The Overstory
by Richard Powers
Summary
Nine people, in nine separate stories, are brought by different routes to the same conclusion: that trees are the important thing and that we are destroying them. An artist inherits a century of monthly photographs of a single chestnut. A student is electrocuted, dies briefly, and comes back convinced that beings of light have instructions for her. A scientist publishes evidence that trees communicate through their roots and is destroyed professionally for it, then vindicated decades later.
The structure is a tree. Roots gives you the nine lives separately. Trunk brings some of them together into direct action against logging in the Pacific Northwest, with consequences that are not romanticised. Crown and Seeds follow what is left.
The nine are deliberately unalike: an engineer's daughter with a jade ring and her father's mulberry, a paralysed games designer building a world people would rather live in, a psychologist studying why people ignore evidence, a Vietnam veteran who fell into a banyan and lived. Patricia Westerford, the ruined and vindicated scientist, is the one readers remember.
Powers is doing something unusual. He is writing at the timescale of a forest, in which a human life is a brief event, and making the reader feel the mismatch.
It is long, around five hundred pages, and the first section functions almost as nine short stories, which some readers find slow and others consider the best part. There is a great deal of botany. The final quarter, after the activism fails, is bleaker than the book's reputation suggests. Best for readers who want a novel of ideas that changes how you look at the street outside afterwards, which it reliably does.
Historical Context & Significance
The Overstory won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The citation praised an ingeniously structured narrative that branches and canopies like the trees at the core of the story, whose wonder and connectivity echo those of the humans living amongst them.
It was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2018, and became a genuine phenomenon of a kind that novels of ideas rarely manage, selling in very large numbers and being credited by activists with changing how they thought about forests.
The science is real. Powers drew on the work of Suzanne Simard on communication between trees through fungal networks, research that was contested when published and hugely influential since, and the scientist in the novel who is ruined and later vindicated follows that arc closely.