Jordison, Sam (December 18, 2018). "How could The Overstory be considered a book of the year?". The Guardian . Retrieved August 17, 2020.

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.” This begins with a short chapter that has the feeling of a biblical tale, with perhaps a touch of magical realism to it. The meaning, the cycle of life, but also the life lessons that we are somehow missing, unable to grasp. There are many other character’s stories that eventually become somewhat intertwined, but at the root of all of these stories is this reverence for trees, so much so in some of these stories that they act as one of the characters. Absorbing, thought-provoking and more than enough incentive to embrace your inner tree-hugger Culture Whisper Patricia Westerford learns about trees from her father. She studies botany and forestry in college. While completing research, she discovers trees communicate with each other through chemicals. Her findings are denounced by a few prominent scientists. She loses her job and retreats into solitary life, nearly killing herself. Later, she meets two scientists who tell her that her research has been redeemed in the scientific community. She joins them at their research station and begins investigating trees once more.

Reader Reviews

Powers’s novels can be categorized as part of “the grand realist tradition”; Nathaniel Rich, writing in the June 2018 issue of The Atlantic, noted the author’s penchant for critical documentation of contemporary society, exploring “our most complex social questions with originality, nuance, and an innate skepticism about dogma.” Powers himself, however, views his work as allegorical, and, indeed, The Overstory in particular has a mythic scope. The trees at its heart are godlike in scale, “ as old as Jesus or Caesar”; over hundreds of years, they engage in social behaviors, communicating with one another through a vast network of roots. Human characters treat them as revered ancestors; after all, they share significant amounts of DNA with us. Fantastic as they might sound, all these qualities of trees are real. With The Overstory, Powers has not created a fable so much as translated reality into a compelling system of belief. Well. A long rant has been percolating in my head while I read this overpraised novel by a writer I try over and over and whose work over and over fails to wow me, which is putting it kindly. Lately I've read a number of the 'what to do about great men/geniuses who are also sexual assaulters' think pieces that have been proliferating and what throws me each time is that the artists cited are in reality not a single one of them great, let alone a genius. See for instance Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, David Foster Wallace and so on, none of whose work deserves anything close to the adulation it gets. And no I'm not associating Powers with those accused of misogynist behavior (though who knows, such a revelation about any given man cannot be a surprise at this point). I am however associating him with the long list of white men assigned greatness status when they nowhere near deserve it. What a low bar they have to leap. Shortlisted for the Man Booker in 2018, The Overstory is a brilliant and passionate book about humans and their relationship to trees and the natural environment.

Fabiani, Louise (2018). "It's Not the Trees That Need Saving: The Overstory (Review)". Earth Island Journal . Retrieved February 1, 2021. Meanwhile Neelay starts his own company and becomes fantastically wealthy and successful with his immersive Mastery games, constantly building richer and more complex worlds with his coding. Patricia writes a best-selling book called The Secret Forest, all about how trees communicate. Adam decides to write his dissertation on the psychological profiles of environmental activists, and he begins interviewing people. Dorothy and Ray try to have a child but cannot, and in their dissatisfaction, they dive into reading and other hobbies. Soon Dorothy starts having an affair.From the beginning, this is lovely, even though there were minor parts of this story I didn’t enjoy quite as much as others. There were times when I felt a point was being driven home again and again, which took away some of what I loved about this story, and occasionally it felt heavy and dense, for me, especially later in the book, but ultimately, this is one I won’t forget. The second section brings many of the human cast together in 80s California, where they join campaigners attempting to protect some of the last remaining redwood trees - this is a mixture of fact and exaggeration - in general the tree science is fact, but the human activity is fictional or adapted. At the end of this section, the failure of these protests leads them to start an arson campaign, in which the charismatic Olivia "Maidenhair" (whose story is partly modelled on that of Julia Butterfly Hill) is accidentally killed.. For me this was the most powerful part of the book. What Richard Powers wants his readers to realise is what this means for humanity. He wants us to realise how important trees are for the world. And he chooses to do this not with a text book but with a story. 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.

The book is all about trees, and in many ways the trees are more important than the diverse cast of human characters, all of whom become involved with protecting, nurturing or learning from trees in many different ways. Animism, Tree-consciousness, and the Religion of Life: Reflections on Richard Powers' The Overstory". Center for Humans & Nature. February 26, 2019 . Retrieved December 1, 2021. In The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell complains that “artists of any consequence can never be persuaded into the Socialist fold … Nearly everything describable as Socialist literature is dull, tasteless, and bad.” He calls this fact “disastrous”. He goes on to say that “the high-water mark, so to speak, of Socialist Literature, is WH Auden, a sort of gutless Kipling, and the even feebler poets who are associated with him” – trying to kill two perfectly good birds with one slightly childish stone.Netflix’s The Overstory is currently in the development stage and no production dates are known at the moment. We will likely know more in the coming months. Ray Brinkman – a conventional intellectual property lawyer and Dorothy's husband, who later in life, following a stroke, falls in love with nature.

A colossal, rising, reaching, stretching space elevator of a billion independent parts, shuttling the air into the sky and storing the sky deep underground, sorting possibility from out of nothing: the most perfect piece of self-writing code that his eyes could hope to see.” Richard Powers and nature writing Open Book, Alex Clark interviews Richard Powers, 0:00-12 min, BBC Radio 4 podcast, August 28, 2018, accessed September 2, 2018. The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story."

BookBrowse Review

Nonetheless, when set against Powers’s greater achievements, these are but woodworm compared with the majestic redwood of a novel that he has constructed. It is fitting that it ends with a message of hope. As with Larkin, a belief that humanity is capable of redeeming itself and beginning “afresh, afresh, afresh”.