Asking the Right Questions: The Overstory by Richard Powers

The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.

The Overstory by Richard Powers, whether it changes your mind or not, is a damn good story. It is also more than just a story.

I picked up The Overstory months ago in a moment of inspiration. It is a 2019 Pulitzer Prize winner, but more importantly, Keanu Reeves had recommended it in an interview. Since I would trust John Wick with my life, I figured I could trust him with recommendations. And yet, committing to a tome of 625 pages seemed as ambitious an attempt as the book itself.

I drifted in and out of it for many weeks, eventually picking up pace with my reading once I decided it would be my April read for my monthly reading challenge. It took me another six weeks to plod through it, but once I had finished, I flipped back the volume — now extensively dog-eared and interspersed with pressed flowers — to its beginning, and I inscribed under the title the two sentences that open this review.

As I write this now, I realize how challenging it is to comment on The Overstory without resorting to blatant exhortations at people to “give a f*ck about trees”. But we’ll come back to this.

The Overstory is divided into four parts. Roots, Trunk, Crown, Seeds. Each chapter in Roots is a mini bildungsroman of one of the main characters of the novel, of which there are as many as eight/nine. They are as diverse as could be; a farmer’s son who becomes an artist, a reclusive child fascinated with ants, an IP lawyer and an amateur theatre enthusiast, a loadmaster in the Vietnam War, the engineer daughter of a Chinese immigrant, a computer nerd in a wheelchair, a hearing and speech impaired young scientist, and a carefree student living a risqué lifestyle who dies for seventy seconds and then comes back to life, serving as a bridge between the Roots and Trunk of the novel.

As I read Roots, it felt like I was reading a collection of short stories, each story coming across as objectively detached. These chapters seem as unconnected as they are different, like trees and men. But as pointed out more than once, “you and the tree in your backyard come from a common ancestor”. And so it is that the nine protagonists share a common thread. For one of them, it is stated outright, “he owes his life to a tree”. The rest, in their own strange ways, do the same. Even the one broken by a fall from an oak. Even the one to whom trees mean nothing but the stage prop forests of Birnam Wood in Macbeth.

It is only about one-third into the book — we’re barely through the understory — that Olivia, the resurrected, finds Nicholas, the tree artist. Soon, more roots come together to form the trunk. Five of them unite to form the heartwood. Much of the story hereon is focused on the battle for the Californian redwoods, waged against timber companies working their way at a suicidal pace through the country’s green cover, but a battle is a mere milepost in the trajectory of the greater war — the endless struggle of planet versus profit.

One of the key tenets of The Overstory is the delineation of this struggle and its stakes — the tree of life is on the brink of collapse. Mankind’s hunger for ‘just a little bit more’ is endless, and endless exploitation of resources within a finite system can only lead to one outcome. Climate crisis is already upon us, a pressing life-threatening reality, and deforestation alone has been a bigger factor than the carbon footprint of the world’s transportation taken together. A key character proposes damage control, “What you make from a tree should be at least as miraculous as what you cut down.”

The other is simply this — trees are the most wondrous products of four billion years, they’re sentient, they’re social, and they need our help.

Yes, The Overstory tells you why you should give a f*ck about trees, but it also narrates the story of men and women, those who are brought alive in its 600 odd pages. From failing to remember their names in the first part, to witnessing their journeys of self-discovery, to being moved to tears in the end pages by their acts of love, sacrifice, betrayal and redemption, the "best novel ever written about trees" (Ann Patchett) takes you on a tumultuous ride through the experiences and emotions of its bipedal heroes.

More than anything, The Overstory amazed me with its details. The sheer volume of minutiae — of plants and their species and their behaviours and habitats — had me constantly wondering how long and hard the research for the book must have been. It took Powers five years to write The Overstory. But Powers is known as the ‘the last generalist’ and known well for writing masterpieces in the realist tradition. The Overstory is one triumph among many.

And yet, there is such a thing as too many details. The Overstory could have been part botany text if not for the seamless way in which tree talk is interwoven into the story, but reading it can be exhausting at times. There were pages when the descriptions wore me down to the point where baobabs and their buttresses and bald cypresses and cedars all seemed to merge into one another.

The scope of the story is grandiose, even overreaching, spanning the entire lives of many of its characters. The sheer chronological scale makes it necessary for chunks of the story to be summarized, which Powers does with skill. This, however, renders some parts too simplistic, as if the writer couldn’t afford to have his readers stray in contemplation. Dilemmas are dissected, motives and actions explained, evidences clearly signposted.

Nonetheless, The Overstory has more than one trick up its sleeve. Structurally, the book is a conceit. The story unfolds like the whorls on a tree. A bunch of roots unite to feed its trunk, extending into the crown, which reaches out towards the sky and in a final act of bountiful giving, disperses its seeds into the cerulean expanse.

More notably, The Overstory asks the important questions. How much is enough? How long do we have? Do trees have rights? Does the end justify the means? It is remarkable and scary how pertinent these questions seem to be in the current times; a time of bushfires and cyclones and earthquakes and pandemics and rising temperatures and weakening magnetic fields. Even when the ideological tussle of environmentalism vs capitalism veers off into the territory of ecoterrorism, absolute censure of the acts of vandalism and arson is difficult in view of what is at stake. Violence, by all accounts, cannot be justified, but what when it’s state-sponsored? When the city’s finest are the ones pouring pepper spray into the eyes of peaceful protesters? Who do you call when the police murders?

One of my favourite modern artworks is the photographic self-portrait of Adel Abdessemed, French-Algerian contemporary artist, where he set fire to himself and struck a defiant pose in response to contemporary events like Arab Spring and Syrian Civil War. A dominant interpretation is that it represents the incitement of violence in response to the injustice existing in the world. Similar sentiments echo through The Overstory, and whether it changes your mind or not about the merit of desperate measures in desperate times, it will at the least have you acknowledge it as more than just a good story.

Some may even call it radical. Radical, a word that comes from Radix. Root.