Richard Powers: Overstory (2019, Penguin Random House)
640 pages
English language
Published Jan. 6, 2019 by Penguin Random House.
The Overstory, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of—and paean to—the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.
Beautiful stories of trees and humans and the impact of humans on trees. I became a bit obsessed with trees while reading and definitely took more notice wherever I went.
The one critique I have is that there was a bit too much packed into the plotline and I think it could have been simpler by just focusing of the trees and leaving out the digital parts. But I enjoyed it nonetheless
This book pulled me into its world of trees and gutted me. I loved the richly drawn human characters and the stories they and the author tell about and learn from trees. I didn’t love the whiteness of the book, but also the relationship Powers describes between people and trees is a particularly white western one—some sense of indigenous stewardship before the end would have made that less irksome. But the book is beautiful and devastating to read, and I can’t stop thinking about trees.
I loved this book, but was simultaneously disappointed at the lack of acknowledgement for Native knowledge on the themes of the book.
Best book I’ve read in years. Read it. You won’t regret it.
Warning: like all Richard Powers novels, it’s not light reading. Read it when you have time to savor it and concentrate.
