If you share my values, I think you will find The Overstory a profound and important book, one that does for the life that hovers over us what Pynchon did for the fossils beneath us.

Penultimate disclosure: since reading in 1973 Gravity’s Rainbow, the deepest drilling environmental fiction of the last 50 years, I value most those novels that tell overstories, what I call “systems novels,” books such as Powers’ The Gold Bug Variations, Gain, and The Echo Maker, which won the National Book Award in 2006. More disclosure: I have read all eleven of his previous novels, but I review only those that I think are his most interesting and instructive. įurther disclosure: I have conversed with Powers several times when he visited the university where I used to teach, and I have occasionally corresponded with him about his books. I explain that claim in the review to save space here, this is the link. Partial disclosure: you will find, perhaps on the back cover of The Overstory, a quote by me (from my review of his last novel, Orfeo) asserting that Powers is one of America’s greatest living novelists. Powers knows, and a psychologist in the book says, that humans need “good stories” to be persuaded by scientists’ alarms, so Powers creates a band of varied and lively characters with back stories and understories to make his novel a “bottom-up,” as well as a top-down, fiction, one that equals his best work. Trees were exhibiting qualities of animal life long before the human story began and will be here long after the human story is over, the latter hastened by our suicidal deforesting of the planet. In The Overstory, Powers twits those critics by presenting - with his usual scientific brio - trees that live, breathe, and signal to each other, exist in a “social” relation with other trees and the biosphere that depends on them. These critics carp that his often highly intelligent characters are not human, don’t live and breathe and feel for each other. Powers has sometimes been criticized for being a “top-down” novelist, one who presents characters from the high or long perspective of history, science, or music. The “overstory” of Richard Powers’s title is a term for the canopy of a forest, the foliage at the top of the trees.

Richard powers the overstory