Book review and highlights: The Overstory, by Richard Powers

“Do not hope or despair or predict or be caught surprised. Never capitulate, but divide, multiply, transform, conjoin, do, and endure as you have all the long day of life.”

In “The Overstory,” Richard Powers takes a small idea—writing about trees—and grows and twists and branches it out, using a series of inter-connected short stories and characters to create a novel as complex and rich as any forest.

Powers is an established author with a dozen books focused around science and technology. Using heavy does of poetic prose, The Overstory discusses and describes dozens of tree species. It spans numerous decades as it dives into family legacies, technological progress, tragedy, love, ecology, man’s place in this world, and more.

While covering a lot of ground, The Overstory gathered a lot of awards, winning a Pulitzer Prize and spending nearly a year on the New York Times Best Seller List.

At first, the book seems like a collection of short stories, related only in theme: trees. But as the book progresses, we begin to see hidden connection between the characters. This storytelling style is a vehicle for one of Powers’s main themes: trees are also interconnected in ways we can’t see, through the air and underground. This relationship means that culling one tree has a ripple effect we don’t understand. And in our ignorance, man has done more damage—possibly irreparably—than we will ever realize.

The book takes a strong stand on ecology and climate change, but never seems to get preachy. While we shout at each other with conflicting data and facts about climate change, Powers uses a time-tested strategy: the best way to make a convincing argument is with a good story. He lets the history, passion, and knowledge of his characters make the case for climate change and forest preservation for him.

It’s not a perfect book. A couple of character arcs left me perplexed, their stories not working out as they had envisioned or been promised. But maybe that supports Powers’s clear stance that nature, and the universe, needs something from each of us, and that delivering on that need doesn’t guarantee a happy ending for all. In the end, Powers proves that small is big. That a small idea—the ecology of trees—told through a series of small but ever-more-entwined stories—can build into grand ecosystem of themes and characters that leave us in wonder, and wanting more.