Clearly, moments in Richard Powers The Overstory are poetic and powerful. His overall message is extremely important to our survival, and he is smarter than most of us, especially about trees. He makes the assertion, based on sound scientific knowledge, that trees, and not us, are the main cognizant life form on earth. His contentions about yet to be discovered medicine in forest ecosystems have been around for a long time, in human terms anyway, but Powers drives home the point. Trees have lived thousands of years and have an untold potential for saving us and the planet, yet we’ve come along to destroy them. We are the stupidly offending transgressor.
Scientifically, the message is urgent, and the relentless prose perhaps attempts to communicate that sense of urgency. Powers writes “the only thing that can change minds is a good story.” Unfortunately, while ambitious and daring, The Overstory falls short of being great fiction, and often it isn’t even very good; sometimes it’s just plain bad writing. Of course, everything here can be attributed to mere stylistic preferences.
Powers has the annoying habit of trying to identify characters by several different descriptors, often within the same paragraph or few pages, referring to them by name, then nickname, then “the woman” or “the man who” or some other “the” as if they are new and completely different characters. And there are too many characters to begin with, all there for the same purpose, to become more aware of the significance of tress. Their individual actions however – eating, drinking, and walking around – are often chronicled for no apparent point, mundane movement trying to be dramatic. Then, occasionally, just when you get into a character’s story, you’re met with a blank space, presumably for that sought after dramatic effect, but the space has the feel of an irritating TV commercial.
Powers makes many good philosophical points, but the writing is unnecessarily cryptic and opaque, simple ideas made complex, repetitive scenes, repetitive emotions, repetitive listing of tree species, none of which does anything to move the story along. It becomes relentless proselyting and feels like being trapped in a small space with an end-of-the-world homeless fanatic who won’t shut-up. While he might be right, his cause noble, his warnings appropriate, you feel compelled to do the opposite of what he is saying. It’s so overbearing that this reader almost cheered when some environmentalists walked out of the lecture on page 452.
Unnecessary adjectives act like anchors dragging down the story. Reading along easily enough, then encountering forced word combinations more suited for extremely dense poetry tends to make the pace erratic. A few times, the descriptive adjectives, no matter how you look at them, are plainly just the wrong word. Perhaps this is just an attempt to convey the complexity of the forest ecosystem. But to see what’s really going on in the forest requires clarity and focus, not the suffocation of Honeysuckle and Kudzu.
Often Powers seems determined to push the reader away, to make the reader as scientifically detached as he is. It might be argued that this is an attempt to take the viewpoint of the forest – a point of view from the over story. But it doesn’t work. You have to connect with us on a human level so then we can begin to understand the trees. Many times Powers as author seeps through. He makes not so subtle comparisons to Tolstoy. (He isn’t Tolstoy.)
The Overstory could have been dazzling, but now I suspect the Pulitzer people mistook the unnecessarily cryptic style, that they didn’t fully understand, for brilliant fiction, and they focused on the science while being bludgeoned by the prose. Some must’ve thought it would make them look smart to give it a prize. Maybe The Overstory should have been nonfiction.
Of course, some of it is very good writing, especially around pages 497-498, where original ideas are presented clearly. But we don’t need 400 pages to get there, do we?
Not that there isn’t a fair amount to be gained by reading The Overstory, with unique philosophical ideas and scientific facts, just be prepared for a long slog. If you feel like muddling through 500 pages, and finding the obvious repeated “ad nauseam” (one of the author’s self-conscious self-references) then this is your book.
