This ambitious novel soars up through the canopy of American literature and remakes the landscape of environmental fiction ... What makes The Overstory so fascinating is the way it talks to itself, responding to its own claims about the fate of the Earth with confirmation and contradiction. Individual stories constantly shift the novel’s setting and pace, changing registers, pushing into every cranny of these people’s lives ... In harrowing scenes of personal sacrifice — or deadly self-righteousness — we see an unlikely group drawn together by their absolute conviction that our rapacious destruction of trees is an act of mass suicide. The urgency of that belief gives rise to the novel’s most unsettling theme: the tension between complacency and stridency in the face of existential threats.
...his monumental novel The Overstory accomplishes what few living writers from either camp, art or science, could attempt. Using the tools of story, he pulls readers heart-first into a perspective so much longer-lived and more subtly developed than the human purview that we gain glimpses of a vast, primordial sensibility, while watching our own kind get whittled down to size.... The descriptions of this deeply animate place, including a thunderstorm as experienced from 300 feet up, stand with any prose I’ve ever read. I hesitate to tell more, and spoil the immense effort Powers invests in getting us into that primal forest to bear witness ... The science in this novel ranges from fun fact to mind-blowing, brought to us by characters — some scientists, mostly not — who are sweet or funny or maddening in all the relatable ways. The major players number more than a dozen, all invested with touching humanity, and they arrive with such convincing, fully formed résumés, it’s hard to resist Googling a couple of them to see if they’re real people.
It’s an extraordinary novel, which doesn’t mean that I always liked it ... It’s an astonishing performance. Without the steadily cumulative effect of a linear story, Powers has to conjure narrative momentum out of thin air, again and again. And mostly he succeeds. Partly because he’s incredibly good at describing trees, at turning the science into poetry ... But there is a cost to all this plurality and intellectual energy ... All the big things happen suddenly. Characters die, from gas poisoning or suicide or strokes; marriages collapse; people get arrested. In a book about the wisdom of trees, the stories that shape human life tend, by way of contrast perhaps, to be overdramatic ... There is something exhilarating, too ... I found, while reading, that some of what was happening to his characters passed into my conscience, like alcohol into the bloodstream, and left a feeling behind of grief or guilt, even after I put it down. Which is one test of the quality of a novel.
Powers has here managed to turn the liabilities of climate change—its vastness, its resistance to decisive heroes and villains—into assets. We get not an isolated story, but a forest of them; not one or two main characters, but a whole thicket. This delirious sense of sprawl serves both as a formal mimicry of climate changes—everything implicates everything—while also allowing Powers to address global warming from a thrilling variety of perspectives. By following wildly different people on their various storylines, we get a vivid sketch of how climate touches every inch of the Earth ... The book even has a sense of humor about its capaciousness, its Whitmanian appetite for more, more, more ... so much of the book is fantastic precisely because of its hugeness, its gleeful spilling-over ... The Overstory displays a kind of faith—a faith that global warming will force humans to change into other things, not because we want to, not because it is the right thing to do, but because we will have no other choice.
Powers knows, and a psychologist in the book says, that humans need 'good stories' to be persuaded by scientists’ alarms, so Powers creates a band of varied and lively characters with back stories and understories to make his novel a 'bottom-up,' as well as a top-down, fiction, one that equals his best work ... Powers is one of America’s greatest living novelists ... A novelist who writes with soteriological intent, Powers is insightful about the motives of his eco-terrorists, their appreciation of natural life after personal traumas, their hatred of industry and police, their idealistic desire to save other humans from their suicidal destruction of forests ... Read the e-book version of this 500-page novel, save a tree, spread Powers’s words, become a seed of information, contribute to the 'learners’ global truth, and think about performing some arboreal action for the sake of your grandchildren.
By turns visionary, exhortatory, and doom-stricken, The Overstory is a big, ambitious epic, spanning the last half of the 20th century and asking what we’re doing to our planet. It’s too heady, too rhapsodic, too strange to be characterized as agitprop fiction. But it does have a sobering message ... Powers juggles the personal dramas of his far-flung cast with vigor and clarity. The human elements of the book — the arcs his characters follow over the decades from crusading passion to muddled regret and a sense of failure — are thoroughly compelling. So are the extra-human elements, thanks to the extraordinary imaginative flights of Powers’s prose, which persuades you on the very first page that you’re hearing the voices of trees as they chide our species.
The Overstory has much in common with Annie Proulx’s Barkskins, an epic viewed through the history of a timber company...but Mr. Powers is far more strident about the wages of deforestation. The story of his eco-activists is virtually operatic in its melodrama ... But if Mr. Powers is clumsy in his depiction of persons, he’s brilliant on the strange idea of 'plant personhood.' The novel is interested in what one character calls 'unblinding'—opening our eyes to the wondrous things just above our line of sight. Memorable chapters unfold when two protestors 'tree-sit' in the canopy of a giant redwood being threatened by loggers ... It’s one of many unforgettable images in a novel devoted to 'reviving that dead metaphor at the heart of the word bewilderment.'
An immense and intense homage to the arboreal world (its biological sophistication, its rich panoply of environmental benefits), the book is alive with riveting data, cogent reasoning and urgent argument. Pages that take you into menaced remnants of primeval forest or contemplate singularly splendid or fascinating trees teem with knowledge and gleam with aesthetic appeal ... But large tracts of the book stay fictionally lifeless. Its main characters primarily function as stick figures displaying admirable attitudes towards trees ... One character contends that, in our present ecologically precarious state, what’s needed are compelling novels about the fate not of people but the planet. This valiant, lopsided book is Powers’s attempt to write one.
This is a mighty, at times even monolithic, work that combines the multi-narrative approach of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas with a paean to the grandeur and wonder of trees that elegantly sidesteps pretension and overambition. Early comparisons to Moby-Dick are unfairly lofty, but this fine book can stand on its own ... As befits a book that spans centuries, there is a richness and allusiveness to the prose that reaches back as far as Thoreau’s Walden ... The book is long and could have done with an edit, and Powers’s ecological message, heartfelt though it is, might strike some readers as on the nose in place ... Nonetheless, when set against Powers’s greater achievements, these are but woodworm compared with the majestic redwood of a novel that he has constructed.
Powers is a master of language, and the meditative prose throughout the novel is utterly engrossing, but the descriptions of these nonhuman worlds give the novel its startling impact ... description — like many of the descriptions in the novel — is filled with linguistic beauty, but it also serves a greater purpose; this is the very rethinking of language and narrative ... There are also places where the story falters. Each of the eco-activists experiences a deeply traumatic event that in some way motivates the extreme lengths they are willing to go to in order to protect the trees they love. This pivot in character development seems odd ... Furthermore, while Powers paints the opposition — the loggers, the FBI agents — with a respectful humanity, it would add an illuminating contrast to go deeper into one of their points of view. These are minor concerns, however, in a novel that strives for — and accomplishes — so much, offering a 'thorough rethink' of both the way we see nonhuman nature and the way we see the novel form.
...never mind that I believe Richard Powers’ 12th novel to be a masterwork sculpted from sheer awe. Instead, know that reading “The Overstory” will convince you that we walk among gods every time we enter a forest ... Powers’ greatest achievement here is his ability to convey the genuine magic of trees — specifically, their impenetrable intelligence and sensual delights.
The Great American Novel has been written many times ... Yet these national epics have — you might conclude after reading The Overstory — failed to see the wood for the trees. They’ve been too wrapped up in the lives of mere humans. Richard Powers’ 12th novel is a rare specimen: a Great American Eco-Novel ... The message here is that of Dr Seuss: like the Lorax, these clear-eyed activists (Powers, too) 'speak for the trees' while short-termist Once-lers go right on 'biggering' their logging operations ... This is a good story. It will change the way you look at trees.
The beauty of the trees, their antiquity, their shocking imperilment at our hands, their desire to communicate to us the imminent threats to our mutual survival—all these truths join in one song of celebration and lament ... There can be no happy ending. But to paraphrase Václav Havel, hope is not the same thing as optimism. The Overstory dramatizes this idea on the grandest scale. I have never read anything so pessimistic and yet so hopeful.
Powers reminds us again and again that trees and humans share a quarter of our genes. Therefore, we also share a history—one too often characterized by conquest and pain. The plots of these stories weave together subtly, and a number of them converge explicitly in a long set piece about California redwoods, which are targeted for deforestation ... Powers’s other novels, like The Time of Our Singing and The Echo Maker, have been criticized for being more interested in ideas than the characters they revolve around. The same critique could be leveled at The Overstory, and yet there is something more going on ... Manufacturing a narrative arc out of the brambles of history always requires emphasizing some agents at the expense of others, choosing certain strands and ignoring others. While Powers is eager to show that forests might know things we don’t, his novel risks forgetting a history that is known, one which no one can responsibly plead ignorance. Amid the large cast of characters—both human and non-human— indigenous and black histories are glaringly absent. It’s an omission that is all the more disappointing in a novel that urges us to imagine all kinds of stories as intricately, if invisibly, linked.
A virtuoso at parallel narratives, concurrent micro and macro perspectives, and the meshing of feelings, facts, and ideas, Powers draws on his signature fascination with the consequences, intended and otherwise, of science and technology as he considers the paradox of our ongoing assaults against nature in spite of all the evidence indicating impending disasters ... Powers’ sylvan tour de force is alive with gorgeous descriptions; continually surprising, often heartbreaking characters; complex suspense; unflinching scrutiny of pain; celebration of creativity and connection; and informed and expressive awe over the planet’s life force and its countless and miraculous manifestations. Powers elevates ecofiction ... The Overstory and its brethren seed awareness and hope.
Powers’ (Orfeo, 2014, etc.) 12th novel is a masterpiece of operatic proportions, involving nine central characters and more than half a century of American life ... A magnificent achievement: a novel that is, by turns, both optimistic and fatalistic, idealistic without being naïve.
Powers’s best works are thrilling accounts of characters blossoming as they pursue their intellectual passions; here, few of the earnest figures come alive on the page. While it teems with people, information, and ideas, the novel feels curiously barren.
