How demanding a reading experience is ‘The Overstory?’
“The Overstory” has received many laudatory reviews since its appearance in 2018. Not surprisingly, it won the Pulitzer Prize along with other major fiction awards.
For my part I found myself slightly puzzled by the extravagant praise it received. My hesitancy had nothing to do with the novel’s environmental and arboreal aims which I found powerful and engaging. Rather I had difficulty in sustaining my interest as Powers played out his eight overlapping human stories.
At several points during the book’s 500 pages, I found my attention flagging. When, for instance, it came to Ray Brinkman and Dorothy Cazaly’s troubled marriage, I was not consistently engaged. So too my attention often lapsed in the obsessive game-making story of Neelay Metha. I was at best lukewarm to the complexity of both stories, regardless of the characters’ relationship to a kind of tree. I could see what Powers was up to, but I knew that I needed to return to them to better understand their places in the novel.
I am inclined to compare “The Overstory” to Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” (or “The Whale,” as it appeared in England in 1851). It took many hours of reading and some guidance from a helpful professor for me to come to grips with Melville’s novel.
It is a reading experience that I now treasure, having gained a fuller perspective over time. “The Overstory” is an equally encyclopedic novel — here the ecological attention to the value of trees replaces the hunting of right whales for their valuable sperm; that sperm oil was used to light the lamps of the preelectrical western world. Many readers in the 1850s must have found themselves challenged by Melville’s narrative breadth and his playful provision of unusual information.
In “Moby-Dick” one meets a number of exotic characters and can be thrown off course by Melville’s side-trips into maritime history, whaling lore and comparative religion.
In “The Overstory” Richard Powers makes similar demands of his readers, splicing his selected narratives with dollops of information about species of trees and their secret underground lives, as he moves his own big novel along. In its unique blend of personalized narrative, scientific information and ecological alertness, “The Overstory” is a powerful but unusual book. Powers writes evocatively about the amazing range of trees in our world and our need to understand their value and importance.
Among his central concerns is the ongoing and massive deforestation of North America. He emphasizes the need for informed human intervention to arrest that destructive process.
While the novel dramatizes the dangers of intervention by individuals, public awareness and informed action are crucial for our future. But how can the public be made more aware of the problems? How can they become less complacent about them? As one character wisely puts it, “The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.”
With such a game plan Powers offers up story after story — which is to say, encounter after encounter with trees.
Powers’ stories take the authority of scientific knowledge and the near-catastrophic dangers of resource exploitation to a high plane of recognition. The individual stories are divided into short narrative sections that are designed to build (and hold) the reader’s interest. Together, they lead the reader toward both recognition of a major environmental problem and an awareness of what needs to be done. That future, however, remains dark and ominous.
Just as Melville predicted a waning of the whale as a species because of human exploitation, Powers show us a world that is losing its critical mass of trees at an alarming rate, abetted by our willingness to trust unchecked corporate agendas and our appetite for wood-based products. Our complacency before such a problem is a kind of cultural idiocy.
The stories that make up “The Overstory” are compelling, especially the ones that march toward acts of conscious resistance to the government-approved clear-cutting of west-coast forests. Powers writes each story with a forwardthrusting urgency and vividness that aim to keep his readers engaged.
Several of these stories come together in an isolated act of citizen resistance to the professional logging of “one of the last pocket relics” of California’s “Jurassic forest.” This is tree-hugging passion of an extraordinary kind.
Three individuals live two hundred feet above the forest floor in a towering redwood tree named ‘Mimas.’ They are Olivia Vandergriff (an obsessive college dropout who adopts the name Maidenhair), the artistic Nicholas Hoel (nicknamed Watchman) who slavishly follows her, and Adam Appich (a social psychology student who, having come to interview them, chooses to join their vigil); they stay together on their platform aerie for many months. Imagine that for passion and commitment! With them we live in the titular ‘overstory,’ the redwood canopy, far above the forest floor, observing life from that dizzying height and peering freshly into some of nature’s wonders. The three are defenders of a precarious faith that persists until, inevitably, the professional foresters bring them down.
Later, their commitment unabashed, they become eco-terrorists who resort to firebombing northwestern installations and structures that are adjuncts of the legally-protected forestry business. They are joined in their terrorist projects by figures from two other stories, Mimi Ma and Douglas Pavlicek.
That leaves three other narrative figures to consider. I have mentioned two of them earlier. Most important among all the figures is Patricia Westerford, a mild-mannered botanist devoted to her pathbreaking research into the secret lives of trees.
She struggles painfully to make her findings meaningful to her skeptical colleagues and a largely unappreciative world. At a crucial early point, her work is publicly refuted and dismissed.
Powers based the story of ‘PlantPatty’ on the work of a much sturdier Canadian forest ecologist named Suzanne Simard. Westerford’s field work provides a durable undercurrent of knowledge and sanity in “The Overstory” even as Plant-Patty fights her own battle with stage fright when it comes to presenting her research at major environmental conferences.
However, it is Simard’s pathbreaking research that provides the scientific authority underlying Powers’ point of view. We learn from Simard how trees communicate underground and the complexity of their secret lives; over many years, in fact, students and researchers have come to value Simard’s enduring research initiatives in her home province of British Columbia.
Here, Powers plays somewhat loosely with fact for dramatic effect, especially aimed at his American readers. He presents Westerford as a remote but dogged Colorado researcher. Suzanne Simard’s personality as a scientist is far more grounded than the struggling Patty. For the record, Simard brings a fuller understanding to the cutting of trees because she is from a westcoast logging family. Look her up on Google and you will find a highly competent and able communicator, rooted in her Canadian identity and acutely sensitive both to Indigenous knowledge and her own family history. Her research into old growth forests is available through Ted Talks.
But Patricia Westerford is Powers’ key to arboreal knowledge and the hard sell it faces in the corporategoverned world of 21st-century America.
We learn that “Men and trees are closer cousins than you think” and that you have to pay attention to trees. They “don’t say anything,” but they have much to tell us, if only we can find ways to understand them.
For the record, Simard is more understanding of the cutting of trees because she is from a westcoast logging family frightening message to us as so many trees fall prey to clear-cutting practices every year.