Arrow-straight, untapering, soaring up a hundred feet before the first branch. Powers accomplishes this feat with his stunning depictions of trees and with Patricia: Overstory made me feel like these trees were murdered. Some of the trees, in contrast, are literally cut off in their prime. Why? Because, with one notable exception, the humans die of natural causes near the end of their expected life spans. When some of the novel’s trees die or are cut down, I felt much sadder than when some of the human characters I really liked pass away. Overstory made me ponder what we humans mean by “the world” and our place in it. I want to grow and change my teaching and writing. In a Sierra Club interview, Powers himself says, “All nine of the central characters in The Overstory get turned into something they weren’t: people who take trees as seriously as they take other people.”Īm I now such a person? I’m not sure. My favorite character in the novel, the scientist Patricia Westerford, receives Ovid’s book as a gift from her father, and she often muses on its opening line. The opening line of Ovid’s Metamorphoses describes what Powers is doing in Overstory. Let me sing to you now, about how people turn into other things. The novel is Richard Powers’ beautiful, sprawling eco-fiction, The Overstory. But it turns out, I had no idea how much the right novel at the right time could change me. I believed in the transformative power of literature years before I had the words to say so.
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