Can a novel about trees change how we perceive our place in the world?
In short: Richard Powers's Pulitzer-winning The Overstory weaves the lives of nine strangers into a sprawling narrative about humanity's relationship with nature. By centering the agency of trees rather than human emotion, the book challenges the traditional boundaries of fiction and forces us to consider the vast, non-human timeline of our planet.
Published in 2018, The Overstory follows nine Americans whose disparate lives are irrevocably altered by their connections to trees. The narrative structure is intentionally non-linear, mirroring the rings of a tree to span multiple generations and locations across the United States. Powers drew significant inspiration from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, adopting her vision of plants as complex, intelligent creatures with their own agency. This perspective shifts the focus of the novel: as noted by the Los Angeles Review of Books, the human characters serve merely as the 'understory,' while the trees themselves occupy the primary, extended timeline of the narrative.
The story tracks characters like Patricia Westerford, a dendrologist whose theories on tree communication mirror the real-world research of ecologist Suzanne Simard, and Nicholas Hoel, whose family tradition of photographing a single chestnut tree spans generations. As these individuals converge, their environmental activism escalates into radical, sometimes violent, measures to protect old-growth forests. The group’s eventual dissolution and the subsequent paths taken by the survivors—ranging from prison terms to the creation of artificial intelligence—underscore the novel's exploration of both human frailty and the endurance of the natural world.
Critical reception has been largely celebratory, with Barbara Kingsolver praising its ambitious scope in The New York Times and Ron Charles calling it a landmark in environmental fiction for The Washington Post. While some reviewers, such as those at The Guardian, found the later plot developments melodramatic, the novel’s formal innovation remains a major point of discussion. By arguing that a novel need not rely solely on human emotion, Powers invites readers to contemplate a world where humanity is not the protagonist. This 'darkly optimistic' outlook suggests that while human civilizations may be doomed, the forest will persist, a theme that has resonated enough to earn the work a 2019 Pulitzer Prize and a planned television adaptation.
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Sources
- Summary by Intellect · source: The Overstory
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