by Richard Powers
W.W. Norton & Company, 2018
Richard Power’s new novel, The Overstory, a work of fiction that prominently features trees, was released last year to a great deal of fanfare and critical acclaim. It not only made the cover of The New York Times Book Review, but it was also subsequently shortlisted for the prestigious 2018 Man Booker Prize. The book is the latest installment in a popular new genre of literature in which authors attempt to bring forests to life and inspire readers to re-examine forest ecosystems. Annie Proulx’s ambitious historical fiction Barkskins, published in 2016, exemplifies this trend, and German forester Peter Wohlleben’s worldwide bestseller The Hidden Life of Trees promises that “a walk in the woods will never be the same again.”
Crafting a novel where redwoods or Douglas-firs are the main characters is no easy task. But Powers pulls it off by relying on parables. The result is a treatise on trees and forests where arboreal elements are an integral part of the human characters’ development. At first, it all seems disjointed, and the stories threaten to spiral out of control. But Powers untangles the plot and keeps the reader engaged.
The organization of the novel mirrors the architecture of a tree with four sections: Roots, Trunk, Crown, and Seeds. The understory of the novel is developed in the Roots section, with each chapter marked by an illustration of foliage and each diverse set of characters assigned a signature tree that plays a symbolic role in their lives.
Throughout the first quarter of the novel, trees permeate the writing but are oddly incidental until the seventh tale in the series. There, a storyline forms around a quirky, hearing-impaired girl, Patricia Westerford, whose love of nature develops as she travels around Ohio’s fields and forests with her extension-agent father in midcentury America. Patricia goes on to become Dr. Patricia Westerford, whose groundbreaking research is modeled loosely on the work of Dr. Suzanne Simard, a University of British Columbia forest ecologist and researcher who has gained an international reputation for her theories of belowground neural networks and how trees communicate.
As more characters are added, the players intersect during the Timber Wars of the 1990s, when environmental activists in the Pacific Northwest and northern California battled the forest products industry and the US Forest Service to save the remaining old-growth forests. Based on actual historical events, a great deal of the novel takes place in this period and ends near the present. From the perspective of a forester who cut his teeth in the great forests of the Pacific Northwest, I found that the narrative is skewed toward the anti-logging community, and the principles of sustainable forest management are not given equal weight.
Powers is the first to admit that, until he started working on this novel five years ago, he was “tree blind” and couldn’t tell an ash from an oak. The research and writing process has been transformative; during his exhaustive research, he read everything he could get his hands on – over a hundred books, articles, and other pieces of scientific literature – about forests. According to Powers, “Trees have agency” – by this, he means they are not so genetically distant from humans and have their own social order. Powers’ literary prowess is put to the test as he tries to meld hard science and animism in novel form. Concepts like a shared immune system, the forest as a super-organism with a “hive mentality,” and networked intelligence appear throughout the book. “These trees have been here for centuries, and to save them, literature will have a role in bringing a change that treats these forests with the same kind of sanctity that we reserve exclusively for ourselves,” said Powers. Whether literature can save ancient forests remains to be seen. To researchers or forest managers in the field, the scientific underpinnings of the novel may not seem especially visionary or monumental, but most people who pick up this novel will be casual readers. It may play a role in opening their minds to the inner lives of trees.