“Overstory”: A Life-Changing Novel

I believed in the transformative power of literature years before I had the words to say so. But it turns out, I had no idea how much the right novel at the right time could change me.

The novel is Richard Powers’ beautiful, sprawling eco-fiction, The Overstory. The time is now, my third sabbatical.

Let me sing to you now, about how people turn into other things.

The opening line of Ovid’s Metamorphoses describes what Powers is doing in Overstory. My favorite character in the novel, the scientist Patricia Westerford, receives Ovid’s book as a gift from her father, and she often muses on its opening line. In a Sierra Club interview, Powers himself says, “All nine of the central characters in The Overstory get turned into something they weren’t: people who take trees as seriously as they take other people.”

Am I now such a person? I’m not sure. But I am sure that the more I reflect on Overstory, the more I want to grow and change my teaching and writing. My relationship with the world.

Overstory made me ponder what we humans mean by “the world” and our place in it. When some of the novel’s trees die or are cut down, I felt much sadder than when some of the human characters I really liked pass away. Why? Because, with one notable exception, the humans die of natural causes near the end of their expected life spans. Some of the trees, in contrast, are literally cut off in their prime.

Overstory made me feel like these trees were murdered.

Powers accomplishes this feat with his stunning depictions of trees and with Patricia:

Patricia gives herself to Douglas-firs. Arrow-straight, untapering, soaring up a hundred feet before the first branch. They’re an ecosystem unto themselves, hosting more than a thousand species of invertebrates. Framer of cities, king of industrial trees, that tree without which America would have been a very different proposition. Her favorite individuals stand scattered near the station. She can find them by headlamp. The largest of them must be six centuries old. He’s so tall, so near the upper limits imposed by gravity, that it takes a day and a half for him to lift water from his roots to the highest of his sixty-five million needles. And every branch smells of deliverance. (141-142)

What a blend of lyricism and scientific specificity! But you haven’t seen anything yet. Patricia’s discoveries are based on the work of real-life scientists Diana Beresford-Kroeger and Suzanne Simard:

The things she [Patricia] catches Doug-firs doing, over the course of these years, fill her with joy. When the lateral roots of two Douglas-firs run into each other underground, they fuse. Through those self-grafted knots, the two trees join their vascular systems together and become one. Networked together underground by countless thousands of miles of living fungal threads, her trees feed and heal each other, keep their young and sick alive, pool their resources and metabolites into community chests …. It will take years for the picture to emerge. There will be findings, unbelievable truths confirmed by a spreading worldwide web of researchers in Canada, Europe, Asia, all happily swapping through faster and better channels. Her trees are far more social than even Patricia suspected. There are no individuals. There aren’t even separate species. Everything in the forest is the forest. (142)

This passage is one of many that made me feel both humbled and joyful by all I have left to learn. Especially about connection. I’ve long believed in the web of life, and one of my favorite quotations is E.M. Forster’s “Only connect.” But Powers’ novel helped me begin to understand that the connections in our world are much more direct and intricate than I had realized.

Of course, as a child, I learned that plants and people are connected, trees breathing in the parts of air that people breathe out. But I had no idea that trees and people have so much in common. With the exception of Joyce Kilmer’s  poem (“I think that I shall never see/ a poem as lovely as a tree”), I hadn’t considered that trees might be superior to humans. But Powers’ novel reminded me that trees usually live longer than we do—and they are much less destructive than humans. His novel taught me that trees are at least as cooperative as we humans—and perhaps more giving—especially when it comes to sustaining other life forms.

The link between trees and people is also made by the book’s designer, Marysarah Quinn. The title page features a cross section of a tree trunk, and this cross section is used multiple times as a scene separator. It looks like a human fingerprint.

Furthering this human-tree connection is the fact that many of the novel’s main human characters assume the names of trees, and all of them forge a special connection with a particular type of tree.

In the first section of the novel, “Root,” which introduces the nine main human characters, Quinn has placed a sketch of leaves from each character’s tree at the start of the chapter that bears their name. These drawings, which resemble sketches done by character Nick Hoel, add to the novel’s beauty. They, like Powers’ novel itself, are human art paying tribute to trees.

Overstory made me want to pay tribute. It made me feel awe.

I’ve always wanted to visit California’s redwoods, but after reading about the year Nick and Olivia spent living in the limbs of giant Mimas, my desire to make the trip has morphed. It will not be a mere bucket-list vacation complete with photo opps, but a sacred pilgrimage, a quest to connect with the miraculous and ancient. To feed my spirit and explore my awe.

But to get there, I’ll have to drive or fly. Or take a bus or train. But the fact remains: to see these trees, to use them to nurture my commitment to sustainability, I’ll have to use some of our world’s resources.

Overstory also made me feel grief and guilt.

The novel helped me recognize and explore the grief I feel when I drive I-380 from Iowa City, where I live, to Cedar Rapids, where I teach. I’ve made this commute since 1994, and over the years, lots of trees and farmland have given way to “development.” Recently, acres of land north of Iowa City have been reduced to muddy scars.

This loss is a far cry from the destruction of the old-growth forests in Powers’ novel, yet it is still painful to witness. More painful still is the knowledge that I’m complicit. Some of this “development” stems from the expansion of the Interstate and the roads that feed it, and some of the “need” for that expansion is down to commuters like me.

Powers’ novel is causing me to more deeply examine my complicity in damaging the world.

By choosing to live nearly thirty miles from where I teach, I’m hurting the environment. I’m generating unnecessary carbon emissions and contributing to climate change. I’m helping to trigger the sprawl that mars Iowa’s gently rolling hills—and hurts my own heart.

Why did I make this choice? And why will I continue to make it?

Iowa City feels like home. It is Iowa’s most gay-friendly town. My partner and I both attended grad school at the University of Iowa. In Iowa City, we have deep roots.

But Powers’ novel reminds me that I’ve privileged my figurative roots over the actual roots of other living beings.

Can I atone for this choice? Offset it?

Maybe. I do not buy a lot of stuff. I do not eat a lot of meat. I try to reuse and recycle. But there are many areas of my life—besides my commute—in which I could do better by our world.

I need to devote more time and effort to figuring them out and doing them. I say this not to beat myself up, but to show the impact of Powers’ novel.

Overstory makes me ask a question that relates to the broad subject of this blog: the quest for a delicate balance. Consider ecological grief.  Powers’ novel implies that we American humans haven’t yet adequately experienced and acknowledged our environmental grief. But once we begin, then what?

How can we feel enough grief to fuel the changes we need to make without feeling so much that we’re immobilized?

Overstory asks many other hard and important questions. What is worth giving your life for? What is love? What never ends? What is connection? What is progress? Fulfillment? Real growth?

When five of the novel’s human characters come together to protest deforestation in California, they use this slogan:

NO TO THE SUICIDE ECONOMY
YES TO REAL GROWTH.

Throughout Overstory, Powers exposes the words growth, progress, and fulfillment as dangerous doublespeak.

That is one way a novelist can combat climate change. What are others?

What is literature’s role in combating environmental degradation? What is the writer’s or artist’s role? The role of creativity and imagination? These questions are all explored via the main human characters in Powers’ metafictional masterpiece.

There is Neely Mehta, who becomes a multi-millionaire after developing an online game. At first this virtual reality seems to mimic and foster attitudes and practices related to the suicide economy, but then Neely has a change of heart. He transforms the game, and we’re meant to understand that his game and its “learners” begin transforming people and the rest of the world.  

A lower-tech artist is Iowan Nick Hoel, the human character who bookends the novel. Like his father and grandfather, he takes a monthly photo of the lone chestnut growing on their farm. These photos and his many sketches of trees and plants connect him with his beloved Olivia/Maidenhair. They lead him to live with her for a year in a giant redwood named Mimas.

After he leaves the tree, it is devastating to see him work in an Amazon Fulfillment Center. Amazon is not named in novel, but it’s obvious that Nick’s Fulfillment Center in Bellevue, Washington is supposed to make readers think of the company named after the rain forest:

The product here is not so much books as that goal of ten thousand years of history, the thing the human brain craves above all else and nature will die refusing to give: convenience. (379)

When Powers describes Nick’s reaction to “the gorge of books,” he encapsulates his own novel’s effect on me:

the sight fills him with horror inseparable from hope.

“Somewhere,” Nick thinks, “in all these boundless, compounding, swelling canyons of printed paper, encoded in millions of tons of loblolly pine fiber, there must be a few words of truth, a page, a paragraph that could break the spell of fulfillment and bring back danger, need, and death” (380). Powers accomplishes so much here. He shows writers and readers a way forward, offering us a mission. But at the same time, he once again indicts our complicity.

Although I love Powers’ novel, this scene in the Amazon warehouse made me sick about holding a print copy of the book. As novelist Barbara Kingsolver writes in her review of Overstory,

Even if you’ve never given a thought to the pulp and timber industries, by this book’s last page you will probably wish you weren’t reading it on the macerated, acid-bleached flesh of its protagonists.

Powers’ novel made it real for me that magnificent living beings had died to make the pages in my hands. All the pages I’ve ever read. And that’s a lot of pages. A lot of trees. I’m a voracious reader who loves not just literature, but physical books.

At least the copy I was reading was from the library. Trees hadn’t died to make this book for me alone. Yet what about all the books I had bought? They are my treasures, and I feel good about supporting writers and independent bookstores, especially my beloved Prairie Lights. These actions—and owning books themselves—had once filled me with happiness and pride, but now they were also tinged with disgust and sorrow.

For a while, I was angry at Powers for making me question the virtue of book-buying. But after I finished his novel, and after I looked at it more closely, I saw that he was urging book-lovers to seek hope within the horror. The copyright page bears this message:

The Overstory is printed on 100% recycled paper. In using
recycled paper in place of paper made from 100% virgin
fiber, the first printing has saved
480 trees
393,576 gallons of water
152,288 pounds of greenhouse gas emissions
40,272 pounds of solid waste
Totals quantified using the Eco-Calculator at https//rollandinc.com/.

I had no idea that the first printing of a bestselling book could kill 480 trees. Or that using 100% recycled paper could save 480. How many other books are printed on such life-saving paper? What can I do to make sure that more are? What kind of paper does Amazon use to print my own reissued novels? (Talk about complicity!) What kind of paper is used in the print version of The Paha Review, the literary magazine my students produce at Mount Mercy?

Overstory made me curious. Eager to research.

Powers has altered the trajectory of my thinking. And in my own shifting mindset, he offers me hope.

Powers also offers hope with other aspects of his metafiction.

Three pages after Nick’s stint in the Amazon warehouse, Powers depicts Dorothy reading to her husband, Ray, who is severely disabled by a stroke. As Ray ponders the limits of literature, Powers critiques human exceptionalism:

The books diverge and radiate, as fluid as finches on isolated islands. But they share a core so obvious it passes for given. Every one imagines that fear and anger, violence and desire, rage laced with the surprise capacity to forgive—character—is all that matters in the end. It’s a child’s creed, of course, just one small step up from the belief that the Creator of the Universe would care to dole out sentences like a judge in federal court. To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one, and to mistake life for something huge with two legs. No: life is mobilized on a vastly larger scale, and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people. (383)

What is the difference between a story that offers satisfaction and one that offers meaning?

How can novelists, educators, and other storytellers chip away at human exceptionalism? What should we offer in its place?

One answer emerges in my favorite passage from Overstory: the ending of the chapter that introduces Patricia. In this passage, she accepts a proposal from Dennis, and they agree to form an unconventional marriage, one that involves living separately:

She takes his shaking hand in the dark. It feels good, like a root must feel, when it finds, after centuries, another root to pleach to underground. There are a hundred thousand species of love, separately invented, each more ingenious than the last, and every one of them keeps making things. (144)

This stunning portrayal of love brilliantly counters human exceptionalism. The second sentence opens with what seems to be a typically anthropocentric metaphor: the natural world serves to illuminate human love. Yet that same sentence also uses human emotion to portray the feelings of plants. Then, in the final sentence, as Powers celebrates the variety of human love as a “species” of biodiversity, he blasts the distinctions between vehicle and tenor. He merges two ways of viewing the world: humans as primary; the rest of the world as primary. He shows that these perspectives “pleach” or interweave. He suggests that when we humans see ourselves as part of the natural world—“its ever branching and beautiful ramifications”—we do not diminish our stature; we increase it.

Before reading Overstory, I had never encountered the word pleach (or, for that matter, the word overstory). Clearly, I need to branch out and read more science, more natural history.

As a professor of literature, I need to green my interdisciplinarity, expand my definition of history.

In a gateway course for English majors I taught this fall, EN210 Writing and the Analysis of Literature, I introduced my students to literary theory. I aimed to help them interpret literature through a wide variety of lenses, most of them related to some type of history: economic history; intellectual history; the histories of race, colonialism, gender, sexuality, and class. But I skimped on natural history. The text I used, the popular Steven Lynn’s Texts and Contexts: Writing About Literature with Critical Theory, barely mentioned ecocriticism.

Overstory made me want to offer my future students better opportunities for exploring the intersections of literature and the natural world. 

Powers’ novel also made me want to learn more about how my discipline, my work as a teacher, impacts the environment. In particular, I need more information about the screen vs. paper debate and the environmental and educational impacts of online education.

As a teacher of literature, creative writing, and composition, I want to enable my students to consider how literary writers and other writers can best expand our understanding of the world and help all of it—human and non-human—to thrive.

As a professor at a Mercy university, I want to do a better job helping my students explore one of the Mercy Critical Concerns: care for the Earth.

I also want to do a better job encouraging my creative writing students to grapple with questions related to human diversity.

Overstory has made me want to help my creative writing students reflect on the debate about whether white authors should depict characters of color. To what extent should any of us depict characters who lack our own privilege?

Let’s return to the passage that celebrates Patricia and Den’s love—and all types of diversity. That beautiful passage is queer in the broadest sense of the word. It honors the non-normative.

But I wanted part of Powers’ novel to be queer in the narrower, more usual, sense. Because the novel has nine main human characters, and because it celebrates so many different types of human love, I wanted a character that identified as queer. I wanted more than this short sentence: “At Holyoke, Mimi is a LUG: Lesbian Until Graduation” (38).

My desire raises the sticky question of a novelist’s responsibility for representing human diversity. Of course, a novel can’t do everything. No one writer—even a genius like Powers—can represent the entire rainbow that is humanity.

But in an American novel, how much diversity is enough? And of what sort?

In commenting on a novel like Overstory, a novel that offers a wonderfully rich tapestry of human and non-human diversity, I feel churlish and greedy wanting more. Yet it is Powers’ vast ability to represent diversity, his talent for inhabiting a wide range of complex characters, that makes me feel all the more troubled by what is missing.

Of the novel’s nine main human characters, two are Asian, and seven are white. None are indigenous, Latinx, or African American. As minor characters, Native Americans appear fleetingly, but the novel contains no Latinx characters. No African Americans. Not even in bit parts.  At least not that I remember after reading the novel only once.

Perhaps Powers focused on white characters because we white people are mostly to blame for climate change. But still, the absence of Latinx and African American characters jarred me.

The absence made me reflect on the places outside of Overstory where voices are missing. In the classroom, I need to find more effective ways of encouraging my students to consider questions of representation. As a writer, I need to think more deeply about the voices I choose to feature in my own fiction.

Overstory was the first novel by Powers that I’ve read, and I’m eager to be transformed by his other novels.

What novels (or other literary texts) are changing you?