The Overstory (2018): Book Review

Quick Take: 
If only I had discovered Richard Powers earlier on. His most recent novel (and the first that I've read), The Overstory (April 2018), is one of those epic, poetic works that attempts to mingle or even re-set human narrative storytelling to the pace of the natural history of trees. I rarely say this about a work of literature (and I've read plenty)--but it is truly beautiful, and no doubt a masterwork.

Basically, in all of its human drama, this novel poses two narrative and historical-natural questions: what if we could narrate--and live--at the pace of trees? And how might human history affect and be affected by the natural lives of trees? The conceit is an ambitious one, and one possibly trite and tried, but Powers produces an original and deeply poetic work.

A moving read, I recommend this book for those seeking a captivating novel of history and loss--a truly melancholic read. I couldn't put it down (which is rare for me these days), and I found very little to be critical of. Powers is a master of the craft--he is a past winner of the National Book Award, and The Overstory is longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize. He is certainly up there with the contemporary American greats of what they now call literary fiction.

***

More:
While the novel initially spans 150 years or so, it is really about the convergence of multiple characters' histories in the present, but at the pacing and in the mode of tree growth. Like trees, these characters conspire, revolt, and suffer together; they discover, celebrate, and live alongside the hidden lives and indifferent histories of trees through activism, scientific research, artistic representation, and virtual digital media.

The novel is told through tracking different strands of the greater human family tree, with a certain arbitrariness underlying its narrative motion. It is capricious in its joys and losses--whole species of chestnut trees are lost in the blink of an eye; whole branches of families suffer loss. As I read, I came to expect surprise as the narrative device, which is good, because I loathe a neat narrative arc, resolution, or transcendence, even as I expected the desire for life and living from both trees and humans. Throughout the novel, lives emerge and converge organically, like the trees around them, and they are swept away arbitrarily, too, into new histories or dead ends of their family trees.

As a modernist, Powers resists reconciliation, but he does imagine a natural convergence of human and tree that is poetic and tragic. Redwoods and chestnuts suffer natural disease or human extermination, and the humans around them suffer and celebrate in both organized and arbitrary ways.

While the design and metaphysical balance of the novel worked, what made it most palatable, and even beautiful, was its absolute elegance on the level of storytelling and diction: The writing easily passes as a series of epic, prose poems. It is not for naught that Powers references Thoreau and Whitman. He is clearly a modernist inheritor of their transcendent traditions.