Current Reading: Richard Powers' The Overstory

 

I am about thirty percent of the way through Richard Powers' novel The Overstory and it really is quite an extraordinary book. This book is longer than most novels at slightly more than 500 pages. But when a writer publishes a book that is a long book and it is also one that has been reviewed the book is somehow different than most published books. As the late Anthony Burgess noted about writing long novels, "the writer can't resist trying to play God."

Or consider what Emily Temple wrote when compiling a list of long novels worth reading:

Personally, I find solace in long novels. The good ones always seem to create space for the reader: space to sink and settle, and time to really learn what you’re dealing with, both in terms of character and in terms of author. You have to build something, reading a really long book. It’s almost a collaborative experience. So if you’re looking for a long-term relationship with a book right now, you couldn’t do much better than the books below.

As far as Powers' novel, it is a bit hard to describe it in more than general terms saying something like it is a long and complicated story about trees and their relationships with a group of people. So, let me just quote the Kirkus Reviews summary:

Powers’12th novel is a masterpiece of operatic proportions, involving nine central characters and more than half a century of American life.

In this work, Powers takes on the subject of nature, or our relationship to nature, as filtered through the lens of environmental activism, although at its heart the book is after more existential concerns. As is the case with much of Powers’ fiction, it takes shape slowly—first in a pastiche of narratives establishing the characters (a psychologist, an undergraduate who died briefly but was revived, a paraplegic computer game designer, a homeless vet), and then in the kaleidoscopic ways these individuals come together and break apart. “We all travel the Milky Way together, trees and men,” Powers writes, quoting the naturalist John Muir. “In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.” The idea is important because what Powers means to explore is a sense of how we become who we are, individually and collectively, and our responsibility to the planet and to ourselves. Nick, for instance, continues a project begun by his grandfather to take repeated photographs of a single chestnut tree, “one a month for seventy-six years.” Pat, a visionary botanist, discovers how trees communicate with one another only to be discredited and then, a generation later, reaffirmed. What links the characters is survival—the survival of both trees and human beings. The bulk of the action unfolds during the timber wars of the late 1990s, as the characters coalesce on the Pacific coast to save old-growth sequoia from logging concerns. For Powers, however, political or environmental activism becomes a filter through which to consider the connectedness of all things—not only the human lives he portrays in often painfully intricate dimensions, but also the biosphere, both virtual and natural. “The world starts here,” Powers insists. “This is the merest beginning. Life can do anything. You have no idea.”

A magnificent achievement: a novel that is, by turns, both optimistic and fatalistic, idealistic without being naïve.