long answers need long time in richard powers' overstory

Towards the end of The Overstory, Neelay Mehta, who we follow from misfit childhood into successful video game designer adulthood, asks his staff, "What do all good stories do? They kill you a little. They turn you into something you weren't."

The Overstory will do that to you.  It isn't your usual linear narrative. There isn't a simple plot.  But you will be different when you finish. Your sense of time will change. You'll see that  the people most adjusted to societal norms are also less evolved, if not delusional.  In the words of  Patricia Westerford, a scientist and arborist in the novel, "other creatures, bigger, slower, older, more durable - call the shots,  make the weather, feed creation and create the air."  When you finish reading this book, you'll never see trees in the same way again.

But it isn't easy going.  You won't zip through it.  Reading an epic takes commitment. Several people told me they got bogged down in the middle, as did I. There are so many characters and narrative threads which are hard to keep straight.  But over 500 pages they weave together, branch out and intersect.  They work like the underground root system of the trees which are central to the story. "Forests mend and shape themselves through subterranean synapses," Powers writes. "And in shaping themselves, they shape too, the tens of thousands of other linked creatures that form it from within. Maybe it's useful to think of forests as enormous spreading branching underground supertrees."

 The characters are quirky and unique.  They suffer near death and physical handicap: infertility, deafness, electrocution, bombing, stroke.  Some of them are on the spectrum.  But because of this they are  alert to a different sense of time, and more in tune to nature.

The book opens with the Hoel family who over several generations photograph a Chestnut tree on their farm.  Put all together the hundreds of pictures reveal the slow, purposeful growth of the tree and its long dignified story.   Then there's Olivia Vandergriff, who is promiscuous and superficial until she is electrocuted by a lamp in her bedroom.  She comes out of this near death experience able to hear voices - her spirit guides.  She becomes a leader in an important environmental movement.

We learn how trees communicate with each other. We learn with scientist Patricia Westerford, who is almost deaf, how to listen to trees.  Trees send warning to each other which human beings can't hear.  "Harm was never imminent enough.  Imminent at the speed of people is too late."
 

All the characters - Nick, Mimi, Neelay, Patricia, Olivia, Douglas and others meet up as activists in the Pacific Northwest, to protest deforestation. Together with Nick Hoel,  Olivia lives for a year on a platform in a giant redwood to stop the loggers from bringing it down.  It's transporting. For me, this is the heart and soul of the book.

But do the activists succeed in protecting the trees?  You already know the answer. "People have no idea what time is," says Nick. "They think it's a line, spinning out from three seconds behind them, then vanishing just as fast into the three seconds of fog just ahead.  They can't see that time is one spreading ring wrapped around another, outward and outward until the thinnest skin of Now depends for its being on the enormous mass of everything that has already died."  Ultimately the activists scatter.

"Long answers need long time," Powers writes. "And long time is exactly what's vanishing."  The novel is a serious warning.  This book is not optimistic.  It's epic and prophetic.

But when we've thoroughly ruined the planet for ourselves and human beings can no longer survive here,  the trees will come back.  They will outlast and survive us because they are greater than we are.

#theoverstory #environmentalwarning #treesoverstory