The Overstory by Richard Powers

 

Our book club met this month (IN PERSON!) after reading The Overstory by Richard Powers.  This book is difficult to explain in a few sentences, but I'll do my best. It's the tale of a series of people whose lives are connected through the power of trees.  It's not the story of the roots, the underground connections, but the overstory - what's on top and the human lives that intertwine with one another and plant life. 

The book is divided into four major parts: Roots, Trunk, Crown, and Seeds.  In the first section, Roots, we are introduced to nine major characters in a series of vignettes.  If you had told me that it was originally written as a series of short stories as an examination of the human condition, I would believe it.  That section is memorable and powerful.  In the next section, Trunk, all the stories start to intersect in sometimes major and sometimes tangential ways. The last two sections are the fallout from the rest of the story, a rather extended section of falling action.  

Have you ever read a book and known it was good, you're marking things down and thinking about things long after you have read them, but at the same time, knowing you're never going to recommend this very good book to anyone?  That's where I am with this. It's good. The Roots section is especially good. 

(I might recommend you get the book, read the first 150 pages and call it good.)

But oh, man. The sighing. Every page would make me sad. It was unrelentingly morose and depressing and oppressive.  I wanted nothing more than for the book to somehow read itself and take itself back to the library so that I didn't have to think about it again.  The feeling of hopelessness I feel, even now as I sit here with the book next to me, is building up in my chest.

There are a number of reasons why Dr. BB and I do not have children, but if I were a person on the fence about procreation, this book would have convinced me that the future of the planet is doomed and what we humans are leaving to your children (not mine, because I'm all closed for business) is one of environmental collapse and crisis.  

So, hey. It's a good book. Maybe even a really good book. But I'm not sure I'd recommend it. People in my book club generally had similar thoughts about it - we all agree the first section is SO GOOD, but some were more positive about the rest of the book than I am. 

Things I looked up:

1) Page 8 - Yes, there was a draft during the American Civil War. The Enrollment Act of 1863 conscripted men between 20 and 45.  Substitutions were allowed and the unfairness of the law's implementation led to the New York city drafts riots in July of 1863. 

2) Page 11 - Coeval: having the same date or age; contemporary

3) Page 11 - Zoopraxiscope: a primitive version of a movie projector that worked by showing a series of still photographs in rapid succession 

Zoopraxiscope

4) Page 33 - Displaced Persons Act of 1948 - Signed by Truman, this law allowed selected authorized European refugees to be permanent residents of the United States.  

5) Page 39 - Hall - Petch Equation - Something about strengthening materials based on changing their average crystalline (grain) size.  The Wikipedia article starts with two sentences and I don't understand and ends with tables of words that might be English, but I don't know. If I were a more curious person, I might dig in further, but I'm not, so feel free to look it up if this has made you curious.

6) Page 11 - Moore's Law - The observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit at optimal price/performance doubles about every two years. This is not a law of physics, but simply an empirical observation based on gains in production in history.  Another thing that did not inspire me to dig any deeper. 

7) Page 213 - gypo - I think this is a derogatory name for the Romani people, derived from the word gypsy, but I'm not 100% confident in that.

8) Page 215 - coprophagic - this word means related to feces, so the "coprophagic grin" in this context is a shit-eating grin and I find Powers' language to be unnecessarily inflated here.

9) Page 217 - drupe - a fleshy fruit with thin skin and a central stone containing the seed, like a cherry, plum, olive, or almond; raceme - a flower cluster with the separate flowers attached by short equal stalks at equal distances along a central stem; panicle - a loose branching cluster of flowers, as in oats; involucre - a whorl or rosette that is only a certain types of plants, but the definition included the words bracts, inflorescence, and umbel, so I gave up. 

10) Page 454 - Arbre du Tenere - A solitary acacia that was once considered the most isolated tree on Earth.

Arbre du Tenere, 1961

11) Page 468 - Blight-resistant chestnut trees aren't a thing yet. Maybe soon.  

12) Page 10 - 23 - Hoel chestnut  - This is based on a real tree in West Union, Iowa. An isolated chestnut brought west by an immigrant farmer that managed to survive the chestnut blight long after all the trees on the East Coast had been vanquished by it. 

13) Patricia Westerford - This character is a tree scientist who is laughed out of academic in the book. I strongly suspect she is loosely based on Suzanne Simard.

Notable quotes:

1) Page 48 - "Even as an infant, he hated being held. Every hug is a small, soft jail."

I like social distancing, to be honest. I find touching people to be challenging at the best of times.

2) Page 124 - "It's a miracle, she tells her students, photosynthesis: a feat of chemical engineering underpinning creation's entire cathedral. All the razzmatazz of life on Earth is a free-rider on that mind-boggling magic act."

I like how descriptive this is and I like how Powers brings it back later in the book.

3) Page 145 - "Her last session ever of Linear Regression and Time Series Models has finally ended."

So, this is personal to me. I still have an incomplete on my graduate transcript from Time Series and I honestly feel like it's going to haunt me forever. A failure that will never end, seeping into my dreams at night and awakening me in a cold sweat.

4) Page 148-149 - "It should have occurred to her two years ago, even in the initial thrill, that any relationship where she lied three times in the first two hours might not be a great long-term bet."

There's something about the innocence and naivete of youth that this sentence just gets exactly right.

5) Page 161 - "...[p]laces remember what people forget."

I often wonder what our house has seen. Now that I've read this book, I look at the pine tree in our yard, the one that is twice as tall as our house, and I wonder what stories it has to tell.

6) Page 199 - "How long does it take to know anyone? Five minutes, and done. Nothing can move you off a first impression."

I really hope this isn't true.

7) Page 412 - "And what do all goods stories do?"..."They kill you a little. They turn you into something you weren't."

I feel like this quote is particularly apt for this novel.

8) Page 451 - "When the world was ending the first time, Noah took all the animals, two by two, and loaded them aboard his escape craft for evacuation. But it's a funny thing. He left the plants to die. He failed to take the one thing he needed to rebuild life on land, and concentrated on saving the freeloaders!"

I like the callback from the second quote I called out here.

9) Page 475 - "Say the planet is born at midnight and it runs for a day...Somewhere in the last sixty minutes, high up in the phylogenetic canopy, life grows aware. Creatures start to speculate. Animals start teaching their children about the past and the future. Animals learn to hold rituals. Anatomically modern man shows up four seconds before midnight."

We're just small parts of the whole and the whole will go on without us.