Title: The Overstory
Rating: 4 Stars
I make an effort to read as many Pulitzer Prize Fiction winners as I can. Of the past sixty winners, I’ve probably read at least fifty. The Overstory was the 2019 winner.
Unlike most of the previous winners, I honestly don’t know how I feel about it. It’s nearly impossible for me to give it a ranking. There were times as I read it that I would have easily given it five stars. There were other times when I was convinced that I was reading a two star novel.
First of all, there’s the sprawling plot. It focuses on nine different characters. There’s a Vietnam war vet that was part of the Stanford prison experiment. There’s the paralyzed brilliant software developer looking to write software that connects people as he himself lives in isolation. There’s a troubled married couple that share a love of amateur acting. There is a dendrologist specializing in tree communication. There’s a directionless college student that becomes an eco warrior. There’s an Asian engineer with a love of trees inspired by her father. There’s an artist inspired by nature. There’s a psychologist studying people with extremist beliefs.
As you can imagine, setting these stories takes a bit of time. The first third or so of the novel covers the origin stories of each of these nine characters.
Eventually, five of the main characters, concerned about the environmental damage that humans are inflicting upon the planet, come together. Moving from peaceful protests like tree sitting to prevent logging, they ultimately end up committing violent acts. One such act ends in the death of one of the characters. That is the second third of the novel.
The final third is the characters’ lives after the explosion. The four surviving members of the explosion are living quiet if not underground lives, constantly on the fear of arrest.
At the same time, the software developer is getting rich developing an immersive gaming experience. The married couple are estranged and are on the verge of divorce until the man has a stroke that renders him nearly immobile and voiceless. The dendrologist (expert in trees), once derided for her views on the sophisticated behavior of trees, is now redeemed with a best selling book but is desperately concerned about the state of the planet.
From this description, you might understand some of my dilemma. There’s a lot going on, but much of it is at best loosely connected. Some subplots were quite engaging. Others not so much
At its heart, this is an environmental or ecological novel. All characters end up being concerned with the survival of trees, ranging from acts of violence in protest to performing groundbreaking science in the service of trees or even to letting their yard grow wild as an act of rebellion.
At the same time that all of these plots unfold, real facts and data are brought to bear. Since humans have taken over the planet, half of all trees have disappeared. Since trees are so crucial to nature’s lifecycle, the cascading repercussions of this destruction include countless number of species going extinct and unknown life saving medicine being lost. We are the seeds of our own destruction.
An underlying theme of the novel is that when we endanger nature, we’re not actually endangering nature, we’re endangering ourselves. No matter what we throw at it, nature will adapt. When humans cease to exist, it’s only a matter of time before nature reclaims all of our farm land, carefully manicured lawns, and the cities in which we live. If you can imagine our planet’s life to date taking place in the span of a day, humans only appear four seconds to midnight. At our most destructive, we barely register as a speed bump.
Having so many apparently disparate plots that are, upon deeper reflection, loosely connected, matches with the behavior of trees and forests. Apparently in some cases, what appears to be an entire forest is really only just one unimaginably complex tree. Trees communicate with each other via techniques that we’re just barely beginning to understand. One type of tree will provide another type of tree nutrients that it has somehow signaled that it needs. Since trees can live for centuries, this communication, sometimes at the deep root level, moves at such a slow pace that it is nearly imperceptible to human sensitivities.
The fact that all of this biological philosophy is communicated in a novel while at the same time telling nine distinct stories is astonishing. For Richard Powers, it truly is a tour de force and unquestionably deserving of the Pulitzer Prize.
This is one of those novels that I appreciated and admired both for its message and its brilliant writing but I have to say that I didn’t really enjoy it. For a work of fiction, it took me much longer than normal to finish and there were times that I felt disengaged with it.
Even so, it’s an important novel trying to communicate an urgent message.
dorkenstein 