Michael Finocchiaro's Reviews > The Overstory

Richard Power's The Overstory is a masterpiece that won the 2019 Pulitzer for Fiction. It is monumental piece of environmental fiction whose ubersubject (the "overstory" if you will) is trees and how humans have misunderstood them, fought over them, destroyed them, and even died for them.

The book's initial section, "Roots", contains introductions the nine protagonists of the primary narrative which constitutes the largest section called "Trunk." Each character is fully fleshed out and while they seem all completely unrelated, Powers succeeds in winding all their stories together, like so many subterranean roots and fungi, into a coherent narrative. Adam, Olivia, Nick, Douglas and Mimi are all tightly bound into an activist movement on the west coast and their stories add the drama to the story as sort of the tallest, most visible redwood forest that they are struggling to protect. Around them, the other characters have peripheral views into the primary action playing out on TV as Neely writes a successful Civilization/Minecraft game which he evolves towards a more ecological underpinning, the professor Patricia who - like the very real Peter Wollheben and The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate – Discoveries from a Secret World - writes about the very real and tangible ways that trees communicate, and the dysfunctional couple of Ray and Dorothy who let their mutual love of nature lapse and see their relationship collapse.

Having read Wollheben before Powers, I started to raise my own consciousness about trees. I was also lucky to have caught the Trees exposition here in Paris at the Foundation Cartier (https://www.fondationcartier.com/en/e...). Also, I have an aunt in Kentucky whose ash trees are succumbing to the emerald ash borer like most of the other ash trees in America. The plagues that have periodically wiped out species of trees affect the life of Nick and Adam. In the latter case, "The fungus gutted Detroit while the kids were still small. Then Chicago, soon thereafter. The country's most popular street tree, vases that turned boulevards into great tunnels, was leaving this world. (p. 55) One of the unstated issues that the book tries to demonstrate is that had the forests not been cleared so completely, the natural defenses of trees may have been able to combat these waves of destruction.

The writing is mostly in the present tense which helps pull the reader into the story and makes time almost disappear while reading it. Almost as if the reader is trying to channel time as trees experience it. There are also nice literary allusions, my favorite was this one: "Civilized yards are all alike. Every wild yard is wild in its own way. (p. 384). I'll let the erudite commenters reveal which masterpiece Powers was quoting there.

As an aside, I wanted to briefly talk compare The Overstory and The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate – Discoveries from a Secret World with a book which I have vocally criticized: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. In the latter, the author bemoans the wanton destruction caused by the agricultural revolution, but to my mind proposes no alternative and just leaves the reader with empty, vsacuous soundbites. In the former two books, we are given a vast insight into how trees communicate and how they are intimately related to human beings. Yes, our ignorance of their speech (as alien to us as would be expected because our life spans and perception of time is on the same magnitude as that of flies to humans) has caused irreparable damage to the ecosystem. And there is an obvious domino effect: global warming and climate change. But, in the two books about trees, even if a militant outlook is shown to be a dead-end, it is demonstrated that being custodians of nature, we can help forests come back and preserve our biodiversity. It is not all of humankind that is to blame, as Harari would have us believe, but rather, rapacious grift driving large corporations which reap a direct, short-term financial benefit from wholesale environmental destruction. If the law was enforced rather than trampled upon, the jobs could be converted to conservation-related jobs and the forests could be preserved. I found that this positive message was stronger than any of the superficial aphorisms in Harari's book.

In conclusion, the book is truly beautiful and well-written. I believe its core message was something like this: "It feels good, like a root must feel when it finds, after centuries, another root to pleach to underground. There are a hundred thousand species of love, separately invented, each more ingenious than the last, and every one of them keeps making things. (p. 144)

My rating of all the Pulitzer Winners: https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/1...