It's That Good

The Overstory by Richard Powers
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Amazing book. Surprisingly deep and affecting. Not my usual fare, but I liked it and recommend it.

This is not just a book about tall trees and the huggers who love them. That's in there, but it's a lot bigger than that.

I'm not one to talk about the use of language--it's not among my top 3 or 4 reasons to read anything--but I couldn't help but be impressed by the author's prose, from beginning to end. He tells a complex story, stretching from nature to technology, from love story to science fact, from history and politics to popular culture, but in all those cases makes it sound like poetry or philosophy or revelation. So smooth. So readable. Having said that, one might expect an abundance of absurd metaphors, or eye-rolling pages larded up with saccharine excess, but it's not like that. Line by line, paragraph by paragraph, the author somehow tells a series of interlocking stories with the clearest, most precise prose, making every passage sparkle with endlessly inventive imagery and (unobtrusive but effective) figurative language. It didn't matter whether the author was talking about video games or plant DNA or protesters living in trees or an unhappy couple falling apart, the voice--authoritative, knowledgeable, informative, entertaining, poetic--made it cohere.

Got me hooked. Stuff like this, about protesters facing loggers:

A shout rises down the road, the sound of a crowd after a field goal. Through the trees, opposing armies square off in each other's faces. There's shouting, a bit of scrum. Then a scuffled tug-o'-war with someone's jacket. The latecomers trade glances and break into a trot. They reach the face-off in a clearing in the denuded woods. It's like some Italian circus. A double ring of protesters surrounds a track-mounted Cat C7-powered monster whose crane arches above their heads like a long-necked dinosaur. Fellers and buckers circle the anarchy. A special fury hangs in the air, the product of how far this wooded hillside is from the nearest town.

The language throughout is special but not precious. So good.

The narrative is also well handled, telling the story of a number of disparate characters all somehow connected to trees and the natural world, and there's lots to say about that, but the most affecting aspect of this book for me is the way it connects the reader to billions of years of evolution, seeing trees and the forests and the enormous web of life in a new way. We learn the science along with the characters, discovering how these fellow creatures live and grow, how they communicate, how they interact with every other part of the natural world. The author gives these trees real presence, and it's no exaggeration to say that the forests start to feel like older brothers filled with the wisdom of long evolution, individuals and communities in their own right who deserve our utmost respect and absolutely demand our protection. When a tree gets cut down in this novel, it feels like murder; when a forest gets clear-cut, it feels like genocide.

My most common thought while reading this--I could never, in a thousand years, write this book myself. Just breaking down the science so that it fits in with the action is miraculous, but mastering so many subjects (beyond the scores of species described at various points) well enough to write that one paragraph on that one page so well, with such authority, and then repeat that a couple hundred times...

I'm not even the right guy to write this review, not really, so I'll leave it at this: I enjoyed reading this book and found it enlightening on a topic where I thought I was already enlightened.

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