On "The Overstory"

1. “He wonders: What makes the bark twist and swirl so, in a tree so straight and wide? Could it be the spinning of the Earth? Is it trying to get the attention of men?” 

Seven months ago, I started reading The Overstory. I had found myself in an unenthusiastically air-conditioned bookstore in Ho Chi Minh City—the kind without chairs, where you perch on shelves awkwardly because people will stare at you if you sit on the ground. (How I got there is unclear, but it involved a desire to be tucked away from motorcycles, debaters, and the sun.)

I noticed the book mostly because its spine was overlaid with an image of swirling wood that looked like my kitchen table. I picked it up mostly because I remembered Obama saying something about Richard Powers in the news. And I kept reading because the book felt richer and steadier than my life had felt for weeks. In Vietnam, of all places—among a people who once lost five million acres of white pine, mangrove, mahogany, copperpod to the country I will briefly call home—I began to read about trees.¹

2. “People have sex with strangers. People marry strangers. People spend half a century in bed together and wind up strangers at the end.”

I sat down last week for tea with a friend I hadn’t seen in two or so years. We used to sit together in high school math, passing notes and drawing spiders. The math classroom is an unexpectedly intimate space. You begin to see where a person’s mind goes in the quiet, tedious moments. 

Over tea, he tells me about his linear algebra courses and how his brothers are doing. I tell him that I liked my roommates this year and read most of Ulysses. The woman at the table next to us puts her earphones in to avoid the next half hour of verbal table tennis. We toss stale questions back and forth, the rhythm broken only by occasional laughter at the stupid things we did when we were 14. It is painful in a nibbling way—this sense of estrangement from someone I once knew so well.

Which one of us has changed? I ask myself, after we head down opposite directions of the street. Is he more serious than before? Am I more judgmental? Or were we like this all along—have the memories just blurred over time? 

Powers’ book has nine main characters, who similarly grow and wither over 600 pages. There is Adam, who grows up sitting in trees and dabbing nail polish onto ants to track their movements down a sidewalk, and withers in a federal prison on arson charges. There is Olivia, who withers in substance-induced delinquency in college, only to grow into a fierce conservationist and live on a platform in the forest canopy. The characters lose legs, speech, jobs, hope. They gain pragmatism, money, convictions, conviction.

While Powers’ heroes live more dramatic lives than the characters in my world, their stories evoke a familiar feeling. At its core, more of human development than we realise is about the dulling of sentiment (and maybe, if we’re lucky, its eventual regeneration too). We all love trees, at age six. It’s only later, as we grow more cynical, that they become expendable things in our minds—“we see fruit, we see nuts, we see wood, we see shade… obstacles blocking the road or wrecking the ski slope… dark, threatening places.”

I am at a stage in life where this dulling surrounds me. My friend, who once dreamed of being an architect, professed over tea that he is now reluctantly becoming an electrical engineer. My mother no longer makes chairs, and I no longer want to write novels.

Nothing is morally wrong about pragmatism, most of the time. Often, we lack choices. But there is something deeply sad about these transformations—the hardening of people “like shale into slate”—as utile as they might be. 

3. “If you carved your name four feet high in the bark of a beech tree, how high would it be after half a century? She loves the answer: Four feet. Still four feet. Always four feet, however high the beech tree grows. She’ll love that answer still, half a century later.” 

What makes the tree a seductive metaphor is that it is constant. 

Very few things are. People drift quickly across cities and continents. Old storefronts grow into skyscrapers—concrete takes a few years to shoot upwards, where an oak might have taken 150. Samsung wants to give your refrigerator buttons and a brain. These changes aren’t bad. Many are good. But they share the same wistful, disorienting quality as my recent teatime charade.

Most books about trees tug at this feeling, overtly or not. In the 1933 novel To A God Unknown—a kind of old-growth in itself: a forgotten, beautiful thing that took Steinbeck longer than The Grapes of Wrath to compose—Joseph’s towering oak tree long survives his dying father. In Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree, a boy grows into a gluttonous adult, unrecognisable from the kid who sat in the shade and ate apples. His tree endures, rooted firmly in the ground. Sometimes I wonder how much of real-life environmentalism begins here. Not in a calculated fear of extinction, or a belief in the moral value of wildlife, or even a sentimental affection for nature, but in the desire for some things to remain still.

In the seven months I spent reading The Overstory, the novel itself became something of a constant for me. The prose is too dense and too rich to be crammed into one’s eyes, a hundred pages at a time, like a Grisham thriller. And so it followed me slowly, through long evenings at my oak desk in Cambridge, through quiet mornings in a tent on a certain Canadian island, through warm afternoons in the shade of sycamores along the Charles River. 

Nicholas, Mimi, Adam, Dorothy, Ray, Douglas, Neelay, Patricia, and Olivia became fixtures in my life. I tried to visit them every week, even as the actual humans in Cambridge rotated in and out of my universe (an anticipated yet unsettling part of the first year in a fast-moving place). The nine of them will stick around for a while, I think, held together immutably by the same grained, oak-coloured spine I found last December.

4. “The oracle leaves turn the wind audible. They filter the dry light and fill it with expectation. Trunks run straight and bare, roughed with age at the bottom, then smooth and whitening up to the first branches. Circles of pale green lichen palette-spatter them. She stands inside this white-grey room, a pillared foyer to the afterlife. The air shivers in gold, and the ground is littered with windfall and dead ramets.” 

The Overstory is an intensely beautiful book. It is also a long book. And so I was surprised, when I turned the final page a few nights ago, that the story still felt incomplete.² Powers remarked in an interview, “I wrote a book that asked a very hard question: why are we so lost and how can we possibly get back?” The novel conjures so many generational anxieties—about environmental damage, but also about technology, brutality, displacement, disconnection—and refuses to put them to bed. 

When I closed the book, my mind wandered to the final lecture I attended this year. It was on The Iliad. Our professor had paused for a moment, long enough for 90 dishevelled students to sit up straight and listen.

“Does beauty sensitise us to grief?” she asked. The Iliad is a violent poem, so violent that it is occasionally difficult to find substance in the wreckage. What gives the text meaning, for many, are the pockets of domesticity, warmth, beauty—Achilles’ horses in tears over Patroclus’s death; Andromache preparing a bath for Hector, who will never come home. We come to see violence not only as an act, but as a deprivation of something softer.

I think that The Overstory is not so different, 2700 years later. Powers spends pages describing oaks, cedars, aspens, pines. These moments are not side dishes to a neatly bundled political fable. They are an attempt to make us see the life in an organism that, mostly, is either unnoticed or used for something else. If nothing else, a beautiful novel is worth reading for its own sake. There is hidden stillness around us, waiting to be observed.

1. Vietnam also lost one to three million human beings. It feels odd to exclude that information, but odder still to shove it into a subordinate clause.

2. Partially, this is because Powers starts killing off his characters in the second half of the book like a clown with a handsaw. Immolation, brain aneurysms, sudden nocturnal death, the works. I found this unsettling.