The Overstory by Richard Powers Discussion/Spoilers

[Donna]

Today begins the discussion of our September group read, The Overstory, Richard Powers’ allegorical environmental novel. Powers is an American author whose background in science, computer programming and English literature all come to play in this, his twelfth novel. The Overstory won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

The book is an ode to trees and a cautionary environmental tale. Rather than a linear narrative arc, Powers creates a tree-like structure for the novel with stories that grow out in concentric circles like rings in a tree trunk. There are four sections: Roots, Trunk, Crown, and Seeds. In Roots we are introduced to nine separate characters in wonderful short vignettes. Each of the nine has a foundational relationship with trees or develops a tree “awareness” through some transformative life experience. In Trunk, the lives of five of the characters become intertwined as they join forces to fight destruction of a standing redwood forest. Their actions become more and more strident and end disastrously. Crown catches up with the characters 20 years later and Seeds finds them individually questioning the impact of their lives for the future.

There are many themes and motifs in the book, including man’s relationship with the natural world, the power of story as metaphor, lifespan (human, trees, the planet), suicide on small and grand scales, the impact of technology, and the awakening of awareness to nature through stillness and seeing/knowing. The reader is asked to consider such questions as: What should the relationship be between humans and nature? Who are the real environmental terrorists? In the novel, Patricia Westerford, a scientist studying trees, makes the case that trees in a forest form a social network and communicate with one another in remarkable ways, something that is consistent with current theory and argued convincingly in Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate – Discoveries from a Secret World.

My personal response to the book was mixed. I appreciate the monumental scope of the book, the fine writing, the creative storytelling and the environmental message. But it didn’t totally work for me on an emotional level and I struggled to finish it, especially the last 100 pages or so. With a few exceptions, the characters were so singular in focus that they lacked depth. But this was an obvious intentional choice by the author. The book is about trees and it has a purpose beyond the inner lives of its characters, as reflected in this comment by one of the characters, the lawyer, Ray, “To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one.… The world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.” Nevertheless, I found Annie Proulx’s historical take on systematic deforestation, Barkskins, more appealing and emotionally satisfying, although equally alarming in its environmental message. But that’s not to say there isn’t a lot to discuss here and I invite your thoughts and reflections on the novel.

[Jane]

Donna, I'm still reading the first section (just got back from a five week trip to California, much of which involved trees). I love the book on the sentence level. The writing is beautiful. Not sure I'll keep all these characters straight, though. The sentence you quoted makes me wonder if this is Powers' attempt to write a novel about the natural world that is as compelling as the struggles between a few lost souls. Of course, the lost souls are present. So maybe the lawyer is speaking what Powers' actually believes. I'll keep reading.

[Donna]

"So maybe the lawyer is speaking what Powers' actually believes."
That was my thought, too, Jane. It's a bit of an odd belief for a writer of 11 previous novels to have. But, apparently like his characters, Powers had an encounter with a tree that was transformative. Here is a link to a short article about what motivated him to write The Overstory.

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertain...

[Jane]

I want to recommend Lab Girl by Hope Jahren. I read this book with my in-person book group, and when I read about the young Patricia, I thought of Hope Jahren. She talks about the inter-connection of trees as well.

I personally feel that THE OVERSTORY is much too long. My interest started to flag in the sections about the protests. One protest would have been enough.

Since I finished the book, I have been mentally thanking trees in my neighborhood for all of their good work!

[Donna]

Thanks for the recommendation, Jane. I will check it out.

Like you, I found The Overstory to be over long! And the recursive story line felt redundant at times - not enough forward momentum.
But then again, I tended to focus in on the understory (the human characters) and gloss over the overstory (the tree characters).

[Jane]

Well, I am only now finishing the human stories. And I DO love them. Patricia is right now my personal favorite...but it's her story I'm reading. I've often thought this...that trees have conversations with each other in a language we humans can't understand. I have a tree outside my window. I think it is called a tulip tree. No one's been able to tell me for sure. It has huge leaves and hot pink seed pods that are ripening now. My husband wanted to cut it down and I didn't. We had a wonderful horticulturist/marital therapist who cam to advise us about pruning the trees in our yard, which haven't been touched, except for husband's pruning, in 32 years. He said all of our trees were healthy, but some limbs needed to be cropped for the health of the tree. David thought one of our trees would be forced out by a neighbor's tree with overhanging branches. "Oh, no," he assured us. "They are simply dancing with each other." His price was a bit high, but not crazy. I would have paid him whatever he asked after hearing that.

[Sue]

I have just begun, just read the first sequence about the chestnut trees and I found the ending powerful. This is my first time reading Powers and I am enjoying his writing itself. It will take me a while to get to the point where I can really comment on the overall style and content. So far, so good for me, but I have read your comments and also checked out the alternate suggestions for future reading. More books!

[Barbara]

Like Donna, I struggled to finish this. I loved everything about the trees. Though I'm not as obsessed or militant about it as any of the characters in the book, I've always had a special feeling about them. It may have started when I was a child and one of my favorite things to do was climbing an old apple tree near our house. But, I think it has even more to do with a nature center that was next to a school where I taught for a long time. It was owned by the school district and the office of the teacher who was responsible for bringing groups in and doing nature education was in the building. He adhered to the advice of Patricia Westerford in the book. Any tree that fell stayed where it was and it was fascinating to watch how it became a part of the undergrowth. The only "improvements" that were made were paths, so school children could go through, and picking up of trash. It was a beautiful place. Now, one of my favorite places to hike with my husband does the same thing. We were there earlier this week and reading this book refreshed my appreciation. I also loved the section in which the two people lived in the redwood tree -- it probably brought back the hours spent in a tree when I was young.

Even though I am glad I read The Overstory, I had a few problems with it. My first criticism is the character development as mentioned by someone else here. I didn't mind the multiple characters but Powers doesn't seem to know how to do characterization. I understand that he might have been more concerned with the trees than the people but, if you are going to include them, you need to make the characters believable and interesting. None of these people felt real to me.

Also, though Powers' descriptive writing is lovely and poetic, the book could have done with a lot less of it. I found my eyes glazing over at intervals and wondered who his editor was. I read a couple of interviews with him and he doesn't say anything succinctly so it may be that you just need to enjoy that communication style to love (as opposed to like) his books.

I have a question for the group here. I wasn't sure that I understood the outcome of Patricia's final lecture. Was she threatening to commit suicide there on the stage by drinking what was in the vial? Did she stop at the last minute and throw it out on the crowd choosing "unsuicide"? It felt like Powers was suggesting alternate realities that we could choose.

[Barbara]

Jane wrote: "I want to recommend Lab Girl by Hope Jahren. I read this book with my in-person book group, and when I read about the young Patricia, I thought of Hope Jahren. She talks about the i..."

I heard Jahren interviewed on the New York Times Book Review podcast and thought then that I would like Lab Girl, Jane. Thanks for reminding me.

[Ann D]

I recently read LAB GIRL and also really enjoyed it. I will search for that podcast.

I decided to skip THE OVERSTORY because of its length, my lack of time this month, and some of the reviews. Barbara Kingsolver loved it in her review in the Times.

[Ruth]

I threw in the towel in the middle of the disastrous demonstrations. Pretty much the same problems as others have mentioned. Too many different characters. Paper thin characterization. Too much repetition.

[Sherry, Doyenne]

I didn't read this. I got it from the library and looked at the size of the book and the size of the type, read two pages. I'm in a reading slump. And the size of this book didn't help.

[Carol]

Same here Sherry. I seen the size and said nope.

[Donna]

Barbara, I thought Patricia did not commit suicide but it was rather ambiguous - I guess representing the uncertain future of the planet.

[Sue]

After reading all these comments, I’m in no hurry to continue. I do plan to keep on reading slowly but I have other books I will fast track.

[Donna]

Sue, I started the book in August, knowing I would have to open the discussion. It took some time to read but I'm glad I stuck with it. There are some very interesting reviews online that discuss all of the allegories - things I missed on first read (I tend to be a very literal reader) but appreciate as I think about them.

[Sue]

Thanks for that, Donna. I do plan to return to the book and your comment makes that goal brighter. I have a few other books that are time-sensitive reads and I will probably read them first. But trees still intrigue me, so I have to finish Overstory.

[Gina]

I got behind in this book because I had other books due at the library. I read the very first pages and will probably continue awhile. It sounds doubtful that I will finish. At the time, I was struggling through Blindness and wanted to bail, but also to finish. I hate it when a book keeps me on the fence like that.

[Jane]

Like Barb, I loved the tree parts. For two and a half years when I was a child, we lived in a construction camp in the Amazon jungle and then later we lived in the jungle in Gabon, Africa. At that time, the trees were all powerful in that they would take over a clearing if the workers didn't keep the plants and saplings cleared away. We only walked into the jungle if we had a guide with us, because it was so easy to get lost. The best guides in Gabon were the pygmies. One time a British man got lost and the pygmies found him immediately. When my father asked them how they did it, they said, "Wouldn't you be able to tell when an elephant went crashing through the bush? That's what it looks like when Europeans go through the jungle." All white people were Europeans to them.

Most of the characters were interesting except for Neely, the one who made video games. I have no interest in video games, so I didn't get all of the various levels mentioned. I suppose the point of these sections was that the only place for the planet to be reforested was in the games.

The book is worth reading for the ideas, I think.

[Barbara]

Jane, I loved your story about the trees in the Amazon jungle and smiled at the comparison of white people with elephants crashing through the bush.

Another issue about this book that I wanted to raise had to do with Powers often telling us how to feel rather than bringing us to that point. Sometimes he did it through the voices of the characters which worked a little bit. But, sometimes he did it as part of his own narration which bothered me. It always feels like a shortcut when authors do that. There was an interview with Powers that I can't find now in which he was questioned about that. He said that "moral fiction" was seen as legitimate in the 19th and early 20th centuries but that it has gone out of style now, that authors are required to keep a distance. I don't see it as necessarily keeping a distance but as bringing us to consider a conclusion or a moral through the plot and characters. What do you all think? Was it a problem in the book for you? I know that this a way bigger problem for me than it is for some other readers.

[Ruth]

It bothered me a lot, Barb. One reason I gave up on it was that I felt like I was being lectured at. The way to grab people emotionally is to involve them in the story and let them arrive at your conclusions that way, rather than telling them what to feel. As one of my first writing teachers used to say, “ There’s writers work and there’s readers’s work. Don’t do the readers’ work for them if you want them to care about your story.”

I know he has a point to make. But he could do that directly by writing nonfiction. The only reason for casting it as fiction is to involve the reader emotionally. Yet he continually undercut himself because he couldn’t stop telling us what we were supposed to think.

[Donna]

It bothered me, too, Barb. In fact, it was my main problem with the book - not so much that he was telling me what to think, but rather that he didn't make me feel.

[Jane]

I have ended up being very glad that I read this book. I read a review on a site called in which two reviewers argue about the merits of the book. The importance of the topic struck me. I've been so aware lately of the horror of the massacre of the Amazon. Gradually, I began to see the value of so many different personal stories all connected in some way with the stories of the trees. Yes, there was too much lecturing. The names of the trees that Patricia finds seemed endless as I read that section. But the scope of the book and what the author is trying to do by interweaving stories of characters with the plight of trees on our globe is such an ambitious project, and it actually awed me. Sometimes he indicted his own effort...

[Donna]

It was an ambitious project, indeed, Jane, and one with a very relevant and important topic. I also am glad I read it and, to be honest, I have continued to think about it.

[Jane]

Here are two very concise and well written reviews of this book by two colleagues who are also friends.

As we sit on this terrifying brink of losing everything, this book at once alarms, soothes, emboldens, and invigorates the hopeless reader into maybe, just maybe, actually doing something. Kristina

I don’t have words to describe what this book did to/for me, except that I feel wrecked, smarter, hopeful, lofted, despairing and driven for having read it. The book says it better: “Yes! And what do all good stories do?...They kill you a little. They turn you into something you weren’t.” Megan

I've written a review that now includes a character by character very short synopsis of the opening stories. I can't stop thinking and writing about this book. I was pulled in by each of the character's stories. Dorothy and Ray's story, especially the later part of their story is so intimate and small and perfect. I know it's long but one reviewer said that it became even more powerful on his second reading. I, too, can't stop thinking about it.

[Barbara]

I must say that, for all my criticism, I have been looking at trees with more awe these days.

[Carol]

I didn’t read the book but I am enjoying the discussion. Like Barbara I too have a greater respect for the trees. This morning I was reading an article about a tree trunk that was uncovered and in the life circles there were evidence of the earths magnetic field from thousands of years ago.

https://www.newsweek.com/ancient-tree...

[Sue]

I saw that same article, Carol. Trees have always attracted me. And I enjoy photos of unusual or very old trees. For me there has always been something other-worldly about them.

[Barbara]

The PBS/NYTimes Book Club read The Overstory for their November selection. This article was their last post: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/lov...

[Book Concierge]

My F2F book group is discussing this in April, so I'm going to hold off reading it for a while longer. But will definitely refer back to this discussion.

[Mary Anne]

Sorry to be tardy. Like many here, I struggled along for a while with this book. But then I had the benefit of hearing Powers speak a few weeks ago, and his awe of trees was contagious and spurred me onward.
At the beginning of the talk, he pulled a leaf out of his pocket. A friend from England, who is also a tree expert, gave it to him. The seed for the tree came from an endangered species found in Siberia, and planted in the friend's yard in England. Now the tree flourishes. Powers spoke eloquently of how much life that little leaf contains. I guess I will never look at a tree trunk that has naturally fallen in the woods the same way again.