We’re the Understory

The Overstory a novel by Richard Powers.  Norton.  502 pp.  $18.95

The Overstory is nothing if not ambitious.  It begins by introducing nine characters in brief vignettes, summing up their lives to a certain point; each of these characters, we have a feeling, could inhabit a novel of their own.  The one thing they have in common—we notice in particular from the first character, Nicholas Hoel—is a relationship to trees.  These introductions occupy 152 pages of small print.  Then the narrative rolls forward, taking up one character, then another, in a time that is roughly the present.  If someone had asked me if this was a good idea for a novel, I might have said yes, but only if the novelist is Leo Tolstoy.  But though I wasn’t enthralled by the entire novel, I have to say in balance that The Overstory is a hell of a performance.  My hat is off to Richard Powers, whom I’d never read.  I’m not surprised it was an award winner.

I read the book because it was recommended by a friend who had never steered me wrong, in fact steered me to two of the best reading experiences of my life, both of which I would happily read again, but I almost didn’t read this novel because of the pomposity of the publicity surrounding it.  Powers’ website is beautifully put together but off-putting in the way it presents him, introducing The Overstory, for instance, as “a monumental novel about reimagining our place in the living world, by one of our most ‘prodigiously talented’ (New York Times Book Review) novelists.”[1]  Also, who convinced him, on the website and in other places, to appear in these dreadfully posed photographs, which almost look satirical, they’re so bad?  I was also troubled by an article in The Guardian where he says that “we” are alienated from everything alive.  Speak for yourself, there, pal.  It’s as if Powers suddenly discovered the existence of trees in the middle of his life, and then set out to learn everything about them and write a book (and to live among them.  He apparently now resides in the foothills of the Smokies).  There’s something weird about this whole situation.[2]  But he did learn an incredible amount about trees, and put the knowledge into a gripping narrative.  These are no small feats.

Predictably, a number of his characters become enraged by the clear cutting of trees going on in various places, especially ancient redwoods that have been here forever, and their protests, and eventual terrorist acts, occupy a major part of the novel’s heart.  A couple of characters climb up and live in a redwood to prevent it from being taken down, and what they find is fascinating, a whole world up there.  Others set off explosions to take out equipment.

I’m entirely on Powers’ side, and agree that it’s incredibly short-sighted and insensitive to take down these trees, but his novel would be more effective if he had a few characters from the other side of this issue.  For long stretches of the middle of this book, I was in the familiar territory of our political landscape, where people who are trying to protect the environment are heroes and everybody else is a fat gun-carrying truck-driving idiot.  I’m on the same side as all the people who will read this book.  But if I want to watch a Michael Moore movie I’ll watch one.

So I was bummed out in the middle of the book, dutifully reading yet another novel that says we’re the good guys and they’re the assholes, they’re also morons, they’re destroying the earth, shitting where they live, and they’ll find out how bad this is when the human race goes extinct.  There!  Serves them right!  But there is a larger vision that sustains this book and seemed to come up when all the protests were over, though it was there all the time.  It is a vision of the true magnificence of trees, that we really have no idea what they are, how much they communicate and take care of their own, how sheerly intelligent they are.  That’s a strange word to use about trees, but there’s no other word for it.  Also the sheer magnificence of creation, of this world.  It’s a kind of religious vision.

There is one character, Patricia Westerford, a nerdy graduate student who first sees how trees communicate and care for their own, publishes an article that says so, and is soon vilified and mocked by the academic community.  Eventually she leaves academia altogether, practically becomes a street person.  There seems to be more than a little misogyny behind the way she was attacked, also a smugness and arrogance of professors who believe they know everything and grad students know nothing.  She eventually becomes the true hero of the novel for me, because she understands this larger vision of trees and of nature altogether.  Her reputation is vindicated by a younger group of scholars, and she becomes a sage.  The meeting she attends where people are asking what we can do now is marvelous, and its final ambiguity is just right.  If I was bogged down in the middle of this novel, I was thrilled by the last hundred pages.  And I can see that the middle of the book might have been necessary.

The Overstory’s final vision is that life on this earth is vast, ancient, and mysterious, and that human beings are a late arrival.  If it’s true that they can’t survive the current situation, that will seem tragic to them, but in the face of creation it’s a minor blip.  Life will go on, and there’s no telling where it will go next.  It’s too mysterious ever to be grasped.

[1] While I’m on this subject, I had been thinking of reading Lincoln in the Bardo when I checked out George Saunders website.  I was pleased that he had written his bio in the first person, but rather stunned at the way he toots his own horn.  “In 2001, I was selected by Entertainment Weekly as one of the 100 top most creative people in entertainment, and by The New Yorker in 2002 as one of the best writers 40 and under.”  Can you imagine any of the great American novelists of the past doing such a thing?  Faulkner, to pick someone wildly at random?

[2] Various interviewers describe Powers as a self-effacing, modest person.  That makes me wonder who created the website.  Have a look.