Review of The Overstory (sort of) by Richard Powers

First, I need to thank poet Janice Northerns for urging me to read The Overstory. While it had been on my radar for some time, and it was a Pulitzer Prize winner, I hadn’t really taken the time to slot it into my reading calendar. Janice asked if I had read it and when I said I had not, she put her fist to her forehead and said “Oh! You’ve got to read it.” So I did. In some ways it feels a bit foolish to say one is writing a review of The Overstory. Like many of the books I read, they already have great reviews by people smarter than me. But I want to focus on things that I found particularly engaging.

First, the story includes several people from different walks of life that end up being impacted by trees and the desire to protect them. The plot takes us across generations and we end with a group that, in seeking to protect old growth forests, suffer their own mistakes, and (mostly) end up paying for them. So Powers makes the idea of conservation and preservation much more complex when humans are added to the equation. But enough of the plot.

What really takes me with this book is the prose. Vivid, lively, clipped, quick, engaging, moving, all these things and more. We move through generations in a single sentence and it all feels normal, logical even. In some ways I feel like I’m reading an Annie Proulx book of some time ago. And speaking of Annie Proulx, a couple of years ago I finished her massive Barkskins which has the same opportunity for awareness of how forests have been plundered. She follows several generations as the timber/wood industry develops in North America, and then on to other parts of the world. At over 700 pages, it exceeds that of The Overstory’s 500 pages. My take on Barkskins however, is that it only has flashes of Proulx’s compelling prose from days gone by that can be found in the 1997The Accordion Crimes and other work. In some places Barkskins degrades into mere story telling. As one more point about conservation and preservation, we can go back to Rachel Carson’s 1961 Silent Spring as an early catalyst for conservation. I was a kid at the time and that book made enough of an impact that DDT became anathema and eventually (per my mother’s opinion,) songbirds returned around our farm. I do believe it would be a worthy exercise to re-read Silent Spring, Barkskins, and The Overstory for a rich understanding of the complexities of the natural world as impacted by humans.

At the end, and for writers, The Overstory feels like a must-read because of its compelling and in places almost joyful tone and use of prose and the mastery with which Powers makes the reading a gift, regardless of the plot, characters, setting, and other accoutrements a writer may engage.