5. The Overstory

The Overstory. Richard Powers. 2018.

Over the past year and a half, a number of people have recommended this book to me.  So, I was very excited to start it and was looking forward to really getting into a novel.  So many people I really like told me I was going to love this book.  And I really tried.  

At the beginning, the book is a series of short stories about people.  The loose theme that more of less held the stories together was the relationship between the humans and trees.  Some of these vignettes resonated with me.  Some did not.  I kept waiting for the stories to relate to each other. but it felt disjointed. The book is basically a love story to trees and if you really love trees, the science of them and the beauty of them, then you will probably love this book. I discovered I do not love trees in this way. I found the woo-woo, quasi-natural science spouted by some of the characters droned on and I found that a distraction from the human story line, which did, eventually, after a very long time, sort of pull together in interesting ways.  It just took so long and there were so very many words in the way of getting there. It is a true novel in that sense: so wordy and narrative.  I am saying that here as if it was a bad thing, which it was. It felt like Moby Dick or Charles Dickens, something I was assigned to read in high school English class and never did get drawn into.  Smart, thoughtful, symbolic, and very...long.

Perhaps more than anything about this book, the entire time I read this book I was reminded of my friend, Nancy. She would have loved this book. She loved trees and she loved to talk about trees.  Whenever we went somewhere new, she studied the trees and when we walked, she would tell me all about the trees. I never cared about the science, but I loved being with her and so I tolerated her tree lectures.  But I'll also admit that while I listened, I didn't retain any of that tree knowledge. That love of scientific nature pulsed through her. She also loved a good, wordy novel with fancy vocabulary and that took pages to describe something mundane in great detail.  It seems to me that this is the kind of book that people I really love really love. It just isn't the kind of book that I love a lot.  Although, I did love that I've spent the last ten days thinking a lot about Nancy.

If you liked The Overstory, try Mink River. It left with me with the same sense that if I were just a little bit more intellectual, I would surely have loved this beautiful, authentic piece of literature.

​Recommended by Evangeline.​

---