Reading groupRichard PowersHow could The Overstory be considered a book of the year?
Richard Powers’ novel has its heart in a fine place, but it works by browbeating the reader with lectures and daft melodrama
Let’s start with the good news. The Overstory contains many clever ideas. Structurally, it aims for something interesting, unfolding (as the sleeve of my copy handily explains) “in concentric rings of fable”. Richard Powers neatly brings his characters together around a central point – in his case, a giant redwood tree, with Powers writing eloquently about the interdependence of trees, how they help each other to spread and grow, and even warn each other about dangers using “aerosol signals”, one tree easing the way for others. And because the lives of his human characters take up just a few rings on that great tree’s trunk, we also come to a deeper understanding of time.
So: there’s plenty to appreciate if you’re predisposed to liking books and disliking the idea of environmental apocalypse.
But. The Overstory has problems. Huge chunks of the book don’t properly fit into that concentric ring structure. At least three main characters never converge on the main story. Neelay Mehta, a clumsily rendered Indian-American computer genius, lives an entirely separate life developing a computer game that only really fits in because the game’s structure is mixed in with tenuous metaphors about the “furious green speculations” of trees. Ray Brinkman and Dorothy Cazaly’s story (concerning a divorce that is postponed when Ray has a stroke) also feels at odds with the main narrative. The closest they get to the central protest is sometimes reading about it in newspapers. Powers uses the couple to crowbar in a few ideas about intellectual property and biological evolution, but otherwise they’re a distraction.
Meanwhile, the main story descends into increasingly absurd melodrama. In spite of that business with the rings, the opening chapters mostly feel like an extended “superheroes assemble” montage. It eventually descends into just the kind of crash-bang bollocks that makes bad comic-book adaptations so repetitively dull. Helicopters! Bombs! Fires! Trees falling down all over the place! People getting messages from the trees! People having massive – and massively unlikely – epiphanies!
On the latter point, it seems just looking at a tree can turn characters’ lives upside down. Take Adam. He is initially described as borderline autistic, unable to understand humans and devoid of empathy. But after just one night up a tree, he turns into an empathy-drenched protester and falls hopelessly in love with Olivia Vendergriff, the novel’s inevitably beautiful pixie dream girl.
As the book becomes dafter, it gets harder to endure its hectoring. I lost count of the number of times that Powers reminded me that trees were as old as Christianity. Worse still, in the later pages there’s a straight-up lecture about the need to preserve forests, which reminded me of nothing less than the endless John Galt radio broadcast in Atlas Shrugged.
It gives me no pleasure to compare someone as well-intentioned as Powers to someone as poisonous as Ayn Rand. But I remain bewildered: why has this patchy novel become a fixture on book-of-the-year lists? Why all those rave reviews and a Booker shortlisting? It’s depressing – and not only because everyone has fallen for a book with such flaws. The Overstory is just so undemanding. It asks nothing of its readers. There’s nothing beyond the page, nothing that Powers doesn’t spell out slowly for us. If there’s a moral dilemma, the characters will pick it over. If there’s something to spot, it’s always clearly signposted. Details are fed to us with all the elegance of Dorothy feeding soup to her ruined husband. There’s an all too emblematic scene late on where a character called Doug arrives to betray Adam to the Feds – and we know he’s going to do it because doesn’t he keep “tipping the brim of the baseball cap”? But that’s not enough. He also “fiddles with the cap” before we see him “fingering the brim” and putting “his hand to the brass bull’s horn” on the cap and on and on. Just in case we haven’t realised there might be a recording device in there …
Such material made me cringe. It felt like Powers was talking down to his readers. Perhaps he shouldn’t be blamed. His main aim is to explain scientific ideas, and he’s good at that. Given the state of world politics, treating people like idiots does also make a certain kind of sense. Certainly, the way critics have fallen over themselves to elevate this book suggests there’s validity to Powers’ assumption that some readers deserve to be patronised. But if The Overstory really is one of the best books of the year, then the novel is dying even faster than the forests. Which I don’t believe for a minute.
If anyone is still powering through Powers, we’re going to be keeping comments open for two weeks. It’s a shame to be ending on a book so many of us are not enjoying – but we’ll be back with a fresh start on 1 January 2019.
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