The Overstory – A Novel

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Such material made me cringe. It felt like Powers was talking down to his readers. Perhaps he shouldn’t be blamed. His main aim is to explain scientific ideas, and he’s good at that. Given the state of world politics, treating people like idiots does also make a certain kind of sense. Certainly, the way critics have fallen over themselves to elevate this book suggests there’s validity to Powers’ assumption that some readers deserve to be patronised. But if The Overstory really is one of the best books of the year, then the novel is dying even faster than the forests. Which I don’t believe for a minute.

An astonishingly rich book . Rich in ideas and imagination. Rich in drama, wisdom and truly illuminating facts about trees. Caught by the River It’s also a book about an assortment of characters, mostly pairs, and their interactions with, or passion for, trees and forests (and sometimes each other).What do stories do?" This is what one character asks at a crossroads. "They kill us a bit and make us change." Why would anyone want to destroy all this? Powers’s characters blame the usual human motivations: greed, ignorance, inertia, primitive instinct. Nicholas rues the fact that every tree visible from his canopy perch “belongs to a Texas financier who has never seen a redwood but means to gut them all to pay off the debt he took on to acquire them.” We never meet this Texas financier, however, or anyone else who might profit from development or deforestation, apart from several anonymous voices making threadbare arguments about well-paying jobs and preserving their “way of life.”

Renews romanticism for the contemporary age; making space for the sentimental to breathe freely again, and challenging us not to be afraid to care … Powers’s mission is urgent: not only are we living through an age where science is rewriting what comprises consciousness, but we are simultaneously exploiting non-human life to an unprecedented extent … Powers’s place as one of the few established writers longlisted for this year’s Man Booker Prize is well deserved. ... And if Powers himself was a tree, it would surely be a mature oak, for The Overstory displays the kind of abundant creativity that restores faith in human endeavour. New Statesman The Monkey Wrench Gang, by Edward Abbey—satirical, semi-autobiographical take on a set of colorful characters engaged in radical activism against deforestation As the book progresses, it becomes clear the author--or publisher--wanted this to be a novel and not a collection of short stories. There’s a refrain about hearing the voice of trees, which I don’t disagree with but comes across hokey, and one of the characters gets jail time. It’s all a bit forced to be honest. Nature's Internet: How Trees Talk to Each Other in a Healthy Forest, by Suzanne Simard. Youtube video of TED Talk, July 2016 Absolutely blown away by this epic, heartbreaking novel about us and trees EMMA DONOGHUE, author of Room and The Pull of the StarsPowers’s characters embrace the urgency of activism and the passivity of fatalism, but he rarely places the two forces in opposition to each other. The only character who is consumed by this kind of self-questioning is the novel’s most convincing one. Neelay Mehta, paralyzed in a childhood tree-climbing incident, becomes a Silicon Valley mogul after he creates one of the most popular computer games on the planet—a world-building enterprise that resembles SimCity. Its millions of players sit cocooned in their bedrooms, bathed in the glow of verdant pixels, creating new Earths. With time, however, the game’s exoticism fades. The virtual Earths come to resemble ours, ravaged by gluttony, overdevelopment, and rapacious, short-term profiteering. A] rich literary canopy … Powers , one of a remarkable generation of polymathic American novelists including William T. Vollmann and the late David Foster Wallace, has produced a brilliant encyclopaedic [novel] … A rich entanglement of discourses, disciplines, data, characters and styles, mirroring the most biodiverse ecosystem. Times Literary Supplement The Overstory is a powerful, literary novel, shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize. It sings, in part, a paean to the wonders of trees and the multitude of wonders that old-growth forests and a variety of trees brings to our world. It also mourns a tragedy: how humans relentlessly annihilate these priceless resources, and what drives some people to eco-terrorism.