Shelley Ettinger's Reviews > The Overstory

Well. A long rant has been percolating in my head while I read this overpraised novel by a writer I try over and over and whose work over and over fails to wow me, which is putting it kindly. Lately I've read a number of the 'what to do about great men/geniuses who are also sexual assaulters' think pieces that have been proliferating and what throws me each time is that the artists cited are in reality not a single one of them great, let alone a genius. See for instance Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, David Foster Wallace and so on, none of whose work deserves anything close to the adulation it gets. And no I'm not associating Powers with those accused of misogynist behavior (though who knows, such a revelation about any given man cannot be a surprise at this point). I am however associating him with the long list of white men assigned greatness status when they nowhere near deserve it. What a low bar they have to leap.

There's some good writing here, yes. The theme is of course important, yes, and there's important information shared here, yes. That's about all this novel has going for it. As with every single other of his books I've read, and despite the overabundant effort in this one at conjuring up some, somehow there's no real passion here. As with other of his books, this one never made me feel anything, neither about the urgent matters he's addressing about which I do yes feel a great deal but his writing didn't tap in to even my already existing feelings, nor, most definitely, about the characters who for all his very visible efforts never achieve any depth or dimension. As I've always found with a Powers book, despite or maybe because of everything he desperately throws at it ("cophrophagic" instead of plain old "shit eating" grin kind of epitomizes the problem, as do all the would-be lyrical but actually wearisome lists of natural wonders), in this one he once again misses the mark. The mark being the powerful, stirring, devastating novel this one wants to be but is not.

Along with the general failure there's a specific offense, one that I suppose shouldn't surprise me but still does every time an author commits it, which these boy geniuses yep keep on doing. That is this book's overweening androcentrism. It's a man's man's man's man's world in Powersland, and this is true even though some of the central characters are women, a neat trick. I could go on and on about this but will just mention a few aspects of this insult. One, the most egregious, is the use of the words "man" and "mankind" throughout to refer to human beings. Jesus H. Christ. In the year 2018. Two, following this, every specific tree that plays a part in a scene is referred to as "he." Really!? This even after we've already been told that most trees are male or female. Yet Powers can't manage to adhere to fact when portraying them. Three, in Powers world, it seems, only fathers matter. Just about every story line starts with a depiction of the character's relationship with her/his father, and this father remains a keynote throughout the characters' ensuing lives; mothers are barely mentioned and when they are, it's ridiculously stereotypically (with a nice pinch of cultural racism thrown in, in the case of the Indian mother who gets a handful of lines bobbling her head and nagging her son to get married). Apparently, in Powers' view, only fathers matter. Daddy issues much, sir?

There's more. Like the absence of a single Black or Latinx character in what sets itself up to be a sweeping saga of recent U.S. history. Powers throws a line or a paragraph here and there to a Native person though these characters don't get any actual names or agency of any kind. And like the book's ultimate failure to provide any true vision, any forward thrust that doesn't devolve into dewy mysticism as the closing pages do, any real ideas or analysis about an actual way forward for humans and trees in this book about humans and trees. Which is not surprising, and which also explains the rapturous reviews this book has undeservedly received. When the literary establishment heaps praise on what they label a political novel, the very literary establishment that always vociferously denies there can ever even be such a thing as a political novel that achieves true art, the establishment that will never praise a really political novel that is truly radical and issues a real artistic-ideological challenge to bourgeois consciousness, well then you know the book in question has nothing new or exciting to recommend it.

That book, new and revolutionary, will come. The one that doesn't merely whine about what class society has wrought but tells a winning, gripping story of a real battle, a revolutionary class-struggle battle on a much grander scale than the little scenes depicted here, to save the trees and all the rest of us. I'll be waiting.