The Overstory: Nine Lives and a Forest

A novel that asks you to care about trees, and mostly succeeds.

01What Richard Powers Built

There is a chestnut tree in The Overstory that has been photographed once a month for over a century. The photographs accumulate into a flipbook, and the flipbook — when you race your thumb across it — becomes a movie of a tree breathing. That image arrives early, in the first of the book's nine interlinked origin stories, and it signals exactly the kind of novel Powers has written: patient, cumulative, concerned with time at a scale that makes human lives look like a single frame.

The Overstory, published in 2018, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The citation was unusual in naming the subject matter directly — the natural world — rather than just the literary achievement, which suggested that the judges felt the two could not be separated. They were right. Powers wrote the novel after reading a popular science book on tree biology, and the research shows everywhere, but not obtrusively. The science is woven into the texture of the prose rather than itemised, so that by the midpoint you find yourself thinking differently about every tree you pass, which is presumably the effect he was after.

The structure is the first thing to get used to. The opening section, "Roots," gives each of nine characters their own origin story — a standalone novella, almost — before the middle sections braid their lives together. The Hoel family and their chestnut tree. A woman named Patricia Westerford, a plant scientist whose career is ruined, then resurrected, by her discovery that trees communicate. An Air Force veteran, a game designer, a Chinese-American engineer, a Viet Nam veteran still working through survival. Powers moves from voice to voice without condescension, and each character feels inhabited rather than deployed. The cost of this structural ambition is occasional thinness in the convergence: when these people finally meet — at a protest in an old-growth forest, on the run from consequences — some of them stop feeling as fully realised as they did alone on the page.

A woman named Patricia Westerford, a plant scientist whose career is ruined, then resurrected, by her discovery that trees communicate.

02Where It Struggles, and Where It Soars

The novel's antagonist is human indifference to the natural world, which is a harder villain to dramatise than a person. Powers knows this, and he compensates by making his activists lose — repeatedly, painfully, in ways that feel more honest than redemptive. There is no clean resolution here, and the book's refusal to offer one is both its political integrity and, occasionally, its narrative problem. A reader who wants plots to close will find the final section frustrating. A reader willing to let the novel work at the scale of geology — that is, very slowly, over an enormous span — will find it devastating.

What saves the book from earnestness is the prose. Powers is genuinely gifted at the long sentence that earns its length, the paragraph that builds pressure through accumulation. He can write a chestnut tree shedding leaves in autumn and make you feel it as grief. He can cut to a stand of redwoods — some of them two thousand years old — and suddenly a human lifetime seems like a mayfly's. This is the trick the novel wants to perform, and it works more often than not. Patricia Westerford, whose voice surfaces throughout, carries some of the book's most assured writing: calm, observational, steadied by decades of watching things grow.

The nine-characters problem is real, though. Not all of them are equally compelling, and a few feel like they exist primarily as vehicles for a particular argument about human complicity or hope. Mimi Ma and Adam Appich are the weakest of the nine, present and credible but not vivid in the way that Nick Hoel — the chestnut tree's heir — is vivid, or that Patricia is vivid. You can feel, with the weaker characters, the machinery beneath the choice.

This would matter less in a shorter book. But The Overstory runs to over five hundred pages, and the investment it asks is considerable. The question, about two hundred pages in, is whether the structure justifies the length. For this reader, it does — largely because of what Powers pulls off in the book's second half, when the interwoven lives start shedding people one by one, and you understand that the structure was always an argument: individual lives are brief, and what endures is the forest. Wolf Hall uses a similarly absorptive pace for different ends, but the governing logic is the same — a long book earns its length by the time you reach the last chapter.

Read The Overstory if you want to be changed by a novel, which is a different thing from being entertained by one. Powers asks more than most novelists ask. He also gives more than most novelists give, and the chestnut tree — its hundred years of photographs, its ordinary persistence — stays with you long after the plot has faded.

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