The Overstory

By Richard Powers 

Genre:Wildly ambitious novel using humans as placeholders to tell the stories of trees which tell the stories of earth which tells the stories of humans and makes you feel connected to everything that matters and makes you want to shed everything that doesn’t matter.

Recommended For: Every. Single. Person. 

At the end of the day, I think only two books have changed the way I look at the world.

It’s a big statement to say that about a book, and I tend to hear people make it about nonfiction, if I hear it at all. I read more nonfiction books than fiction, on average, but I can’t say one has drastically shifted the way I look at the world. All the good ones have informed the way I look at it. And the best ones have that deep desire to get me caught up with them on a very particular thing that is both interesting and relevant to what they are already familiar with, swirling around me in a way that I didn’t previously realize. 

A bad nonfiction book might try to change the way you look at the world. Its pages reek with the sweatiness of the grifter who wrote it. Plenty of people fall for that shit, unfortunately. It’s not in the words that are written. It’s in the reader's willingness to be mad at someone or proud of themself and the author’s eagerness to exploit that. You’ll see someone from across the aisle from you on an airplane reading a book by Jordan Peterson, and they have that look on their face. They think the way they see the world has changed, though nothing intellectually has shifted, uncooked ideas have only been reinforced with false equivalencies, and realistically all that’s materially changing is they’re a little more emboldened to treat someone they were already disrespecting a little bit worse. 

A novel, though? A novel can ask you to live inside a different life; walking around like you’re on a tour, holding the knowledge you’d previously gathered in “real” life in your hands, unsure if there might be a place you’ll be able to set it down, even less sure if there will be any use for it here, or if drawing from it is even the right thing to do. 

That can just be a fun experience. Or a weird one. Or a sad one. But it certainly has the potential to shake things up for you. 

One of the books that changed the way I look at the world was James Baldwin’s Another Country. I read it in college, and it took my empathy and gave it some sense of direction. It helped me understand the need for multiple perspectives and the need to acknowledge they are not all equal. There’s a deep amount of pain in that book. There is also a lot of art permeating around the fringes of that book, but the art discussed is not precious and certainly not lifesaving. The book has a lot of trying to exist, if you can imagine what that means. Trying to exist looks one way on the outside, and it looks another way on the inside. The context of who you are - race, gender, sexual orientation - and how that can clash with what you want your little version of existing to look like, is devastating. 

I cannot articulate how Another Country changed the way I look at the world. I just know that I wouldn’t be the same person if I had never read it. 

The other book that changed the way I look at the world is The Overstory.

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I gifted the copy I originally read to a friend before she was about to have a baby. It felt like the proper thing to do. But I almost immediately bought another copy for our home. When I hold it in my hands, I just sort of look at it, like how exactly did you do that? 

The Overstory takes place over different centuries and different regions of America. It is telling the tales of trees, and I think it probably doesn’t quite do justice to say that it uses humans to get that story told. Because the scope and delivery is so enormous, with so many different rhythms circulating from subtext to story and back that people will find their footing at different parts of the messaging and feel a different emphasis. The metaphor pulsates under the story and occasionally makes itself seen more literally like (and forgive me for being less skilled at metaphors) the roots of a tree poking up out of the ground, visible, but traveling so much farther underground, out of sight. 

It also won the Pulitzer Prize. 

The first half of the book is radically different from the second half of the book. For a few hundred pages, you’re mostly just graced with elegant, moving, beautiful, sometimes tragic, tales of individuals and families throughout growing American history as they find some sense of compass for their lives and they nurture a tree that will continue to grow with the country, many years after they die. 

The second half of the book tells modern stories, still connected to trees in different ways, because those trees are established now. The characters in this second half eventually cross paths as this portion of the book pushes forward, and a tale of ecological advocacy, resistance, and even terrorism forms. It’s riveting at every turn, not the least of which is because it always feels like there’s an additional story that is happening somewhere, another shoe to drop, that root pulsating just under the surface. 

About five or ten times every day I let the dog out in the backyard and she doesn’t really stop begging until I go stand out there with her. She doesn’t just want to be outside; she wants company. She wants me to stand out there while she chews on a stick or sunbathes. I’m a pushover, so I usually give her about five minutes of my time. Since reading The Overstory, I stand out there and stare at the trees with wonder. I can’t shake it. The book made me feel connected to everything. The weight of that is also terrifying, and the shock of climate change crisis only weighs more heavily when you feel that connection. But it’s worth it. 

This is where you stop reading if you have not read The Overstory

I don’t typically do a spoiler section, but I feel obliged to discuss a theory about this book.

Olivia is the daughter of Ray and Dorothy, right? 

I know that doesn’t make sense, but it also feels like it has to be true. The end of the first half of the book has Olivia being electrocuted in her shower. Ray and Dorothy are the only characters who do not intersect with the other characters in the second half of the book. I get the sense that there are two sort of alternative timeline happening.

Olivia remembers her father as an intellectual property lawyer (the same occupation that Ray holds), shortly after the beginning of the second half of the book as she begins her journey in the car. That seems a ridiculous coincidence for Richard Powers to include and not one that he would put in the book without any meaning. We also learn right when we meet her that Vandergriff is not her maiden name. She is recently divorced, and it is the name she took in the marriage.

When Ray and Dorothy talk about the chestnut tree that they have accepted as their daughter, he mentions a “tattoo on her left shoulder,” which Olivia also had. Her tattoo was of the Sam Cooke lyric “A Change Is Gonna Come.” 

There are a couple possibilities. Perhaps there are completely alternate timelines. Olivia was Dorothy and Ray’s daughter. They did not struggle to conceive in this timeline. She died in that shower. She came back to life as that chestnut tree in their backyard. 

Another possibility is that Olivia has died many times and continued to come back.

Another possibility is that Olivia is just the character you read about, but she represents these trees. She is nearly possessed by them and willing to let them live through her. This is why all the other characters are inspired by her. She is not Dorothy and Ray’s daughter, but that tree is their daughter and so she might as well be. 

Whatever the case, she is connected to those two. I know that as much as I know anything about any two people that are real.

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Today I Learned About Machinima

This episode of Hidden Levels about Machinima was fascinating. A really cool example of people finding ways to create within new boundaries. I don’t want to give away too much, but a staging of Hamlet inside of a Grand Theft Auto game is just sort of the beginning of an art form that got commercialized and turned into a basic live streaming industry. Listen to the whole episode here.