects of climate change. And many more from his past. None shake his self-justifications. But many try to make him accountable.

But this shakes her. She recalls how she died as a newlywed. She was blown up by a car bomb meant for her husband. So, she leaves her charge to revisit her Indiana hometown. She enters the mind of the man who planted the bomb. Like Boone, he had no regrets. He considered it an inevitability.

Accountability versus inevitability. Jill wrestles with what that meant in her short life, and what that means for dealing with her charge and the parade of spirits besieging him as his life wanes away. In other words, was it right to assist the spirits trying to wrangle a deathbed turn-of-heart out of him? Conversely, was there a kind of inevitability to the trajectory of his life, one that justified his self-satisfaction? That is to say, did he simply fulfill a predestined course?

These are unsettling questions–the kind that leave you thinking when you’ve put the book aside for other things. Some want Boone to be responsible for the terrible things he unleashed, although Boone pokes at the pretensions of those fueling their environmental activism with his oil. However we think of these things, we think choices matter and want people to be responsible. Yet are not people a part of things larger than themselves that shape them?

It’s a question Christian theologians have wrestled with for two millenia. Are human beings responsible? Yes. Is God sovereign and does God predestine? Yes. I have not met anyone who has satisfactorily explained how both can be so. Yet both things somehow have a ring of truth, explaining something of the way the world is, kind of like light as both a particle and a wave.

And that is what Saunders would have us wrestle with. Is life complicated enough that we must live with the tension? But it seems that all Saunders would afford the dying is comfort for lives they cannot change. However, what if there were the possibility of grace?

Review: Jazz Trash

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Cover image of "Jazz Trash" by Michael S. Moore.

Jazz Trash

Jazz Trash, Michael S. Moore. Crumpled-paper.com (ISBN: 9798985928945) 2025.

Summary: Andrew, who cannot play the guitar, is chosen to play guitar for a group that explores the boundaries between jazz and noise.

Perhaps you were (or are) like me–a music fan who dreamed of playing in a rock band. Maybe lead guitar. But the only guitar you can play is an air guitar, and even that not very well. That’s Andrew as he walks to meet band members. He’d seen a poster like this one:

Postcard: “Wanted Guitarist who does not play guitar” from “Jazz Trash” © Michael S. Moore (part of book promo materials)

It turns out he is exactly who Dave and Phil are looking for. They are jazz musicians wanting to create a new kind of music. The fact that Andrew doesn’t even have a guitar and doesn’t know how to play makes him a prime candidate. At his audition in the pictured warehouse, they give him an old guitar and plug him into an amp. And then, on cue, he is to play, which really means making loud noise. Then Dave on bass and Phil on drums improvise behind him.

Andrew has no clue how he is doing. But Dave is ecstatic. This is just what Dave and Phil wanted. So, they make an audition tape to send to the Kit-Kat Club, the premiere jazz club in town. But the owner just doesn’t hear the magic, just the noise. But they get by with a little help from their friends.

Some are friends I’d met before in Moore’s first novel, Crumpled Paper, which I reviewed in 2023, calling it my “sleeper” of the year. Richard is the artist whose breakthrough with a series of “crumpled paper” works. His studio is upstairs in the warehouse from the group, which, after this disastrous mixtape, names themselves “Jazz Trash.” Richard not only sympathizes with the group. He takes them under his wing and arranges a gig at the Kit-Kat under their new name. But the owner pulls the plug as soon as Andrew hits his guitar. A chance to play at a private reception goes slightly longer before the police shut them down on a noise complaint.

Meanwhile, their circle of friends that gather at an artsy cafe, stick with them, Lulu, one of the servers, and Andrew have a budding friendship. Glenn, Richard’s volunteer manager, works his magic. Martha is taken up photographing another artist, Reginald, and his literally haunted house, which reminds her of a series of Nancy Drew mysteries. Yet, she helps with band pictures as Dave creates a music ‘zine to hype the group.

While all this is going on, everyone is working hard getting ready for the annual Art Walk. Reginald will debut new works and try to get free of his ghosts. Meanwhile, Richard will try to follow up on his previous successes, and the band will get what could be their last shot at his reception.

Like Crumpled Paper, Moore explores the world of artists in various media who try to break out of the boundaries of their art. So much is about getting that chance to find an appreciative public. But part of what makes this book so enjoyable is the ensemble of characters living in this artsy community, enjoying tea and good food and conversation in the cafe as they support each others’ efforts. It’s a pleasure to recommend this book by an Ohio author living in my home town! (And I can’t help but wonder if our Short North arts district and its monthly Gallery Hops served as his inspiration.)

____________________

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the author.

Review: Mansfield Park

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Cover image of "Mansfield Park" by Jane Austen.

Mansfield Park

Mansfield Park, Jane Austen. Penguin Classics (ISBN: 9780141439808) 2003 (first published in 1814).

Summary: Fanny Price moves from poverty to live with rich cousins in Mansfield Park, maturing amid their whirl of social relationships.

This is my second Jane Austen novel in my year-long Jane Austen reading goal. It struck me as a version of the ugly duckling who becomes the beautiful swan–that ugly duckling being Fanny Price. Fanny grew up in Portsmouth in a large and impoverished family. At ten her mother arranged for her to go to live with her sister’s family at Mansfield Park. She’s escorted by Aunt Norris, the imperious wife of a clergyman, who makes it a point to emphasize how indebted Fanny is to her and the family for their good offices.

And so begins an uncomfortable and socially awkward existence at Mansfield Park. Her uncle, Sir Bertram is distant. Lady Bertram is a pampered and self-absorbed woman who, seemingly can do nothing for herself. Fanny becomes her sewing companion, and an extra maid. Tom, her oldest cousin, is a spendthrift who barely notices. Maria and Julia, the two daughters, are caught up in their own social life. Only Edmund, the second son, destined for the clergy even notices her and becomes her confidante, and eventually she, his.

Marrying well, to financial advantage is everything. Aunt Norris, now bereaved and removed from her husband’s living, arranges a match between Maria and James Rushworth. While he has an extensive estate, he’s personally unimpressive. Then enter Henry and Mary Crawford. They are related to the new incumbents to the living, the Grants, and come for a visit. Henry has wealth and is a ladies man. On a visit to the Rushworth’s estate, he flirts with both Maria and Julie, favoring the elder. Fanny quietly looks on.

Then, while Sir Thomas is away attending to business in Antiqua, Mansfield Park brings all these remaining young people together in a play at the behest of an actor friend of Henry’s. Edmund, despite his opposition, ends up playing opposite Mary. While Rushworth struggles to learn lines, Henry pursues a dalliance with Maria. Julie, jealous of Maria, eventually elopes with the actor. And Fanny? She quietly supports the effort behind the scenes, her thoughtful demeanor and growing beauty gaining notice. Yet it all comes to naught when Sir Thomas returns. But this futile effort sows the seeds of so much of what unfolds.

Despite the dalliance with Henry, Maria marries Rushworth. Edmund and Mary are drawn to each other but Edmund’s calling poses a problem. He actually takes it seriously rather than as just a source of income–not the life Mary envisioned. And Henry finally notices Fanny and sets out to win her affections. He arranges the promotion of her brother William. But all his good offices and attentions, and the pressures of others, refuse to convince Fanny. She’s seen his flirtatious character and cannot bring herself to trust him. Again, she and Edmund confide in each other.

As it turns out, character matters as both Edmund and Fanny learn. The more puzzling thing is why it took two such perceptive young people so long to realize that they were the ones they were seeking? Perhaps it was the first cousin relationship. Marriage between first cousins, while not common, was permitted. All I can figure is that it made for good story, though Austen spends precious little of it telling us how they awakened to their love for each other. But I suspect most readers saw this coming from early on in the story.

The story is a fascinating commentary on the conventions of love and the considerations of wealth. Edmund upsets the convention of the convenient living in which a clergyman did little. Maria’s loveless, and ultimately failed marriage to Rushworth portrays the folly of marrying only for money. (I wonder if the relationship of the Bertrams is another version of this). By contrast, Fanny rises in stature through her character, which also becomes a measure of the character of others. One thing is for sure, Austen creates in her a figure for which we all root and wish the best.

Review: The Overstory

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Cover image of "The Overstory" by Richard Powers

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?

Review: Marce Catlett

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Cover image of "Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story" by Wendell Berry

Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story, Wendell Berry. Counterpoint Press (ISBN: 9781640097759) 2025.

Summary; A story spanning three generations beginning Marce’s disastrous experience of selling his tobacco at a loss in 1906.

The story begins on an evening in 1906 when Marce Catlett and a neighbor rode horseback part of the way, and train the rest, to Louisville to witness the sale of their tobacco. Tobacco that had been carefully tended, sorted, and packed for shipping. Burley tobacco of the highest quality. Marce had hopes of paying off expenses, and paying down the mortgage on the farm. There was one problem. James B. Duke’s American Tobacco Company held a monopoly on the market and the price they paid out barely covered the cost of shipping to Louisville.

It was a terrible blow. There were few words to be said on the journey. “Long day” about summed it up. But that long day became a story with force to shape a family over three generations. It became a story for Marce of a way of farming by which a family sustained its life upon its land. It marked the beginning of Burley Tobacco Growers Co-operative Association. Then Marce’s son Wheeler, who had risen to a position as a Washington lawyer in the Roosevelt administration, walked away from it all to lead the Association in negotiating fair prices for the growers. His efforts bought a space for several decades for growers to make a decent living off their efforts.

But the times were changing. Mechanized agriculture came in after the war. However, many of the children went off to college and it changed them. Children like Wheeler’s son Andy, for a time. Yet his work after college on an ag publication made him long for the old ways. And so he returned to a hillside farm in Port William. That meant returning to a community where each helped the other when they needed help at harvest. That meant hours telling stories as they stripped and sorted the tobacco..

Then times changed more. Tobacco farming ended as the cancer risks of smoking came out. Then farms were turned over to tenants instead of being passed to children. Andy, living the story, carried on as long as he could. But Port William had changed. Increasingly, those who lived in Port William didn’t work there. Not only did many yield to a changing way of life. They also forfeited a way of living on the land that had been the Catlett story. And they forfeited membership in a community that made life there so rich.

At 91, one wonders whether this is Wendell Berry’s valedictory statement (though I hope it is not the last of the works we will see from his pen). One has the sense of Berry saying this of his own life as Andy reflects:

“He gives thanks for life continuing on the earth, and for the earth continuing alive. He gives thanks for the continuing so far of his own life, the story of which is longer than his life.”

Andy speaks of “the breakages of broken times.” But he ends not in despair but in hope that somehow the story that carried him and the generations before him will outlive him.

Berry moves me to reflect on the stories of my family and the community we also called home through three generations. Although urban, rather than rural, similar changes to those of Port William ravaged my community. For that community, I can’t help but think that remembering and building on their communal story has been, and will be key to their survival and flourishing anew. Likewise for our nation, community by community, family story by family story.