Richard Powers' The Overstory (2012)
he says there's no planet b and we're all connected, but in a pretty white way. [reading time: 3min]
What is the single best thing a person can do for tomorrow’s world? (456)
“The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.” (336)
Richard Powers wrote a novel—of ecofiction, specifically—to save us all. The planet can save itself; but this that we are living in, is “the suicide economy” which environmentalists oppose to “real growth” (344) in one slogan written by some of the activists in the book. It’s us who will fail, and succumb, if we do not put a stop to the system as we know it. The planet will find its own way; as for us, we still might, if we turn back around.
The Overstory is sectioned in four parts: Roots, Trunk, Crown, Seeds. The idea is clever, but no gimmick: many unrelated characters get united, in different ways, under the common cause of Nature; then they branch out and finally disperse, hopefully growing more like-minded individuals through their efforts and example. Yet the ending does not bear too much hopefulness. It can leave a bitter taste. Yes, there is a future for trees—but is that enough? The novel seems to answer that it is enough.
When Powers—and this is one of the novel’s finest qualities—writes about plant life he is respectful to the point of reverence, filling the page with the wondrous beauty and capabilities of all vegetation, herbs, shrubs, trees, forests. Even fallen trunks of dead trees have their place in the ecosystem, along with animals, fungi, and other plants. The scientific facts contained in the book are astonishing—beautiful—to the layman, they can seem fantastical, magic. The sense of awe permeates the characters’ interactions with nature, and they can colour the way the reader, too, looks at nature. It is perhaps the novel’s greatest accomplishment.
Some stretches of the book, however, feel unnecessary; some passages are overwritten, almost smug, as if Powers were perhaps too conscious of trying to write the Great American Ecofictional Novel. The problem with that definition is that, except for an Indian-American and a Chinese-American character, everybody else in the novel is apparently white. There are no Black characters; there are no Indigenous characters, except for a few unnamed ones at the very end1. The genre of ecofiction, especially in this century, has been making space for Indigenous voices, perspectives, histories. The white gaze here, on the would-be white saviours of American land, feels narrow; narrower still, for a novel as broad and sprawling as The Overstory intends to be. Moreover, the touch of nihilism has the aftertaste of ecofascism, although the novel’s Emersonian roots tend to exclude that view, as does a very pointed scene in which one of the characters saves another from an attempt on her own life. It is nonetheless a criticism to be made, especially when most characters end up defeated in various ways, and divided again.
Further reading inspired by The Overstory
Gagliano, Monica. Thus spoke the plant: A remarkable journey of groundbreaking scientific discoveries and personal encounters with plants, North Atlantic Books, 2018.
Gagliano, Monica, trans. Alessandra Castellazzi. Così parlò la pianta: Un viaggio straordinario tra scoperte scientifiche e incontri personali con le piante, Nottetempo, 2022.
Reviewed in an instagram post, featuring pictures of a few pages from the book. I wrote, “I’ll admit to some difficulty when it came to a few more spiritual parts, but I really loved two fundamental aspects of the book: the decolonisation of science and the scientific experiments proving that plants have many more senses than we, anthropocentric creatures, expect them to.”
Wall Kimmerer, Robin. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, Milkweed Editions, 2013.
To be read, sooner rather than later.
Simard, Suzanne. Finding the Mother Tree: Uncovering the Wisdom and Intelligence of the Forest, Penguin, 2022.
To be read.
“THE MAN in the red plaid coat comes back the next day, accompanied by two strapping twenty-year-old twins in sheepskin and a giant man with a raven profile and the girth of a middle linebacker. They pack in a hefty gas chain saw, two small dollies, and another block and tackle. That’s the scary thing about men: get a few together with some simple machines, and they’ll move the world.” (501)