The Overstory

Expansive and deeply thought provoking. Packed with ideas. I'll be thinking about this one for a long time.

My only quibble: in its mission to elucidate the eco-activist viewpoint, the book can occasionally teeter into inhabiting that viewpoint in a way that lacks nuance.

It's a book about characters who can get preachy and who see the world as divided into an awakened few and an inscrutable majority perpetuating a dangerous status quo. This all makes sense. The project of the book is helping us know these people.

However, the line between being about preachy people and being preachy is a thin one. I'd say Powers almost entirely succeeds in keeping on the right side of that line, but it's delicate work and I found myself occasionally squinting.

But then I wonder, maybe that journey of being in turns swept up in the movement and disillusioned is part of the point of the whole thing. I'm not sure! But this is what's going into my waffle between 4 and 5 stars.

What a wonderful book! The story, the writing. Trees. It was a pleasure to read. I’d sometimes stop to savor a particular choice of words, an image, a metaphor, a verb. I often have a hard time keeping track of the characters in novels, but here each person is so clearly drawn, they became very distinct individuals for me. This type of structure, jumping from one story to another seemingly unrelated story, often leaves me bored with some threads, impatient to get back to my favorite characters. In this case, though, I found myself equally interested in each story. Each of the characters is sympathetic in their own way. It’s really a remarkably well constructed work. I’m not usually much of a fiction reader, but I was attracted to this book because it deals with the themes of trees and our relationships with them. I feel like I am still engaging the issues the book raises, somewhere inside me. I expect I’ll have to read it again.

I rated “The Overstory” 4 stars, but it could have been 4.5 or even 5 stars with a better editor. Concise storytelling is hard to do, especially when an author falls in love with his own prose, and this book is just too long.

Cutting out 1/3 of both the characters and the length would have resolved my two major problems with it: The number of characters made it tough to get invested in any of them, and I ended up putting the book down multiple times as I was dragging myself through particularly slow passages. Some of the characters’ storylines, such as Neely Mehta and Dorothy and Ray, could have been cut entirely and their points made by other characters.

My other complaint is that I was knocked unconscious after being hit over the head so many times by so many metaphors about interconnectedness, property/ownership, and, of course, trees. That being said, some of those metaphors are terrific — take, for example: “They can’t see that time is one spreading ring wrapped around another, outward and outward until the thinnest skin of ‘Now’ depends for its being on the enormous mass of everything that has already died.”

It’s also a very moving novel that successfully gets the reader emotionally involved in the global tragedy of our disappearing forests. The prose is beautiful and the characters, though too many, are well drawn. A description of a chance meeting between two of them that I particularly loved: “They turn to one another and hug goodbye, like bears testing their strength against each other. Like they’ll never see each other again in this life. Like even then, it would be too soon.” Ultimately, I would recommend it.

I have mixed feelings about this book. On one hand, I expected it to be boring (or at least slow moving) because it's about trees. I was totally wrong about that – in fact, I found this book gripping and finished its 512 pages (or 22 hours, as it were, since I listened to the audio version) in about a week. So in that sense, it exceeded my expectations. I really liked the way it opened – the initial chapters read like short stories and they were beautifully written. I also liked that the book then wove together the story lines of those initial nine characters (I'm a sucker for collections of short stories with connecting threads). Where/why I deducted a few stars:
1. I feel like it went out with a whimper instead of a bang at the end.
2. While Powers seems to be on the ass-opposite end of the philosophical spectrum from Ayn Rand, this book reminded me of her works because it was less a novel and more allegory (or even potentially propaganda). I agree with Powers's views, but I always feel like I'm being manipulated when I read a novel that has a clear moral agenda.
3. I'm not sure ALL the characters were needed. Part of me wonders if this book would've been as/more powerful if it had concentrated on fewer characters.

All of that to say: I'd probably still recommend it, flaws and all, especially to my friends who aren't dialed into the natural world and aren't aware of the interconnectedness of all forms of life.