Tree people

Narrative Architecture #5: Richard Powers' "The Overstory"

This is the fifth chapter in a long-simmering miniseries called “Narrative Architecture” about storytelling choices in fiction. There are many ways to tell a story, and in this series, I’ll examine the literary choices a particular author made and their impact on the story at hand. This week, I’ll engage with Richard Powers’ much-lauded novel The Overstory (W.W. Norton, 2018), winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

This post is a revised version of an essay I composed as part of my MFA program at UNR.

---

“If the trees of the earth could speak, what would they tell us?” reads the dust jacket description of Richard Powers’ The Overstory. This novel, which netted Powers the Pulitzer Prize, is a bit strange. I feel as if the book was mismarketed as a novel which told the story through the perspective of trees. It does not. Rather, it tells the interconnected story of nine individuals whom eventually cross paths (at least, most of the time, which I’ll get into); all their lives are either directly involved or somewhat adjacent to protecting a particular grove of California Redwoods. It feels more like Cloud Atlas, sans the Russian doll structure, and with a very simplistic, sentimental environmentalist message: trees are beautiful, and good. Okay, great. Yes, I’ve also read The Lorax. Still, the ecosystem is so much more complicated than in Powers’ sentimental description, and yet he constantly frames the Pacific Northwest biome as being under extreme threat (not from climate change) but by logging, a note that didn’t ring true compared to far more endangered rainforests—the Amazon, the Congo, and the jungles of Indonesia.

This goes without saying Richard Powers seems to occupy a conflicting spot in the literary universe. The only other Powers I have read, The Gold Bug Variations, I read at the behest of a family friend who considered that novel his favorite book of all time. The Gold Bug Variations is not my favorite novel of all time, as it is a rather tedious romance between a geneticist and musician across two timelines, one that tries to link Bach to genetics, and also Edgar Allen Poe and marketing. It doesn’t work.

However, The Overstory is certainly more effective than that earlier effort. Powers gets out of his own way to tell the stories of his characters, whose origins are often dramatic and intricate. Take the dazzling origins of Nicholas Hoel, a descendent of farmers who photographed a single tree on a farm every day for decades (“three-quarters of a century dances by in a five-second flip” (17), and that of Mimi Ma, a Silicon Valley computer scientist-turned-tree-activist descendant of a Chinese immigrant who brought a priceless heirloom across the ocean in the early 20th century. Then there’s the on-again, off-again romance between Ray Brinkman and Dorothy Cazaly, whose courtship began during preparations for a local theater’s production of Macbeth (as you might expect, the Birnam Wood sequence figures prominently).

But there are a lot of characters, and not every character can be given a gorgeous origin. Some of the character’s plotlines are a bit distracting because their specificity is too close to real events. There’s Douglas Pavlicek, who not only participated in the notorious, real-life Stanford Prison Experiment but fought and was wounded in Vietnam (parachuting into a tree which saved his life). There’s Neelay Mehta, the paraplegic programmer who develops what is essentially the video game Civilization (who became paralyzed when he fell out of a tree as a child). (Are you sensing a pattern here with the tree-related injuries?)

Then there’s the case of Olivia Vandergriff, an out-of-control college girl, who, after being electrocuted and briefly dying before resuscitation, becomes touched by Redwoods and a vessel for the trees’ mission—that of fighting off loggers. As Vandergriff becomes a mouthpiece for the tree gods, she loses her edge as a compelling character. As her death (from falling out of a tree) is the pivot from which the story turns, her lack of humanity as basically a modern-day dryad weakens the punch of this critical moment.

The sheer quantity of characters leads to the book’s main problem—with so much at stake and in play, Powers resorts to the same strategies repeatedly to generate drama in each plotline, a pattern that does not deepen the novel, but rather expands its overwhelming cheesiness. Thus the ambitious design of The Overstory betrays the weak foundation at its roots.

Nearly all the characters are unbearable horny. Adam consistently lusts after his psychology advisor (he’s a teenage guy): “He wants to know whether she ever, even once, thought of him sexually. It isn’t inconceivable. She’s only a decade older than he is. And she is—he wants to say robust” (256). This plotline goes nowhere; rather it’s just there to make a quiet moment somewhat more compelling. Meanwhile Pavlicek lusts after Mimi (uncomfortable, given the age difference), and Hoel gets obsessed with “divine” Olivia.

Moreover, nearly all the characters are subject to some unspeakable tragedy. Hoel’s entire family dies in a gas poisoning. Adam’s sister goes missing in Florida, presumably murdered by a serial killer. Mimi’s father suffers from Alzheimers’; Ray has a stroke after his turbulent wife has an inexplicable affair. Every character has enough drama for each to get their own book. The first time a tragedy unfolds, it has power (Hoel’s origin in particular) but the ninth time the tactic appears, it’s to greatly diminishing returns.

To make matters even more ridiculous, the tragedies are frequently aligned with an alarming amount of fatal or near-fatal tree-related accidents. Nearly every character crashes, falls out of, or is injured in some way by trees. In addition to the “tree accidents” I’ve already mentioned, at one point Nicholas Hoel crashes his car into a tree, and so does Dorothy Cazaly after reading a love note from Ray. I understand the book is about the trees, and the trees have some agency in this book as a supernatural force, but I was starting to roll my eyes every time a character was injured by a tree, since it happened so much and so often.

With such a large cast, one also expects the characters to eventually meet up. Not all of them do. Some characters don’t ever come into contact, and when they do, it often feels forced. Maybe it would have been better to keep them apart? Ray Brinkman and Dorothy Cazaly, the wayward and stormy lovers, never encounter the main group, but Ray, post-stroke, watches the court case of Adam Appich on television. Mehta eventually attends a lecture by tree scientist Patricia Westerford, and so does Mimi. (I never for a second believed that Mimi Ma would become a tree activist and abandon her comfortable life in Silicon Valley). These gestures felt like vain attempts at tying off loose ends that had started out loose and never found their way. It was as if Powers was making this up as he went along, for the most part. Hoel and Appich might have been consolidated into one character, for example, as two young men of similar ages (who both fall, in different ways, for Olivia). Ray and Dorothy never figure into the main plot, and so they might be eliminated. The same goes for scientist Patricia Westerford, who ends up just providing evidence that the trees talk to each other and supports the novel’s insinuation that the trees are manipulating the humans, acting as the book’s mouthpiece for its shallow brand of environmental platitudes (“You asked me here to talk about home repair. We’re the ones who need repairing. Trees remember what we’ve forgotten. Every speculation must make room for another. Dying is life, too” (464). So there were definitely ways to streamline The Overstory. In a Hollywood adaptation, I would expect Ray to actually defend Appich in court for an Aaron Sorkin/Frank Capra finale.

In 2021, Netflix announced that they hired David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, the showrunners of Game of Thrones, to develop The Overstory as a Netflix show. Good for Powers, if it eventually ends up being greenlit, though I do wonder how the writers will adjust the plotlines; undoubtedly the characters will cross paths more directly and consistently in their adaptation.

Powers’ book is undeniably well-written and for the most part enjoyable (apart from the eye-rolling flaws I’ve mentioned), and with the Pulitzer I wonder whether he’s been honored for a lifetime of contributions to letters as opposed to a singular work. The Overstory is not as innovative as its marketing might suggest, but it’s still solid. I wouldn’t rank it highly as climate fiction, because it is too reliant on 1970s environmental rhetoric, too easily spellbound by redwood forests which have been on this Earth (relatively) briefly and will inevitably fade with time, regardless of the logging economy in Oregon. Mostly, Powers teaches us that perhaps too much backstory is a bad thing, as an over-reliance on the same strategies becomes over-the-top and tiresome quite quickly. He does take a jab at Reno, though, just before Hoel and Olivia drive through Donner Pass, in a line that made me laugh quite a bit: “Nevada is wide and bleak enough to mock all human politics” (203). Come for the trees, then, and stay for the shade.

---

Works Cited

Powers, Richard. The Overstory: A Novel. (W.W. Norton & Co.: New York, 2018).