The Overstory

by Richard Powers

Overview

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize
New York Times Bestseller

A New York Times Notable Book and a Washington Post, Time, Oprah Magazine, Newsweek, Chicago Tribune, and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2018


"The best novel ever written about trees, and really just one of the best novels, period."—Ann Patchett

An Air Force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. These four, and five other strangers—each summoned in different ways by trees—are brought together in a last and violent stand to save the continent’s few remaining acres of virgin forest.

In his twelfth novel, National Book Award winner Richard Powers delivers a sweeping, impassioned novel of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of—and paean to—the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond, exploring the essential conflict on this planet: the one taking place between humans and nonhumans. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.

The Overstory is a book for all readers who despair of humanity’s self-imposed separation from the rest of creation and who hope for the transformative, regenerating possibility of a homecoming. If the trees of this earth could speak, what would they tell us? "Listen. There’s something you need to hear."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393635522
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	04/03/2018
Pages:	512
Sales rank:	9,483
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

Richard Powers is the author of twelve novels. His most recent, The Overstory, won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. He is also the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the National Book Award, and he has been a four-time National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. He lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains.

Hometown:

Urbana, Illinois

Date of Birth:

June 18, 1957

Place of Birth:

Evanston, Illinois

Education:

M.A., University of Illinois, 1979

Editorial Reviews

…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.

The New York Times Book Review - Barbara Kingsolver

02/19/2018
Occupying the same thematic terrain as Annie Proulx’s Barkskins, the latest from Powers (Orfeo) is an impassioned but unsatisfying paean to the wonder of trees. Set primarily on the West Coast, the story revolves around nine characters, separated by age and geography, whose “lives have long been connected, deep underground.” Among these are a wheelchair-bound computer game designer; a scientist who uncovers the forest’s hidden communication systems; a psychologist studying the personality types of environmental activists; and a young woman who, after being electrocuted, hears voices urging her to save old-growth forests from logging. All are seduced by the majesty of trees and express their arboreal love in different ways: through scholarship, activism, art, and even violent resistance. Some of the prose soars, as when a redwood trunk shoots upward in a “russet, leathery apotheosis,” while some lands with a thud: “We’re cashing in a billion years of planetary savings bonds and blowing it on assorted bling.” Powers’s best works are thrilling accounts of characters blossoming as they pursue their intellectual passions; here, few of the earnest figures come alive on the page. While it teems with people, information, and ideas, the novel feels curiously barren. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

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

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

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

Remarkable....This ambitious novel soars up through the canopy of American literature and remakes the landscape of environmental fiction.

Ron Charles - Washington Post

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

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

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

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

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

The Overstory, a novel about trees and people who understand them, is the eco-epic of the year and perhaps the decade. Unlike the Lorax, who spoke for the trees, Richard Powers prefers to let them do their own talking.”

Leanne Shapton

Richard Powers’s 12th novel is a rare specimen:
a Great American Eco-Novel.

Financial Times

A colleague of mine once claimed that a critic's opinions are worth less than his or her ability to convey what a book is like. If that's true, never mind that I believe Richard Powers' 12th novel to be a masterwork sculpted from sheer awe. Instead, know that readingThe Overstorywill convince you that we walk among gods every time we enter a forest.”

Adam Morgan - Minneapolis Star Tribune

[Powers is] brilliant on the strange idea of ‘plant personhood...’ opening our eyes to the wondrous things just above our line of sight. Memorable chapters unfold [with] many unforgettable images in a novel devoted to ‘reviving that dead metaphor at the heart of the word bewilderment.’

Sam Sacks - Wall Street Journal

One of the most thoughtful and involving popular novels I’ve read for years....Astonishingly light on its feet....It’s an extraordinary novel, alert to the large ideas and humanely generous to the small ones.

Tim Martin

An immense and intense homage to the arboreal world (its biological sophistication, its rich panoply of environmental benefits), the book is alive with riveting data, cogent reasoning and urgent argument. Pages that take you into menaced remnants of primeval forest or contemplate singularly splendid or fascinating trees teem with knowledge and gleam with aesthetic appeal.

The Sunday Times (UK)

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.”

The Guardian

Vast, magnificent, and disturbing....An array of human temperaments and predicaments as manifold as Charles Dickens’ or Leo Tolstoy’s....I have never read anything so pessimistic and yet so hopeful.

BookPage

A magnificent saga....Powers’s sylvan tour de force is alive with gorgeous descriptions; continually surprising, often heartbreaking characters; complex suspense; unflinching scrutiny of pain; celebration of creativity and connection; and informed and expressive awe over the planet’s life force and its countless and miraculous manifestations....profound and symphonic.

Booklist (starred review)

The time is ripe for a big novel that tells us as much about trees as Moby Dick does about whales....The Overstory is that novel and it is very nearly a masterpiece....On almost every page of The Overstory you will find sentences that combine precision and vision.”

The Times (London)

★ 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.

Kirkus Reviews

The best novels change the way you see. Richard Powers’s The Overstory does this. Haunting.

Geraldine Brooks

This ambitious novel soars up through the canopy of American literature and remakes the landscape of environmental fiction.… Remarkable.

Ron Charles - The Washington Post

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

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 - The Boston Globe

A towering achievement by a major writer.

Robert Macfarlane

Should be mandatory reading the world over.

Emilia Clarke

The best book I’ve read in 10 years. It’s a remarkable piece of literature, and the moment it speaks to is climate change. So, for me, it’s a lodestone. It’s a mind-opening fiction, and it connects us all in a very positive way to the things that we have to do if we want to regain our planet.

Emma Thompson

[Powers is] brilliant on the strange idea of ‘plant personhood[,]’… opening our eyes to the wondrous things just above our line of sight. Memorable chapters unfold… [with] many unforgettable images in a novel devoted to ‘reviving that dead metaphor at the heart of the word bewilderment.’

Sam Sacks - The Wall Street Journal

A towering achievement by a major writer.

Robert MacFarlane

02/01/2018
Standing as silent witnesses to our interweaving genealogies, cyclical wars, and collapsing empires, trees contain our collective history in addition to our climate record. Here, the acclaimed Powers (Orfeo The Time of Our Singing) employs literary dendrochronology to weave the stories of nine strangers connected through their collective action in preventing a forest from falling to industrial harvesting and ruination. From a chestnut in Iowa to a banyan in Vietnam, trees function as a central theme for each character's backstory. As a corollary, foliage becomes a multivalent symbol of family struggle, divine intervention, and community. Just as Douglas firs connect their underground root structures to provide mutual support and protection, each character moves across disparate landscapes to find him- or herself joined in solidarity against an unstoppable force of environmental destruction. VERDICT Whereas Powers dissected the human brain's mysterious capacity to prescind subject from object in his National Book Award-winning The Echo Makers, here he pens a deep meditation on the irreparable psychic damage that manifests in our unmitigated separation from nature.—Joshua Finnell, Colgate Univ., Hamilton, NY

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