New York Times Book Review Tree Novel 2018
Fiction
The Heroes of This Novel Are Centuries Erstwhile and 300 Feet Tall
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THE OVERSTORY
By Richard Powers
502 pp. Due west.W. Norton & Company. $27.95.
Trees do most of the things you do, just more slowly. They compete for their livelihoods and take care of their families, sometimes making huge sacrifices for their children. They breathe, eat and accept sex. They give gifts, communicate, acquire, remember and record the of import events of their lives. With relatives and non-kin alike they cooperate, forming neighborhood watch committees — to name i case — with rapid response networks to alarm others to a threatening intruder. They manage their resources in bank accounts, using past marketplace trends to predict future needs. They mine and farm the country, and sometimes move their families across bully distances for meliorate opportunities. Some of this might take centuries, but for a animate being with a life span of hundreds or thousands of years, time must surely take a different feel nearly it.
And for all that, trees are things to us, good for tables, floors and ceiling beams: As much as nosotros might admire them, nosotros're yet happy to walk on their hearts. It may annals every bit a shock, then, that trees have lives so much similar our own. All the behaviors described above accept been studied and documented by scientists who carefully avoid the discussion "beliefs" and other anthropomorphic language, lest they be accused of having emotional attachments to their subjects.
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The novelist suffers no such injunction, but most of them don't know beans about botany. Richard Powers is the exception, and his awe-inspiring novel "The Overstory" accomplishes what few living writers from either campsite, art or scientific discipline, 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 nosotros gain glimpses of a vast, primordial sensibility, while watching our ain kind get whittled downwards to size.
But: Birds gotta wing, fish gotta swim. People will just read stories about people, as this author knows perfectly well. "The Overstory" is a delightfully choreographed, ultimately breathtaking hoodwink. The scattering of readers who come to the book without benefit of reviews or jacket copy volition believe it'south a drove of unrelated short stories. The opener is a gorgeous family saga with the texture of a Ken Burns documentary, and more plot. The Hoels are Norwegian immigrants whose vocations link them with our continent's once-predominant tree, the American chestnut, as they all flourish and then are tragically cut back — both Hoels and chestnuts — to a alone scion. Pause for a moment to absorb this, then move on to the adjacent immigrant story, in which Mimi Ma's father invests likewise many hopes in a mulberry tree. Then, in the Vietnam War, Douglas Pavlicek is shot from a military airplane and survives through a fortuitous intersection of his fate with that of a centuries-former fig tree. In another time, in Silicon Valley, an eleven-year-old coding prodigy named Neelay Mehta has a much unluckier tangle with an ancient Castilian oak.
Trees are everywhere but incidental, information technology seems, until the seventh tale in the series, nearly an odd petty girl who loves trees more she loves most people and grows upwards to exist a scientist. As Dr. Pat Westerford she spends years lonely in forests doing her inquiry, initially mocked by her peers just somewhen celebrated for an astounding (and actually existent) discovery: A wood'southward trees are all communicating, all the time, via a nuanced chemic language transmitted from root to root. As this revelation dawns, the reader is jolted with electric glimpses of connections among characters in the previous stories. And then we remember we're in the hands of Richard Powers, winner of a genius grant, a storyteller of such chiliad scope that Margaret Atwood was moved to enquire: "If Powers were an American writer of the 19th century, which writer would he be? He'd probably be the Herman Melville of 'Moby-Dick.'"
His picture really is that big. These characters who have held us rapt for 150 pages turn out to be the shrubby understory, for which nosotros couldn't yet run across the woods. Standing overhead with outstretched limbs are the real protagonists. Trees volition bring these small-scale lives together into big acts of war, dearest, loyalty and betrayal, in a trigger-happy struggle against a mortgaged timber company that is liquidating its assets, including one of the last virgin stands of California redwoods. The descriptions of this deeply animate place, including a thunderstorm as experienced from 300 anxiety upward, stand up with any prose I've ever read. I hesitate to tell more, and spoil the immense effort Powers invests in getting usa into that key woods to acquit witness. It'due south a fragile human activity, writing about tree defenders: In an era when art seems ready to encompass subjects as painful as racism and sexual harassment, information technology still shrinks from environmental brutality. We may agree that deforested continents and melting permafrost betray the gravest assaults nosotros've e'er committed against anything or anyone, but yet tend to acquit as if it'southward impolite to bring this upwards.
In the kind of meta-conversation that makes a Powers novel feel and then famously intelligent, the narrative is seasoned with canny observations on this exact problem. The tree scientist frets almost public indifference to her work: "Forests panic people. Too much going on there. Humans demand a sky." Elsewhere, a patent attorney becomes profoundly disabled and seeks solace in novels, fifty-fifty while he muses on the limitations of the form. "To exist human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one. … The world is declining precisely because no novel can brand the competition for the world seem as compelling equally the struggles between a few lost people. … Though I am faux, they say, and nil I do makes the least deviation, notwithstanding, I cross all distances to sit down adjacent to you in your mechanical bed, keep you lot company and change your listen."
Given that Richard Powers has swept the literary-prize Olympics, he should be a household name, just isn't quite. Critics accept sometimes blamed a certain bleakness of outlook, or a arrears of warmth in his characters: As Atwood put information technology, the story going around is that he's "not cozy enough at the cadre." I doubtable the complaint isn't entirely Powers's problem, merely rather a symptom of the art/science divide and some stiff cultural stereotypes. At the prospect of a science-y genius taking the podium, a lot of the audience expects to be frozen out, or bored.
"The Overstory" makes a potent case for expecting otherwise. The science in this novel ranges from fun fact to mind-blowing, brought to us by characters — some scientists, mostly non — who are sweetness 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'due south hard to resist Googling a couple of them to see if they're real people. (They aren't.) This is a gigantic fable of genuine truths held together past a connective tissue of tender exchange between fictional friends, lovers, parents and children. A computer programmer brings his piece of work domicile to spend hours inventing games with his son: "Now, Neelay-ji. What might this little creature do?" A cute Eastern European backpacker invites herself for a one-nighter in the vet Douglas'southward remote motel, and he warns that she shouldn't be out there by herself, looking the mode she does. "'How I expect?' She blows a raspberry and whisks her palm. 'Similar an ill monkey who needs washing.'" Best of all are two crumbling misanthropes, Patricia and Dennis, who will wreck any unsentimental heart with their gentle discovery that simply an 60 minutes a day together can make a marriage, providing the nutrient that's been missing all along. Fifty-fifty when viewed from very high upwardly, through the lens of a thing that's been alive since before Jesus, all these little people with their short, busy lives and blinding passions are very dear indeed.
A tree's-eye view on a planet can likewise exist enough unnerving, in life and in art. Powers doesn't hesitate to requite us wide-screen views of the machinery of his plot, then we can't miss the roles his characters have been assigned as fulcrum and levers aptitude to a larger purpose. It'south a fair enough device in a novel meant to tell united states of america that humans aren't the only show on world: that in fact we're not much more than than a sneeze to a bristlecone pine. In the stop, "The Overstory" defies its own prediction almost fiction'due south limits, making the contest for the world feel every bit as of import as the struggles betwixt people. Even if you've never given a thought to the pulp and timber industries, by this book'southward last folio you will probably wish you weren't reading it on the macerated, acid-bleached flesh of its protagonists. That'south what a story can do.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/09/books/review/overstory-richard-powers.html
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