The New York Times Book Review - Barbara Kingsolver
…most [novelists] don't know beans about botany. Richard Powers is the exception, and his monumental novel The Overstory accomplishes what few living writers from either camp, art or science, could attempt. Using the tools of story, he pulls readers heart-first into a perspective so much longer-lived and more subtly developed than the human purview that we gain glimpses of a vast, primordial sensibility, while watching our own kind get whittled down to size…The science in this novel ranges from fun fact to mind-blowing, brought to us by characters—some scientists, mostly not—who are sweet or funny or maddening in all the relatable ways…all invested with touching humanity, and they arrive with such convincing, fully formed résumés, it's hard to resist Googling a couple of them to see if they're real people. (They aren't.) This is a gigantic fable of genuine truths held together by a connective tissue of tender exchange between fictional friends, lovers, parents and children…Even if you've never given a thought to the pulp and timber industries, by this book's last page you will probably wish you weren't reading it on the macerated, acid-bleached flesh of its protagonists. That's what a story can do.
From the Publisher
"An ingeniously structured narrative that branches and canopies like the trees at the core of the story whose wonder and connectivity echo those of the humans living amongst them."— citation from the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction
"Autumn makes me think of leaves, which makes me think of trees, which makes me think of The Overstory, the best novel ever written about trees, and really, just one of the best novels, period."— Ann Patchett
"Monumental…The Overstory accomplishes what few living writers from either camp, art or science, could attempt. Using the tools of the story, he pulls readers heart-first into a perspective so much longer-lived and more subtly developed than the human purview that we gain glimpses of a vast, primordial sensibility, while watching our own kind get whittled down to size....A gigantic fable of genuine truths."— Barbara Kingsolver, The New York Times Book Review (cover review)
"Remarkable....This ambitious novel soars up through the canopy of American literature and remakes the landscape of environmental fiction."— Ron Charles Washington Post
"A big, ambitious epic....Powers juggles the personal dramas of his far-flung cast with vigor and clarity. The human elements of the book—the arcs his characters follow over the decades from crusading passion to muddled regret and a sense of failure—are thoroughly compelling. So are the extra-human elements, thanks to the extraordinary imaginative flights of Powers’s prose, which persuades you on the very first page that you’re hearing the voices of trees as they chide our species."— Michael Upchurch Boston Globe
"A rousing, full-throated hymn to Nature’s grandeur."— Dan Cryer San Francisco Chronicle
"An extraordinary novel....An astonishing performance....There is something exhilarating, too, in reading a novel whose context is wider than human life. The Overstory leaves you with a slightly adjusted frame of reference....What was happening to his characters passed into my conscience, like alcohol into the bloodstream, and left a feeling behind of grief or guilt, even after I put it down."— Benjamin Markovits The Guardian
"Powers is the rare American novelist writing in
the grand realist tradition, daring to cast himself, in the critic Peter
Brooks’s term, as a 'historian of contemporary society.' He has the courage and
intellectual stamina to explore our most complex social questions with
originality, nuance, and an innate skepticism about dogma. At a time when
literary convention favors novelists who write narrowly about personal
experience, Powers’s ambit is refreshingly unfashionable, restoring to the form
an authority it has shirked."— Nathaniel Rich The Atlantic
"This book is beyond special. Richard Powers manages to turn trees into vivid and engaging characters, something that indigenous people have done for eons but that modern literature has rarely if ever even attempted. It's not just a completely absorbing, even overwhelming book; it's a kind of breakthrough in the ways we think about and understand the world around us, at a moment when that is desperately needed."— Bill McKibben
"The Overstory is a visionary, accessible legend for the planet that owns us, its exaltation and its peril, a remarkable achievement by a great writer."— Thomas McGuane
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2018-01-23
Powers' (Orfeo, 2014, etc.) 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.
2019 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, Short-listed
2018 New York Times Notable Selection, Commended
2019 ALA Carnegie Medal, Long-listed
2018 Booker Prize, Short-listed
2019 ABA Indies Choice Book Award, Short-listed
2019 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, Short-listed
