Deep roots
“The Overstory” is a rousing, full-throated hymn to nature’s grandeur, with a genuflection toward those miracles of creation, trees. Though this novel feels as if composed by the ghosts of Henry David Thoreau and John Muir, its author is Richard Powers, the American fiction writer most at home in the world of science.
Trees are this novel’s most unexpected yet captivating characters. By their very nature, they embody beauty. But they also pulse with energy and resilience. Tough and resourceful, they battle difficult odds and often win. By a long shot, they outlast humans.
Here is Patricia Westerford, the biologist whose life work provides the novel’s backbone, on a field trip in Utah, gazing in wonder: “Aspens stand in the afternoon sun, spreading along the ridge out of sight. Populus tremuloides. Clouds of gold leaf glint on thin trunks tinted with the palest green. The air is still but the aspens shake as if in a wind ... The air shivers in gold.”
However strong these giant plants may be, Thoreau once noted while witnessing a logger at work, “even trees do not die without a groan.” What we hear in “The Overstory,” again and again, is the groaning of tress and their human allies.
Powers structures this sprawling story around a brace of disparate characters whose lives go their own ways until ultimately intersecting. What initially unites them — a bond unknown to them — is that each has a peculiar relationship to a tree.
Aspiring artist Nick Hoel is raised on an Iowa farm where a single surviving chestnut stands sentinel over the prairie. Engineer Mimi Ma grows up outside Chicago in the shadow of a mulberry planted by her immigrant father. The Appich family, in another Chicago suburb, plants a tree honoring the birth of every child. Adam is greeted with a maple. He will become a research psychologist.
In St. Paul, attorney Ray Brinkman and Dorothy Cazaly decide to grace their backyard with another tree on every wedding anniversary. Vietnam vet Douglas Pavlicek, dismayed by the ravages of timber companies in the Northwest, resolves to plant tree after tree wherever they clear-cut. Michigan college student Olivia Vandergriff, while nearly dying of accidental electrocution, beholds a vision that inspires a kinship with all of nature. She will later make a redwood her temporary home.
Nick will pair off, almost by chance, with Olivia, and Mimi with Doug. Joined by Adam, they will join a band of tree huggers bent on saving Oregon’s old-growth forests. (Oddly, the Minnesotans seem an obtrusive, unnecessary addition to Powers’ narrative.)
In the wings, in Palo Alto, video game visionary Neelay Mehta creates an escapist virtual-reality empire until belatedly realizing that earthly reality desperately needs his attention. Since falling from an oak in his youth, the paraplegic Neelay has navigated life and career from a wheelchair.
The novel grows, as a tree grows, in a series of concentric rings. Certainly, there are times when I wondered if there were too many stories jostling for attention. Yet Powers makes his characters so lively and poignant that I stayed glued to the page. Only a fool who believes if you’ve seen one redwood, you’ve seen them all would refuse to care. And once the narrative shifts to the confrontations between activists and loggers, the accelerating pace and drama overwhelmed any remaining reservations.
Patricia’s story, which glides alongside this tempest, provides its own kind of drama. Powers’ earlier novels are notable for their brilliant scientists — specialists in artificial intelligence in “Galatea, 2.2,” for example, or neurology in “The Echo Maker” — who see things the rest of us can’t. Patricia is both an unorthodox researcher and a person easy to like by virtue of her resilience in spite of partial deafness. Nurtured by an agricultural agent father in southern Ohio, she comes to believe that trees are social creatures that “must have evolved ways to synchronize with each other.”
This glimmer of an idea is mere instinct until Patricia’s graduate school studies document how tulip trees emit chemicals that warn their neighbors of insect invasions. Her discovery makes her famous among forestry experts, but when it’s dismissed by skeptics, she’s reduced to “science road kill” too discredited to land an academic position.
Much later, while she is working as a forest ranger in Oregon, her results are replicated and validated by stars in the field, and her future opens up in unexpected ways. For lay readers, she writes the bestselling “The Secret Forest.” With her new wealth, she funds a seed bank, designed to preserve tree species dying out across the globe. She even finds love with a tender-hearted fellow scientist.
For Powers’ other characters, love is generally shortlived. And their predictions for the health of the planet are bleak. Early on, Adam concludes: “Humankind is deeply ill. The species won’t last long. It was an aberrant experiment.”
Powers himself seems to veer away from such hopelessness. His accounts of trees’ fecund beauty resonate with “biophilia,” the idea popularized by eminent biologist E.O. Wilson that people are genetically wired to connect and identify with other living things. The question remains: Is biophilia powerful enough to override those other human givens of greed, short-term gratification and folly?
“The Overstory” makes us wish it were so.
Former Newsday book critic Dan Cryer is the author of “Being Alive and Having to Die: The Spiritual Odyssey of Forrest Church.” Email: books@ sfchronicle.com