Richard Powers

The Overstory, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, is a sweeping, impassioned work 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, Richard Powers's twelfth novel 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. 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.

A Novel

The Overstory

Jamie Griffin

a thing can travel everywhere just by holding still

life has a way of talking to the future. it’s called memory.

Daphne Li-Chen

There are a hundred thousand species of love, separately invented, each more ingenious than the last, and every one of them keeps making things.

She sees it in one great glimpse of flashing gold: trees and humans, at war over land and water and atmosphere. And she can hear, louder than the quaking leaves, which side will lose by winning.

Beatrix

This. What we have been given. What we must earn. 

Life will cook; the seas will rise. The planet's lungs will be ripped out. And the law will let this happen, because harm was never imminent enough. Imminent, at the speed of people, is too late. The law must judge imminent at the speed of trees.

Our home has been broken into. Our lives are being endangered. The law allows for all necessary force against unlawful and imminent harm.

The years ahead will run beyond anything he can imagine. The die-offs and disasters will make Bronze Age plagues seem quaint.

his heart is as good and as worthy as wood.

The law is simply human will, written down. The law must let every acre of living Earth be turned into tarmac, if such is the desire of people. But the law lets all parties have their say.The judge asks, Would you care to address any final words to the court?"

Thoughts ring Adam’s head. The verdicts have cut him loose, like windthrow or fire. “Soon we’ll know if we were right or wrong.”

We’re the ones who need repairing. Trees remember what we’ve forgotten. Every speculation must make room for another. Dying is life, too.

A forest knows things. They wire themselves up underground. There are brains down there, ones our brains aren’t shaped to see. 

No one sees trees. We see fruit, we see nuts, we see wood, we see shade. We see ornaments or pretty fall foliage. Obstacles blocking the road or wrecking the ski slope. Dark, threatening places that must be cleared. We see branches about to crush our roof. We see a cash crop. But trees — trees are invisible.

…They kill you a little. They turn you into something you weren’t.”

..A guy in a dirty suit jacket and shorts, his hair bound up in a bungee cord, cuts behind her on the sidewalk, 

talking out loud: voices or cell phone — choose your schizophrenia.

Who are you? Why won't you stop? No one has ever looked at me like this, except to judge, rob, or rape me. In my whole life, my whole life, never. . .

 Her face reddens. With slow, heavy, disbelieving swings of her head, she starts to cry. The tears do whatever they want. Call it sobbing. The therapist is crying, too. 

Why? Why am I sick? What's wrong with me? 

Loneliness. But not for people. You're mourning a thing you never even knew. 

A great, spoked, wild, woven-together place beyond replacing. One you didnt even know was yours to lose. 

Into making us. But it still wants something.

A quarter minute and they're in agony — introverts and extroverts, dominants and submissives alike. Scopophobia hits them all — fear of seeing and being seen. A dog will bite if you stare at it too hard. People will shoot you. And though she has looked for hours into the eyes of hundreds of people, though she has perfected the art of endurance staring, Mimi feels a tinge of fear herself, even now, gazing into the skittering eyes of Stephanie, who, blushing a little, powers through the shame and settles down.

Love, as all the good novels know, is a question of title, deed, and possession. She and her lover have hit this wall many times before. Now, in the new millennium, the man who has kept her sane, the man who might even have been her soul mate if only her soul were a slightly different shape, hits the wall one last time and collapses at its base.

To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one, and to mistake life for something huge with two legs. No: life is mobilised on a vastly larger scale, and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the 

 seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.

Earth will be monetized until all trees grow in straight lines, three people own all seven continents, and every large organism is bred to be slaughtered.

Help them build a culture so beautiful it would break their hearts to lose.

After a couple of false starts over the past few years, at the start of the year I decided to take my time with this 625-page novel.

I can see why it won the Pulitzer Prize; it's science journalism wrapped in, at times, beautiful prose. The stories that make up the 'overstory' start off as tiny vignettes, as leaves that develop into branches, before the main trunk of the storey becomes more visible towards the end.

That being said, I didn't love this book. I found the stories too fragmented to cohere into a meaningful whole. Also, the message I took away from it was that we're doomed as a species but Nature will be OK when we're gone. That may be true, but it comes across as a little... defeatist.

Doug Belshaw

After a couple of false starts over the past few years, at the start of the year I decided to take my time with this 625-page novel.

I can see why it won the Pulitzer Prize; it's science journalism wrapped in, at times, beautiful prose. The stories that make up the 'overstory' start off as tiny vignettes, as leaves that develop into branches, before the main trunk of the storey becomes more visible towards the end.

That being said, I didn't love this book. I found the stories too fragmented to cohere into a meaningful whole. Also, the message I took away from it was that we're doomed as a species but Nature will be OK when we're gone. That may be true, but it comes across as a little... defeatist.

Such beautiful stories, so naturally intertwined. Also, I love trees now.

Frederik De Bosschere

"And above your tomb, the stars will belong to us".

The Overstory reads like a tree, slowly unfurling its leaves to tell its truth. But that's all there is to it, a defeatist, anti-transcendental, misanthropic suicide note.

It's beautiful for a suicide note, with (literally) flowery prose and indulgent forays into descriptions and allegories of plants. But it doesn't believe in Life, the very thing it champions. It doesn't believe in the capacity of life to transcend itself, that we must succumb to biological evolutionary processes, that post-biology is an impossibility.

Air Abhipraya

"And above your tomb, the stars will belong to us".

The Overstory reads like a tree, slowly unfurling its leaves to tell its truth. But that's all there is to it, a defeatist, anti-transcendental, misanthropic suicide note.

It's beautiful for a suicide note, with (literally) flowery prose and indulgent forays into descriptions and allegories of plants. But it doesn't believe in Life, the very thing it champions. It doesn't believe in the capacity of life to transcend itself, that we must succumb to biological evolutionary processes, that post-biology is an impossibility.

beautiful prose crafting a story as complex, encompassing, and overwhelming as our trees are. very dense but beautifully written 

So beautifully written and such an important message - trees are magnificent, astonishing, all knowing, go save them! It required quite the commitment to get through this one, and the last third of the book was a bit more meta than I usually go for, but the writing really carried me to the finish line. 

Jacqui Spears

I wish I had liked this more than I did, because I enjoyed a lot of the themes it was portraying. The thing that lost stars for me is that the overall 'plot' was pretty boring. It felt like a soliloquy on trees and frankly the pacing felt about as slow as watching a tree grow. I never felt any real personal or emotional connection to any of the characters, even the ones who had very tragic stories, because it felt like all of the characters motivations were single minded and mostly two dimensional. The only one who seemed to do things with passion and feeling was Dorothy and I just could not like her as a character because I feel like she didn't grow, her character remained exactly the same the whole way through and she's kind of a shitty person imo. 

With all that being said, I'm giving the book 3.5 stars because it looked at the autonomy of trees as though they were people and I found that an interesting and new angle at dissecting the effects of industrialization and climate change. 

I also really liked the prose, Powers is excellent at writing well crafted, punny, poetic lines that stuck with me as I read.

"Consciousness itself is a flavor of madness"

"The man who might even have been her soul mate if her soul had been a slightly different shape"

Emma Lechner

I wish I had liked this more than I did, because I enjoyed a lot of the themes it was portraying. The thing that lost stars for me is that the overall 'plot' was pretty boring. It felt like a soliloquy on trees and frankly the pacing felt about as slow as watching a tree grow. I never felt any real personal or emotional connection to any of the characters, even the ones who had very tragic stories, because it felt like all of the characters motivations were single minded and mostly two dimensional. The only one who seemed to do things with passion and feeling was Dorothy and I just could not like her as a character because I feel like she didn't grow, her character remained exactly the same the whole way through and she's kind of a shitty person imo. 

With all that being said, I'm giving the book 3.5 stars because it looked at the autonomy of trees as though they were people and I found that an interesting and new angle at dissecting the effects of industrialization and climate change. 

I also really liked the prose, Powers is excellent at writing well crafted, punny, poetic lines that stuck with me as I read.

"Consciousness itself is a flavor of madness"

"Memory is a collaboration in progress"

"The man who might even have been her soul mate if her soul had been a slightly different shape"

overwhelmingly heartbreaking in the way only hope can be 

farah 

A novel of activism and natural-world power presents interlocking fables about nine remarkable strangers who are summoned in different ways by trees for an ultimate, brutal stand to save the continent's few remaining acres of virgin forest.

Loved the scope of this and its overall kind of aura. But, man, the back third really dragged ass. Satisfying conclusion and it's the kind of book that has forever changed my brain in good ways. Really wish I could read 

Brett Seybert

Loved the scope of this and its overall kind of aura. But, man, the back third really dragged ass. Satisfying conclusion and it's the kind of book that has forever changed my brain in good ways. Really wish I could read The Secret Forest— but maybe The Hidden Life of Trees will suffice. 

Stephanie Bars

Jayme Cochrane

So conflicted about this one. The first third of the book is fantastic, but once the 'real' story started it became a bit of a slog. There's a low of browbeating, ranting and meandering – the book could easily be 25% shorter.

Maurice FitzGerald

Yes heart in right place. It's all good, no bad thoughts expressed, but this was the worst book i have read in years. If this is a good example of the modern novel then I am glad i haven't bothered with many of the others. God i hate it when an author turns a noun into a verb. Cloying overwritten treacle.......

logan chung

I will recommend this book to everyone I meet for the rest of life (or what's left of it). Pick a tree at your local park, in your backyard, along your commute, wherever you eat lunch. Sit under it and read this book, a little day by day. Let the tree read over your shoulder. Let the (sometimes overly flowery) prose and the story within this novel's pages water your consciousness, which will branch out in all sorts of directions – enlightening, joyous, painful, confusing – but you will be a better living being for having read it. 

This is a story about us, and how in our efforts to save "the most wondrous products of four billion years of life," we are really saving ourselves – and the dangerous cost of continuing down our current path instead.

...or maybe it's not for you, for any of these reasons that kept me from granting it a full five-stars (no spoilers):

 - the "I'm finna win a Pulitzer" prose (alternate take: there are many moments when it's so beautiful that it can be considered poetry)
 - its overly optimistic moments/themes/assertions
 - its overly pessimistic/cynical moments/themes/assertions
 - the sometimes questionable use of both Eastern & indigenous cultural knowledge as characterization and/or plot points... not quite "magical Negro" levels of this, but it is a bit noticeable esp. towards the end, though I think Powers handles these things overall fairly well
 - how often urine gets mentioned
 - the out-of-nowhere description of Astor Place / the Village as a "backwater neighborhood"

Really beautiful book, loving learning about trees so much after this read

John Vetter

Andrew John Kinney

While I like what Richard Powers is selling, I felt the book lost a bit of its drive about halfway through. I am traveling as I write this, and I don't have my annotated copy to refer to, but there are many beautifully worded passages in The Overstory. I'm afraid my visceral instinct to defend wild places is not satisfied by the somewhat Buddhist message of acceptance of defeat on the loss of forests, but maybe I'm misreading the message. My personal belief is that humanity is steering the ship of Earth toward the rocks, and we must act now, or at least after 2020, to save our home. I loved Powers' descriptions of trees (I am a nerd who can identify most trees I see in the forest), but I am by training, professional experience, and inclination a problem solver. I love the Appalachian forests and the redwood groves that he beautifully and lovingly describes. I actually did what two of the characters in the book did - I lived in a house on a barren 3.3 acre former horse pasture at one point, and I gradually "re-wilded" it to the point that it is now mostly forest. So I'm on board with his love of forests, but I wanted more from the book than perhaps I should expect from a work of fiction. I wanted a message of hope that said, "We can fix this, we can save the biodiversity of the planet, and let's get started". Something like what is found in the book, Drawdown.

So, sorry, this is less of a review than a statement. By all means, read The Overstory. It is well-written, it is a page-turner that has beautiful passages and compelling characters. But my request if you do read it is, don't be Zen about the issue of forests, be active. If The Overstory makes you love forests and trees more than you do know, and I think it might, then good. And after you finish, plant a tree, advocate for better conservation in your community, change the way you live to be more sustainable. And to be fair to Mr. Powers, I have read about him, and I know that he moved to Tennessee and bought a house on property that includes old-growth forest, and he did that specifically to preserve that chunk of forest, so I know his heart is in the right place, and he has taken action and voted with his dollars.

This book was recommended by a friend. I was transported at first, but progressively lost interest. I kept trying to read but found the book more and more irritating without being able to understand why. It is definitely very well crafted and touches subject I feel very connected to. I dropped it months ago. Today I confessed to the friend who recommended it that I very much disliked the book. He told me he did too, and guessed that he must have praised it shortly after starting it: like me, he enjoyed it very much at first before strongly disliking it. We agreed that it is our least favorite kind of book: a product. It is crafted with a particular objective in mind, a particular audience. Jennifer Egan’s Goon Squad left the same bad taste in my mouth. I will now be even more suspicious of prize-winning US literature. Like the rest of the “entertainment industry”, this is the kind of product that feigns authenticity. It is fake, with real nuggets of heartfelt to create that sensational flavor we know you love. A corpse with a lot of very high quality, perfectly executed make-up. 

Martin

Amy Place

I'm not sure what I'm supposed to read after this

Read it a second time and feel the same way

E J Doble

This book is like nothing I've read before, and it is by all accounts fantastic. It is potent, heart-wrenching, poetic, beautiful, and terrifying all in one. Powers has produced a masterful eco-fiction that casts trees and their place in our world in an incredible new light.

The book opens with a cast of characters, who then spill off into stories spanning entire lifetimes where some of them meet and interact, while others never see each other at all - but all are connected by their journey into nature and seeing the importance of the natural cycles around us. There were sections in the middle passage where I struggled to tell between certain characters, but by the end of it each person was a clearly-defined individual shaped by the cause of nature.

This is a book about trees. About their diversity, beauty, despair, tragedy, and rebirth. Trees connect to the characters in completely unexpected and wonderful ways. I spent much of the book heartbroken by what was happening - and what IS happening - in the world. The path of nature almost reads as an obituary, and it is deeply saddening to read. Admittedly, the book went on far longer than it needed to, with a lot of mundane character elements that could be omitted, but the focal points stood out magnificently. 

But this book also changed me: I will never look at trees in the same way again. The book's primary aim is to illustrate to us just how important and fundamental nature and forests are, and I think the clincher was this: no matter what happens, and how reckless humans are, nature will find a way in the end - but we should not yield to corporate greed, and runaway growth, and the butchery of nature, or that end will be at our demise too.

I should read this book every year until I'm dead. Extinct. Is it maybe because all I ever wanted to be was wise.

Dora Tominic

Disclaimer: this is not a review.

I should read this book every year until I'm dead. Extinct. Is it maybe because all I ever wanted to be was wise.

Tuago

I read half of the book which was at parts really beautiful and inspiring. I couldn't finish the second half as it lost steam and started to get boring... Still worth reading the first half as it recounts beautiful family sagas where trees are central to the story.

Worth a read, but only if you love trees. Otherwise as another reviewer said, a tapestry of stories disguised as a book.

Jonathan Sackheim

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION 2019 SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2018 A wondrous, exhilarating novel about nine strangers brought together by an unfolding natural catastrophe ‘The best novel ever written about trees, and really, just one of the best novels, period’ Ann Patchett 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. An Air Force crewmember in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. This is the story of these and five other strangers, each summoned in different ways by the natural world, who are brought together in a last stand to save it from catastrophe. ‘Breathtaking’ Barbara Kingsolver, New York Times ‘It’s a masterpiece’ Tim Winton ‘It’s not possible for Powers to write an uninteresting book’ Margaret Atwood ‘An astonishing performance’ Benjamin Markovits, Guardian

Winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

Jimmy Cerone

A Tapestry Disguised as a Book

One of the best books I’ve ever read. It will thrill you, anger you, and bring you to tears. It may even give you a bit of hope. Please enjoy.

Landon Alder

The first half of the book was fairly entertaining, getting to know the lives of all these individual characters, but the second half felt like it could have been condensed into 1/3rd of the pages. It had lots of beautiful imagery, but was so slow moving I had to force myself to finish it. The ending also left much to be desired

I enjoyed how Powers develops the main characters separately first, and then weaves them together into a narrative that offers a perspective about our place on earth. But the narration felt a little too distanced from the characters to me, and they didn't seem as vivid or engaging. (But perhaps that's also because the novel I read right before this one had a first-person narrator.)

The Overstory A Novel

Reviews

Highlights