jnzllwgr 's review for:

The Overstory by Richard Powers

4.0

adventurous dark emotional hopeful inspiring reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: No

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A paean to the living world, and trees in particular, Powers’ story is epic in scale and also an embodiment of contrasts. Highly romantic in nature, the writing style leans more clinical and the majority of the narrative enfolds in a deliberate, linear fashion. The book is even organized in 4 sections: Roots, Trunk, Crown and Seeds — poetically descriptive, but also very follows the deep, middle, present and future histories of the diverse characters. I found a deep love for many of these personas and a tearful sympathy with their paths. In some ways, this is a fictional variety of those non-fiction books Looking for Longleaf, Entangled Life and the Secret Life of Trees which reveal and celebrate the web of existence that we share with the biomes. Depending on your disposition, the poetics of Powers’ work might reel you closer to the issues at hand. When my children were young, they loved finding old branches and sticks and beating the low-hanging tree limbs with them. I used to tell them, “Just because we cannot hear them, does not mean they are not crying.” Their initial, quizzical looks, even at 4 and 5 years old, revealed that we had unknowingly conditioned them to assume that if they are not like us, we may do with them what we wish. Timothy Morton has been my lighthouse of a thinker who adapted Object Oriented Ontological principles to art and ecology and the awareness of our relationship to the world.  I now see how one can choose to leverage their right (the Overstory, Morton) or their left (Morton, Longleaf, Secret Life, etc.) brain to understand what is at stake. 

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I unintentionally began reading this a few weeks prior to a trip to Northern California. I was so glad to have finished I prior to travel to gain the book’s full force while wandering the forests. Those places are unlike anything else. Nearly verbally and visually impossible to describe.