Richard Powers on The Overstory (2018)

Originally published in The New Twenties in 2020.

I read The Overstory (2018) along with a close friend of mine who still can’t remember who recommended it to her. She claims to have found the title in the notes app on her phone and doesn’t know where it came from. 

Neither of us knew anything about the book, the plot, the author, but we both went for it. This novel that so heavily concerns itself with the interconnectivity between humans and trees appeared to us much like a little seed, asking to be planted on faith alone.

And plant it we did. We decided to read it together, or as together as you can from two different provinces. Under the shade of trees just beginning to blossom, from two sides of the country, we read Richard Powers’ The Overstory. 

It turns out that anything you can do, a tree can do better – and longer. Trees are eating, communicating, and cooperating. They’re caring for their own, having sex, and giving gifts. Some trees can sense danger, and in turn, will call swarms of insects to come and protect them. Trees can desire, plan, and execute.  

“Link enough trees together, and a forest becomes aware,” says Patricia Westerford, a main player of Powers’ fable. 

Trees are trying to get our attention. They are desperately trying to tell us something and have been for a long time. But either we aren’t listening or we can’t hear them. 

This notion sits at the core of Richard Powers’ 12th novel. Powers starts and ends by asking you to view trees in a new light and for what they truly are -- alive, in danger, and largely invisible to us.

The novel follows nine Americans and their relationships with trees, many of whom intertwine over the destruction of the Redwood old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest. The cast of characters is varied. There’s a coding prodigy, a psychologist studying the personality profiles of environmental activists, even a victim of the Stanford Prison Experiment; but the story is truly driven by two women: an unorthodox, shunned researcher who learns that trees are communal and can communicate to each other, and a young college student who, after being electrocuted by her slow cooker and briefly dying, can hear those same trees talk.

Of course, it would be remiss to mention the cast of characters without mentioning the trees themselves, as they play as much of a role as any human in the novel. 

“I began to tell people that I was writing a novel about trees, and they would laugh, or ask if I was writing non-fiction,” says Powers, speaking on the phone from Illinois, “but as I moved deeper into writing the book, my question rapidly changed from ‘can you really write a novel where the trees are a central part of the story?” to “why aren’t all novels about the nonhuman?” 

He figures that will be a goal of fiction in the future - to shed human exceptionalism. “Our stories don’t begin and end with us, and we are who we are only by virtue of all these other entities and agents and actors,” trees included!

Powers’ narrative sets down traditional pacing. The story isn’t linear, often skipping large periods, decades even, at a time. The novel spans approximately a century and forces its readers to shift to the macro and consider time, not through the lens of humankind, but through the lens of the trees. Suddenly, the entire lifetime of our characters (and some of their ancestors) --  flashes by in a blink of an eye.

Although Powers skips through time at whim, his characters are centered around one focal point: a Redwood tree, rooted in the Pacific Northwest, that has found itself a warzone between environmentalists and loggers. The tree’s name is Mimas.

Reading The Overstory forces your hand in a sense. Not only does it require you to pay more attention to the trees in front of you, but it asks you to remember all the trees you have missed. It asks you to award these four-billion-year-old beings some humility, to “commit unsuicide,” as Powers calls it.

At one point while reading the novel, my partner-in-reading told me she was interrupted by a notification on her phone --  an e-mail from a volunteer group with an odd request. The organization had received a large donation of fir saplings and were wanting to unload the extra seedlings on the public. Another seed, asking to be planted. 

Things like this happen when you read The Overstory — you get the sense the trees are seeking you out. The novel makes it feel like you are one of its characters, awakening to something you’ve always looked at but never seen. As the characters open their eyes to the “most wondrous products of four billion years of life,” so do you. 

I kid you not when I say that the day I finished this novel, one of my long-dead basil sprouts (a fate met by all my basil sprouts this spring) came back to life. The Overstory, man. 

Powers laughed when I told him these anecdotes. We weren’t the only ones experiencing what we would soon come to call ‘Overstory magic.’ Powers says he has had people from all over the world come to him, telling him their own stories of trees and connection. 

“I’ve never had a response [to a novel] like this,” Powers said.

“It’s the subject matter. I think what surprises us about our [disconnected] state is that, at one point, we were attentive, we did know, we did love, we were amazed by trees. And then, at some point in our lives, we grew habitual to them, or indifferent, or too busy to have that same kind of presence. What happens with this book is a simple act of recovery.”

The novel is a love letter to environmental activism and the philosophies packed into it. Nearly all of the characters serve as activists, with five of the storylines culminating in the fight over the Redwoods.

Perhaps what struck me most while reading The Overstory was Powers’ ability to forgo speculation or fantasy while still so urgently representing the climate crisis. Oftentimes, it can be incredibly difficult to convey to an audience what danger they are in without speculating on the disasters they may face or throwing them into a post-apocalyptic world. So much of the environmental fiction, or “cli-fi,” published these days takes the form of dystopian fantasies, or, at the very least, speculative fiction.

Through the environmental activism narrative, Powers has found a way to illustrate the most urgent issue of our time without being forced to speculate. The Overstory takes environmentalism about as far as it has yet to go in the realism genre, all while asking its audience, in all seriousness, to view trees as living, breathing, feeling, tasting, seeing beings. 

Powers has insight into both sides of the climate debate equation.

“That’s the thing with Climate Change. It makes people’s blood run cold because they think they’re going to get a lecture, or a guilt trip, or be told all of these disasters that are going to happen unless they start sacrificing things,” he said. “They think that the message here is one of diminishment of quality of life and a reduction in their possibility for personal meaning.” 

Instead, Powers suggests an approach much more aligned with the themes of his novel. “What if, instead, the tasks were pitched as coming back home, working towards reintegration, remembering and rediscovering the pleasures of community, what would happen?

“All of a sudden your behaviour becomes much more conducive to sustainability.”

Powers’ own habits and relationships with the natural world changed while writing The Overstory. Throughout the process, he made the move from Palo Alto, California, to the Great Smoky Mountain National Park of Tennessee. 

“For most of my life, I’ve always been pretty indifferent to what was happening outside the controlled and created space that I made for myself as a writer. I thought my job was to shut out the world, focus and concentrate, and not come up for air every day until I had the words,” he explained. “When I did move to Tennessee, I completely inverted that relationship. The writing was only something that could be done as a kind of after-the-fact gratitude or praise for being in the world.”

Suddenly, instead of struggling for 1000 words a day, Powers was walking 4 miles a day, doing his best to be present, to observe, to tend to -- to be ready to listen to what the trees might have to say.

He says the rituals have helped his creative process. “After about mile 1.5, the words start flowing. They’re not forced or contrived. They’re like respiration.” --

With such a profound effect, maybe it isn’t surprising that Powers isn’t quite ready to move past The Overstory. 

“I just want to walk, look, listen, breathe, and write this same book,” he told the Chicago Review of Books, “again and again, from different aspects and elevations, with characters as old and large as I am able to imagine.”

While it’s difficult to take a single lesson from The Overstory, the gift of curiosity is as good as any. Powers implores his readers to become more curious with the world, to begin to deepen and heal their relationships with the natural.

“Once we give up this idea that the self is the be-all end-all of existence, and everything else is just an opportunity or a frustration,” Powers says, “then that kind of rehabilitation can start both between humans and nonhumans.”