Books: The Overstory

The Overstory: A Novel
By Richard Powers
2018
Kindle Edition
Print length: 502 pages
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize


Since this book won the Pulitzer and many other prizes, I think I'm supposed to have liked it.

I did not.

Maybe it's because I read it on the Kindle - but I think the Kindle helped me to see the failures in the book.

It's a nice book. Lots of pretty writing, and a strong environmental message. Thoreau would be pleased to read it, I think.

I found it tedious. I felt like it needed editing, and it could have lost about five of the nine characters in it. I had a difficult time keeping up with who was whom and why they were doing what they were doing; a circuitous route around the American Chestnut ended poorly and rather stupidly, if you ask me.

Some reviews say the book ended on a positive note, but I didn't see anything positive about it. Mostly the message is this: trees good, people bad. People are going to kill all trees and end life on earth as we know it.

The only way to save it is to make it a big virtual project, like taking the "catch a Pokémon" game and turn it into cleaning up a stream or something.

Ok, then.

Other reviewers thought the characters were well drawn; for the most part, I found them to be caricatures and not characters. They all represented the fringes of society, the people who don't fit into the cogs and run the mainframe of consumerism and capitalism that now drives the mechanisms governments have put in place to create a new species of human doings instead of human beings.

These can be interesting people, those who don't fit into the well-oiled machine, but Powers managed to make them rather uninteresting if not eye-rolling. The only character I liked was Patricia Westerford, a scientist who put forth the initial journal article that trees communicate and their roots intertwine and they protect and feed off of one another. She was belittled for her work and only later recognized as the pioneer in what is now a commonly held scientific theory - that trees and plants have their own ways of communicating.

One thing I've not seen mentioned in other reviews about this book is the treatment of women. Women are given the patriarchal treatment here; they are not heroines or heroes. In fact, of the four main female characters, two die, one is maimed and scarred, and the other is unable to have a child and forced to spend 20 years caring for her husband who has a stroke (and she's a faithless wife, too). The men all trundle off to live other lives until one guy stupidly writes down their escapades as activists and a young nameless woman finds his notes and turns him in. And then only two of them end up jailed.

One young man, a computer whiz, is portrayed as a brilliant mind trapped in a crippled body, and he is unable to understand the beauty of nature except through the lenses of his made-up virtual worlds. He ends up a multi-millionaire, though the author does not treat him especially kindly.

I had a difficult time getting into this book; it was a slog to read. If my book club hadn't been reading it, I would have put it down around a third of the way through and never finished it.

Personally, I would not have missed out on much. I already knew that trees talk to one another, that the forest and the natural world communicate in ways we simply do not yet understand. I have always known this, just as I know that whatever it is we are destroying will be returned in some form that we have yet to imagine. New and different trees, or different, more hardy vegetation, will eventually spring up and overtake our cities. I've seen it. I've been to the remains of local towns that were abandoned, and I've seen their structures overrun by nature's steady progress to retake the ground.

Maybe city dwellers, people who don't think outside of themselves, and folks who've never spent a lot of time in the woods will find this message endearing and take it to heart.

It is a good message.

I just wasn't entranced with the story or the method of storytelling.