The Overstory – Richard Powers (2018)
Richard Powers’ The Overstory is an accounting, a reckoning, of our invasive species.
It is a novel of context, where the context is four billion years. Our species being recently arrived, it is self-evident that ours is to be a short-lived species.
It is a tale told in anger, particularly at the conceit of homo sapiens to consider themselves different from all other forms of life, entitled to exploit resources beyond their needs. Our pending fate is an ironic reckoning of the survival of the fittest.
Powers brings us eight or nine individual diverse members of the homo sapiens species in the nation of America, each of whom have an unrelated short story told in parallel over the first half of the novel. Eventually, many of these individuals meet and their stories come together. Each person is or becomes damaged in some way, but the damage enables them to see the world differently. Their perspective enables them to take a step back from the hustle and con of commerce.
Some of the individuals find each other and pair-off, others find and then lose the other. One is Nick, the great-great grandson of a Norwegian immigrant who planted a chestnut on his Iowa homestead. Another is Mimi Ma, the daughter of a Chinese immigrant who planted a mulberry in his suburban Illinois backyard.
Many of our characters are inspired by Olivia, a beautiful, vacuous east coast college girl who dies, for a minute and 10 seconds, of accidental electrocution. When revived by a jolt to her heart, she has become changed by the voices of beings who inspire her to seek out a group of protesters defying loggers on the west coast. She is irresistibly drawn, like a salmon seeking headwaters (or like the survivors in Stephen King’s The Stand), to cross the country to find her destiny.
Our companions find common ground with trees. They witness an exuberant cycle of inter-related birth, growth and death. They come to see their lives in relationship to trees, and seek to take individual responsibility by escalating activism to block de-forestation.
Olivia (nicknamed Maidenhair) and her Iowan friend, Nick (Watchman) protect an ancient redwood named Mimas by living for a year on a platform built into its high canopy. The loggers harvest all the trees in the vicinity and will not leave, on arrogant principle, without the victory of also taking down Mimas and its grove.
It must be said that The Overstory is polemical. The novel is 500 fast-moving pages, even though the tension propelling the plot is thin. Powers is at his best when we are with his characters as they find and lose each other, and as they fight their quixotic battles for their trees. He beautifully describes the interwoven relationships of trees, and compares the balance to our self-centered species. However, could it be that only our species is brazen enough to acknowledge aloud the imperative that all life shares to grow, expand and subjugate? Does not every species expand, at the expense of others, to its maximum reach in whatever niche is available? Perhaps Powers’ response would be that we could, if it wanted, self-regulate this instinct, and that we are all-the-more damned for choosing not to do so. It would have been an interesting argument to acknowledge, even if just to knock down. There is no questioning, however, Powers’ point, repeatedly made, that our consumption of resources is gleefully disproportionate to our needs.
The Overstory offers several options of what might be called redemption. Is our extinction inevitable? What can a person do to make a difference? One option is suicide in the interests of culling the human population. Or, one could choose “unsuicide” by taking personal responsibility to change society’s collective suicide pact — act, even on an individual level, to change the trajectory. Suicide or unsuicide is our sacrifice and our debt to life.
Another option seemed a bit too easy, too magical, too much wishful thinking — a technological Hail Mary. It is the vague suggestion that artificial intelligence might evolve into its own species and self-interestedly arm earth with the means to fight back against the human course of destruction. The Terminator (please forgive me) would impose conditions upon the human species in the best overall interests of the earth.
I don’t have an editor to stop me from my own self-destructive over-reaching, so here goes: I was reminded in a way of Sartre’s Nausea. When we step back, what are we? We cannot justify our separateness from existence. Who are we to believe we have meaning that is somehow unique? A tree’s form is defined by our expectation, but if we look closely at a tree, we see its essence as viscous living mass. Nature exists with us or without us. In fact, we stand in the way of trees.
Richard Powers won the National Book Award in 2006, and has received a MacArthur Fellowship. He’s written 12 novels, but The Overstory is my first Powers book.
A good novel can create mindfulness (at least for a few days). Powers’ trees are beautifully loved on every page. Trees communicate and defend each other. Over the years I’ve often kissed newly planted trees in my yard on the presumptuous assumption that somehow my essence will endow the tree. I’ve catalogued the trees of my backyard, including a Chestnut Oak, Black Tupelo, Scarlet Oak, White Oak, Red Maple and white flowering Dogwood. (I’ll ignore, in deference to Powers’ thesis, the pine that seems to repulse its nearby deciduous companions.) I’ve posted index cards on our deck to remind me of their names. And yet, I don’t even see most trees that I mindlessly walk by every day. This book reminds us of their very long lives and our short lives.
Bob Fall 