Fiction Review: The Overstory

Since its release in 2018, I have been hearing rave reviews of The Overstory by Richard Powers, which won the Pulitzer Prize, was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and was on lots of Top 10 lists that year. Many of my friends told me what an amazing book it was, as well. It was on my stack for Big Book Summer 2021, but I never got to it. Thankfully, I made it a priority this year, for Big Book Summer 2022, because this novel about trees (and people) is a powerful, engrossing story that is utterly original.

The book is cleverly structured in four parts: Roots, Trunk, Crown, and Seeds. Roots is structured as a series of separate short stories. Each story focuses on a person or family and a tree or trees that are somehow connected to their lives. For instance, the first story is about a Norwegian immigrant in 1800's New York. He proposes to his future wife, an Irish immigrant, one evening while they are picking chestnuts in what was then a time of celebration in a region filled with chestnut trees. After marriage, they move to Iowa, buy five acres of land for a farm, and the man plants some of the leftover chestnuts. One grows into a giant chestnut tree, next to their farmhouse. Over the next 150 years or so, the tree grows (later, a unique sight after all the chestnuts on the East Coast die), as their family grows. Generations grow up, as the tree grows up, and a unique way of documenting the tree's growth is carried on through the family, until Nick, an artist and the great-great-great grandson of the homesteader is left to remember the tree's legacy.

That's just a brief outline of the first story in Roots. There are seven others, each focusing on a person or family somewhere in the U.S. (though sometimes with roots elsewhere) and the tree(s) that affected their lives. Each story is accompanied by a drawing of a branch of the tree. In Part 2, Trunk, the eight people highlighted in Roots, eventually come together on the West Coast, on a mutual mission to save some of our nation's oldest trees from being clear-cut. They are up against formidable forces in their fight, and each person carries his or her own roots, family, memories, and reasons why trees are important. In Crown, things fall apart, and the group separates, each devastated and coping in his or her own way to a tragedy that occurred. At this stage in the novel, they--and the reader--begin to feel that the goal of saving the trees (and the urgency to do so) are hopeless. However, in Seeds, there are glimmers of hope, as different characters each do their own part, and the trees themselves show some resilience.

That long description barely begins to capture the real essence of this book. It's magical, the way these people come together and find each other, in much the same way that trees connect with each other, communicate, and depend on each other. One character in the novel, Patricia Westerford, a hearing-impaired botanist who got her love of nature from her father, studies trees, writes books, and blows away old thinking about forests with ground-breaking research. Her passages provide some facts and science but in a beautiful, engaging way that is intricately connected with her life. It's a book about trees but also about people and mostly about the connections between both. This special novel uniquely combines science, spirituality, relationships, deep characterizations, and even suspense into a beautifully written and completely original story. This is one that will stick with me for a long time.

502 pages, W.W. Norton & Company

Recorded Books

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This book fits in the following 2022 Reading Challenges:

 

Mount TBR Challenge

Alphabet Soup - O

Diversity Challenge

Literary Escapes Challenge - Oregon

Big Book Summer Challenge

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Listen to a sample of the audiobook here, from the prologue and the beginning of the first story, about the chestnut, and/or download it from Audible.

 

You can buy the book through Bookshop.org, where your purchase will support the indie bookstore of your choice (or all indie bookstores)--the convenience of shopping online while still buying local!

 

 

Or you can order The Overstory from Book Depository, with free shipping worldwide.