The Taller They Are

 Review of The Overstory by Richard Powers

I mean holy shit.

In Richard Powers' twelfth novel The Overstory, one of the characters has just written a book around the concept that trees are actually social beings when her literary agent calls her to tell her "you wouldn't believe what you have me seeing on the way into the office". The Overstory itself has this power; after reading it I can't even look at my backyard the same way. 

Told through the perspective of 9 individuals whose lives constantly cross paths - less in cheesy one domino toppling the other way like the movie Crash or something, but more like an everyone and everything is interconnected type of way - The Overstory tells a story about trees. Powers' prose style, which before now I had been unfamiliar with, seems to be just laying out stunning sentence after stunning sentence. One can forgive the sort of rigidness of his familiarly archetypal characters if only because he can describe a tree with so much poetic, philosophical, and beautifully scientific language it becomes a genuinely emotional thing to behold.

I'm not exaggerating, I have yet to find a writer in my short life as an avid reader who has inspired in me such an appreciation for things I have lived in proximity with my entire life. Moby Dick has always been a favorite book of mine because Melville could take a mundane object like a cup of clam chowder and blow it up to a massive philosophical stand-in for concepts you would think would be far-fetched, and he does it with poetic prowess alone. The Overstory does the same, but more singularly; it's just trees baby. And maybe this is because I don't live in Herman Melville's world, but The Overstory is more intimate. Powers lives in our world too, when he prompts you to look around, it feels more real, less like just a fun literary exercise.

Which of course makes the actual story of The Overstory all the more crushing. If the novel is about anything other than trees it is about the complete and utter failure of society to protect and cherish them. Unlike other fictional books about climate change (cough cough Ministry for the Future), The Overstory has stories of mass movements. We watch fictionalized accounts of real efforts (like the Lumber Wars in the 90s) across many decades to protect forests and the environment at large. Massive peaceful demonstrations, civil disobedience, and violence toward property all fail. There are more cultural, "thinkfluencing" attempts like writing books, making video games, and scientists committing suicide in the name of awareness. There are even the small personal struggles of someone who simply does not want to mow their lawn in a suburb to give their plot of land back to the earth. They all fail.

And none of this is a spoiler. It can't be a spoiler because we know what happens already, we know what happens because we're living through this exact narrative right now. While the depiction of the Lumber Wars of the 90s was fictionalized, we saw its failures in real life. There are real people sitting in federal prison for property crimes in the defense of trees, charged as domestic terrorists. Climate scientists are literally committing suicide right now in brutal ways. Nothing has changed; the consumption is insatiable. 

So while Powers builds in you an intense appreciation for forests, endears you to what we can only now see as an essential partner for sustaining life on earth, and asks you to look around, you're also forced to see the fire. This could make The Overstory an incredibly important text, one that asks people to slow down and appreciate and take action to protect what is around them. But as we see in the novel itself, even when you're inspired to action the forces against you are awful and immovable. Maybe we are just looking at another literary exercise, except this one is not fun. 

It is, however, incredibly good.