The Overstory: A Novel by Richard Powers

W.W. Norton & Company, 2018

Other than in The Swiss Family Robinson, where a shipwrecked family builds and inhabits a fantastic treehouse, I’ve not read a book where trees figured as prominently as they do in The Overstory, and although I suspected it had something to do with the forest canopy, I even had to double check the definition of overstory.

Growing up, my friend Jean-Marie and I spent a lot of time in trees, Jean-Marie scrambling up with remarkable grace, while I often rooted myself to a lower branch, terrified to move, unwittingly afraid of heights. Fifty years later, I can still picture Jean-Marie above me, fearless, lithe, and athletic.

At first The Overstory seems to be a series of unrelated vignettes all centered on people in whose lives trees figure prominently. A newly arrived Norwegian transports antebellum American Chestnuts in his coat pocket from Brooklyn, New York to Iowa, where he plants all five on a farm; a son in Shanghai sent to America to study engineering in 1949 hides three jade rings depicting intricately carved trees in mooncakes and later plants a mulberry tree in his backyard to commemorate the family’s silk business; a young father plants a different tree species for each of his progeny.  There is an American soldier during the Vietnam War who parachutes into a banyan tree.

During childhood, I lived in a neighborhood, known as The Cedars, which featured a glorious copper beech a short bike ride away. Mostly, though, Jean-Marie and I climbed in her backyard, usually a mature apple or the towering cedar that stood like a sentinel at the corner of her driveway and the gravel road that led to it.

Each of the Overstory’s subplots pulls ahead at an unexpected pace, sometimes accelerating by decades, other times by generations. Trees figure as importantly as the human characters, often bestowing life altering effects upon them. People die under trees, get saved by, and injured in trees. Meanwhile, the characters’ trajectories take other surprising turns. The student from China pioneers mobile phone technology, another character, gaming technology. Eventually, they all intersect.

For much of my early life I lived on Bowers Road . Although I understood it instinctively, a dictionary confirms that a bower is “a pleasant shady place under trees,” which I knew because that exactly described my childhood street, lined as it was by mature maples on both sides, all the way to Cherry Lane.

The Overstory won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Literature and is more than an expertly crafted novel and an important treatise on the environmental crisis caused by tearing down old growth forest. This novel opens a door onto the science of the forest biome, where, incredibly, trees communicate and tend to one another. Trees, as it turns out, also tend to humans.

“But the priestly tulip trees still boost her immune system, while beeches lift her mood and focus her thoughts. Under these giants, she’s smarter, cleverer.”

Overstory readers may find themselves looking at trees differently. They might even become radicalized, perceiving tree crews as executioners, and the felling of trees by homeowners, municipalities, and land developers as akin to assassins picking off innocents.

Richard Powers has published eleven other books and currently lives in East Tennessee, presumably among very old trees. A former Stanford professor, he takes Overstory readers to that campus several times, introducing us to various tree specimens there. I suspect that many readers of The Overstory will add dendrology to their list of new interests. Like all great books, this one gets you thinking.

Southern Live Oak, Natchez, Mississippi, March 2021

Jean-Marie, who moved away after fourth grade, remained a friend, although her life continued to take her to places I did not venture: long term marriage, children, and lovely old houses. Were there climbing trees?

Sadly, most of the old maples on Bowers Road are now gone, but last time I visited, a glorious old tulip, boldly struck by lightening in the 1970s, still towers in my old backyard. Some of the old sentinels survive. We must ensure they do.

Use this link to buy a copy of The Overstory.