The novel concerns itself with our human drama — it always has. The intrigues, the misunderstandings, the passions and illusions. The novel busies itself with the horrors and duplicities of family life, relationships (surely one of the greatest of soul-sucking words …), war (usually its ghastly aftermath), babies (the novel depends rather over-much on babies and their impending arrival), and crime, the more gruesome and diabolical the better. The immigrant tale is a staple of the novel, as is the generational saga. Incarceration (becoming quite popular), the heartbreak of addiction, the tragedies and injustices of history, the injustices and tragedies of the so-called present — all themes of human interest or momentary attention…
But to suggest that human beings aren’t the most important or interesting items around is to invite censure. The novel must be forgiving of human foibles, certainly never judgmental. To be judgmental would be anti-humanist. To be anti-humanist is to be unacceptably dissonant, a crank. In the middle of William Gass’s ecstatically anti-humanist and under-valued novel, The Tunnel, glistening like a turd in a toilet, is this perception:
“This is how the world looks. The world looks … trashed.”
Which is very much the case. And should we not be affrighted and enraged by this every day and strive to un-trash it? And should not the novel — slumbering giantess that she is — awake and guide us by increasingly wily stratagems and effects and old-fashioned illuminations and impassioned rhetoric to perceive the magnificence and complexity of the non-human world?
Of course it should. It must. But it hardly ever does. The Overstory is an exception. The central players in Richard Powers’ latest novel are trees. It is their drama we become witness to on the page — the lives they inhabit, their intelligence, the ways they speak to us and each other, the increasingly dreadful fates they experience as a community. The Overstory concerns itself with their destruction, their slaughter, in our country, in our time. America once had numerous great, distinctive forests including the giant redwood groves of the Northwest, home to many of the largest species of trees on earth. No more than 5 percent of these original old-growth forests remain (the number is probably closer to 2 percent) their complex worlds slaughtered, never to regenerate, their deep and living soils sterilized to accommodate only a monoculture of harvestable timber.
Knowing this, knowing in a deep transformative way, will shape Richard Powers as a novelist, just as The Overstory should shape the future of the novel, moving it from its comfy and well-worn anthropocentrism into the more disturbing and demanding narratives of the elegantly structured and complex otherness surrounding us, the myriad world of being that we have … trashed.
In an interview in Conjunctions, Powers said that the heart of The Overstory is:
“a rejection of human exceptionalism — the idea that we are the only things on earth with agency, purpose, memory, flexible response to change, or community. Research has shown in countless marvelous ways that trees have all of these. Tree consciousness — which we’ll need to recover in order to come back home to this planet and stop treating it like a bus station bathroom — means understanding that trees, both singly and collectively, are central characters in our own stories.”
Book Post brings high-quality, carefully curated reviews from working writers to your inbox each week! Find out more here.
