The Overstory

Took me most of a month, on and off between shifts, because the first hundred and fifty pages are basically nine short stories before Powers starts braiding them together, and I kept setting it down between characters to look out the window and see if any of what he was describing matched what I was looking at. Some of it did. The chestnut blight chapter, the Hoel family photographing the same tree every month for generations, that one got me thinking about the lookout log here, decades of entries from people I’ll never meet, all of us watching the same slope.

The premise is that trees are running longer, slower plots than the human characters can perceive, and the book wants you to feel that mismatch of timescale directly instead of reading it as a fact on a page. Patricia Westerford, the researcher who gets laughed out of her field for suggesting trees communicate and then vindicated decades later, is obviously drawn from real forest ecology research on mycorrhizal networks, and she’s the character I trusted most. Her sections have the patience the whole book is asking the reader to have.

Where it lost me some was the back half, once several of the characters converge to defend old-growth forest in the Pacific Northwest and the book has to become a plot with stakes and confrontations and an FBI investigation. Powers is better at duration than at incident. The activism chapters have real urgency but they read like a different, more conventional book got grafted onto the slow one, and I noticed the seams. Olivia’s arc in particular, the electrocution and the voice she starts hearing afterward, asks for a kind of mysticism the rest of the book earns through patient observation rather than through a jolt of electricity, and it never quite squared for me.

Still, nine characters and Powers keeps every one of them distinct in voice, which is a harder trick than people give it credit for. And there’s a specific passage, late, about how a forest’s actual timescale makes any individual human intervention look like static, that I read twice in a row before going back out to check the horizon. Didn’t see smoke. Just a lot of trees that were going to keep doing what they do whether I watched them or not, which I think is the point he’s making the whole way through, even in the chapters that don’t quite land it.