The Overstory

By: Richard Powers

Narrated by: Suzanne Toren

Length: 22 hrs and 58 mins

Publisher's summary

Pulitzer Prize, Fiction, 2019

A monumental novel about reimagining our place in the living world, by one of our most "prodigiously talented" novelists (New York Times Book Review).

The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fable that range from antebellum New York to the late 20th-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond.

An air force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits 100 years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another.

These and five other strangers, each summoned in different ways by trees, are brought together in a last and violent stand to save the continent's few remaining acres of virgin forest. There is a world alongside ours - vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.

©2018 Richard Powers (P)2018 Recorded Books

Beautiful and painful

I just finished reading this for the third time in about a year and a half. There is everything in this book. I will no doubt reread it many times. I cannot reccomend highly enough. The pain is because of all that we are NOT doing to save the biome.

Very well written, but rambles on

I purchased this title after it was recommended by NPR's Best Books of 2018.

The narrator performed well, especially considering the challenges of portraying characters with accents and speech impairments. She gave personality to each character in the novel, which was paramount in a book with 9 main characters.

The first half of the book is very captivating. The chapters read like poetic verses, filled with metaphor and imagery. The author does an excellent job of exploring the deep human nature of each of the characters so that they become easily relatable. I enjoyed how trees symbolized something important in each character's story.

The second half of the book, though, was tough to get through at times. The tone of the book shifts into something that reads more like a manifesto on environmental conservation with conviction, though not convincing. The characters tend to get very repetitive and say the same message in a hundred different ways -- "humans are destroying the earth." Certain characters stories get long-winded and overly and unnecessarily detailed. The first half of the book has a very good flow, but the second half of the book at times gets tough to follow. It has its moments that really impress upon the reader, but the second half of the book did not engage me as much as the first half. I am a completionist so I was determined to finish the book no matter how I thought it dragged on.
The ending wasn't very satisfying; I really thought this book could have ended at around Chapter 18. (There are 30 chapters in the book, each chapter being roughly around 50 minutes long.)

Timely advocacy, timely inspiration

Plant colonies and their relationship to who we are, where we find solace and strength. different take; that will resonate with hikers, advocates of preserving our national parks, our heritage for our children; and the history of what we have lost personified in the American Chestnut, deforestation rates and corporate intentions on our future. All co-mingled with the stories of men and women you will care about.

Quality uneven

There were stretches of this book that great and highly engaging mixed with portions that were not.

The narration was annoying. Personally I dislike narrators who “over act” the different characters with phony voices. This narrator even broke into song at one point...and not too good effect. Also this narrator had a certain prissy quality and seemed to overcompensate when the dialogue was occasionally raunchy.
Since I was trapped in the car on a lon trip, I finished the book but I wouldn’t share it with a friend.

A powerful work of art on urgent topic

Highly recommended for both narrative and social message. The performance by Suzanne Toren was also excellent.

A very timeline and engaging story that actively challenges one's notion of how nature should be framed in conversations. This book is an absolute must for those who care about environmental justice, but it's also written with the explicit intent of helping those who don't think that way to see why such things matter. This is a critical reframing at a time when the planet's environment is structurally challenged. The story does a good job of making that issue personal.

The title story starts out a bit ponderous, I thought. Very artful, but a bit abstract. I mention this because I didn't really get into the flow of the story right away, and I would urge other readers, if they waver at this point, to stick with it. The book presents at first like a set of isolated stories, but the stories gradually come to have relations, and to finally intertwine as one, in the manner that trees do in a forest. It's worth persevering because the overall message, the "overstory", if you will, is quite powerful.

Fortunately, this is one of the things I love most about audiobooks: For things where there are rough patches, you can just sit back and let the narrator carry you through it until there is smoother going.

The world tree

A sublime book, urgently needed, and in spite of what it tackles, hopeful, so much so. And a great listening experience regardless of the weird accents adopted by the reader. One of my greatest Audible books of the last few years.

Well Written...Frustrating Narration

Though it feels a bit awkward to critique a Pulitzer Prize-winning book, I would still like to offer my opinion.

First, the story. The fairly wide cast of characters are generally well-crafted, and their stories—which all eventually involve trees—are artfully woven together, some coming into contact with others. This worked quite well.

Second, the writing. Mr. Powers definitely has a talent for word-craft. To me, this was the strongest part of the book. The imagery and the messages resonate quite strongly, especially in light of our own ever-developing Climate Change struggle. Still, there is a repetitive nature to some of the writing that can sometimes wear on one’s patience.

Third, the narration. Suzanne Toren is undoubtedly talented (I can only image how challenging it must be to narrate and entire novel), but her style did not fit well with the male and foreign-born characters of this book; the men mostly sounded guttural and raspy, and the foreign nationals sounded like they all have the same generalized accent. The biggest problem for me was the volume; low in general (as compared to other audio books in my library), and further reduced by Miss Toren’s tendency to whisper-read short passages from time to time. This otherwise fine book would truly have benefited from an ensemble cast reading.

Overall, definitely worth a listen, but expect to maintain a fair amount of patience.

The Majesty of Trees vs. the Virus of Humanity

I’ve spent a lot of time in recent years thinking about what I like to call the “rhizomatic novel,” novels structured so that their different characters are never fully conscious of being part of the same larger story. It’s a kind of bird’s eye, or even god’s eye, view of experience. Some of the practitioners of it include many of our leading novelists: Colum McCann, Jennifer Egan and Joan Silber among them.

Richard Powers’s The Overstory is partly in that vein, but its very premise is an exploration of the rhizome – in contrast to the more apparent, geometric unfolding that we historically associate with nature. That is, even though the main characters of this book are, essentially, trees, the real science of it deals with the ways that trees interact with each other and the larger world.

One scientist character here is part of the pioneering work of uncovering the ways that trees use pheromones to communicate with one another, signaling, for instance, to their neighbors if they’ve been attacked by insects and giving those neighbors time to prepare advance defenses. Another (or perhaps it’s the same – the humans here are ultimately less interesting than the forests they seek to preserve) wonders over the way their roots sometimes merge into larger shapes, giving additional dimensions of their communication and creating a webbed, rhizomatic underground tangle that links them all.

So, I admire the fundamental architecture of this book. It’s very shape – let’s go with rhizomatic for the moment – echoes its inquiry. Forests are not collections of individual trees, we’re told, but vast ecosystems that interact. They’re richer and more wondrous than we could have imagined, or at least than we were taught to imagine.

Powers often writes with stunning beauty, and I can easily see why it’s won the National Book Award and been nominated for a Man-Booker. This is fiction as ambitious as fiction gets. It’s a novel that challenges us to see humans as nothing more than supporting players in a drama overseen by trees that, in their age and magnificence, dwarf us.

To put it in his terms, the debris that falls to the forest floor – a debris that one character describes as “mothering” the rest of life into existence – is called the understory. Powers asks us to imagine the “story” that takes place ‘over’ that, to give voice to the literal and figurative canopy that the separate trees of a forest create.

With all that upside, though, I confess I enjoy it a bit less than much of its seemingly deserved hype tells me I should.

First, I like to think that novels are, at bottom, inquiries into possibility. The ones I admire most are the ones that put all their presuppositions on the table, the ones that often end up critiquing their authors as much as the world those authors see. In this case, though, Powers makes it clear from the start – and increasingly throughout – that we are wrong and the trees are right. We are never called on to question the basic premise here. These trees are extraordinary, but I don’t think it’s as easy as the novel implies to see them as the “good guys” as against our species as the “bad guys.”

That’s oversimplifying things a bit. The different characters of the novel come to different conclusions. Some turn to violence, some to quiet support, some to academics, some to computer modeling, and some to scientific activism. In the end, though, most come to realize how limited their efforts are. They are the best allies our few remaining great trees can have, but they can do little to fight against the virus that is humanity. Our great academic, for one, eventually comes to answer the question of how we can best help the environment with a simple answer: we can allow ourselves to die so that the trees can heal themselves.

So, there’s a bleakness here that seems to be inserted into the structure of this book rather than discovered within. That puts it in the tradition, say, of The Jungle or The Grapes of Wrath, but it keeps it (for me at least) from asking to be part of that other tradition that follows the novel where it leads.

Second, I found I got the idea pretty early and then wanted more. The first half of this is gorgeous as we see the back stories of several characters who are all somehow called to take part in activism to save the great trees. The second half brings some of those characters together, and then separates many later, but their stories are never all that compelling. The real heroes are the trees; the different people we see never quite emerge as central enough to command our attention. John Dos Passos tried a similar experiment two or three generations ago to greater success (it’s no shame to say this book is less good than Manhattan Transfer or the USA triology – you can be less good than those and still come close to being a masterpiece) but he had the same challenge of making peripheral characters matter enough for us to care about them. Part of his point, as I remember it, is that we can care only so much. Some do emerge as meaningful, but many others pass by without our being allowed to invest in them.

So, as powerful as Powers’s work is here, I’d like to see it give us a little more to hold onto, a little more of human life to care about.

I admire this effort tremendously, and I’d like to take a shot at another of his novels, but I find this a notch below the best and most inspirational work I’ve read in the last several years.

Profound, life-changing journey into the forest, into the human heart

This book is astounding and fascinating, dark and horrifying in places, and blissfully full of light in others: just like any forest. The characters, including trees, came alive, and I end this book missing my friends: Doug, Pat, Neelay, Ray, and Mimi Ma especially, but all of them... and the trees. I look forward to reading this book again when I’m out backpacking in the forest. During and after reading it, I found myself looking at miraculous trees in a new way. In fact, it’s not the least bit exaggeration to say this book changed my life. I may look the same on the outside but there’s a definite shift in my thinking. If you’re not sure whether to read a book this long via audiobook, please don’t hesitate. I hung on every word.

Trees are people too

Engaging story, multiple plot lines / characters pulled off in a compelling story spanning many years. This is not by any means an optimistic journey but that doesn't reduce its significance. Some truly beautiful moments here and sadly would have been five stars but seriously needed an editor at times - some pretty heavy redundancy / one note song action. Have to say in agreement with other reviews having a difficult time with the narrator's "characterizations." Her interpretations of character voices range from slightly annoying to fingernails on the old chalkboard. The Chinese and Southern Asian accents are particularly cartoonish and demeaning , but by far the worst is hearing impaired dendrologist. Her "deaf voice" sounds like an over-enunciating drunk with a sinus infection. Always blows my mind when these productions feature sub-par talent. Ain't there an audition? No one checking this out? Nothing can rip you out of the magic of a great story faster than bad talent.