Ambitious, unwieldy, and often genuinely moving, The Overstory is a novel that reaches for the sublime and sometimes tangles its own roots on the way there.
Richard Powers has written a novel of such scale and moral earnestness that it is impossible not to admire the audacity of it. The Overstory wants to do for trees what serious fiction occasionally attempts for nations or generations: make them feel like the true protagonists of human history. At its best, Powers achieves something rare — a sense that the life of the forest is not decorative backdrop but an alternative order of intelligence, patience, and suffering. The book can be luminous when it lets trees unsettle human vanity rather than merely symbolise it.
Yet for all its grandeur, the novel is not without an almost managerial heaviness. Powers is so determined to educate, to persuade, to gather ecstasy and ecological warning into one cathedral of a book, that the prose sometimes strains under its own ethical weight. The structure, with its nine interwoven lives, is meant to create a sprawling ecology of connection, but not every strand is equally alive. Some characters feel conceived less as people than as necessary conduits to the book’s large design; they arrive bearing an argument, and occasionally one can hear the argument clearing its throat. Literary fiction may be permitted a certain schematism, but this novel occasionally mistakes significance for depth.
Still, one cannot dismiss the force of what Powers is doing. His best scenes have the slow accretion of a ring inside a trunk: patient, cumulative, almost invisible until suddenly the whole thing holds. He is excellent on attention, on the moral re-education of looking closely, and on the strange grief that comes from understanding how little of the living world remains in human hands. The book’s environmental militancy is not shy, but neither is it merely fashionable. It is rooted in a genuine dread and awe, which gives the novel its pulse even when its architecture creaks.
What limits The Overstory, for me, is that it sometimes prefers vastness to intimacy and proclamation to ambiguity. The final movement leans into a kind of near-apocalyptic fervour that is stirring, certainly, but also a trifle doctrinaire; the novel can begin to sound as though it has packed a sermon into a redwood and invited us to worship there. Still, I would rather read a novel overreaching nobly than one remaining safely in its lane. This is an uneven book, but its unevenness is part of its ambition: it wants to enlarge the scale of feeling, and on more than one occasion it succeeds.
Who should read this
Read this if you are drawn to ambitious literary fiction, ecological themes, and novels that think on a continental scale. If you prefer wit, compression, or character-led subtlety over grand design, you may find it rather too earnest for comfort.
A personal note from Whitfield
I admired The Overstory more than I enjoyed it in the ordinary sense, which is perhaps fitting for a book about enlarging one’s sense of scale. It left me chastened, impressed, and mildly exasperated — a respectable set of after-effects for a novel of this seriousness.
Conversation(0)
Join in — no account needed. A name and email are all it takes. Your email is never shown publicly.