Editors Reads Verdict
The Overstory is an ambitious, necessary, and formally innovative novel that uses the structure of trees — roots, trunk, crown, seeds — to tell nine interlocking human stories about the thing that connects them all: forests. Powers asks what it would mean to take non-human life seriously, and the question changes the shape of every other question in the book.
What We Loved
- The structural conceit — the novel is arranged like a tree — is one of contemporary fiction's most perfect formal achievements
- The science of trees is rendered accessibly and with genuine wonder
- Each of the nine character stories is convincingly rendered as a complete world
- The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel succeeds as both activism and art
Minor Drawbacks
- At 502 pages, the novel's ambition occasionally outstruns its pace — some sections demand patience
- The ecological argument can feel didactic when the narrative yields to exposition
- Some characters serve the novel's themes more than they develop as fully independent people
Key Takeaways
- → Trees communicate, form alliances, support each other, and remember — the forest is not scenery but community
- → The timescale of human attention is catastrophically too short to perceive the life of the world we depend on
- → Radical action in defence of something you love raises moral questions that are not resolved by the love
- → The human story is a small episode in the story of life on Earth — the novel's formal structure embodies this reordering of scale
- → Loss at ecological scale is not metaphor but the literal disappearance of the conditions for life
| Author | Richard Powers |
|---|---|
| Publisher | W. W. Norton |
| Pages | 502 |
| Published | April 3, 2018 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Literary Fiction, Environmental Fiction, Fiction |
| Difficulty | Advanced |
| Best For | Readers interested in environmental literature, literary fiction with scientific substance, and novels that argue for a fundamental reorientation of how humans understand the non-human world. |
A Novel Structured Like a Tree
Richard Powers divides The Overstory into four sections named for parts of a tree: Roots, Trunk, Crown, Seeds. Roots introduces nine separate human stories — a multigenerational American family and their chestnut tree, a soldier who survives a fall from the sky because of a banyan, a computer scientist who can hear trees talking, a war veteran, an activist, a student brought back from death by a vision — each complete in itself, each apparently unconnected to the others. In Trunk, the stories begin to converge. In Crown, they meet. In Seeds, they scatter.
The structural conceit is not merely decorative. It is an argument: that the way human consciousness typically organises narrative — individual, causal, temporally compressed — is precisely the kind of consciousness that cannot perceive the forest. Trees operate on timescales that make human lifetimes look like a season, and the novel’s form is an attempt to build a different kind of attention in the reader, one that can begin to perceive things at arboreal scale.
What the Science of Trees Does to the Novel
Powers is one of American fiction’s most technically serious novelists, and The Overstory is built on the science of forest ecology — specifically the research of scientists like Suzanne Simard, whose work on mycorrhizal networks demonstrated that trees communicate and cooperate through underground fungal webs, sharing nutrients and chemical signals. One of the novel’s nine protagonists, the scientist Patricia Westerford, is a version of Simard: a researcher whose findings are initially dismissed as anthropomorphism and later vindicated.
The science transforms the novel’s moral stakes. If trees are not passive objects but agents with memories, relationships, and something that functions like choice, then the destruction of forests is not property damage but something closer to murder — a claim the novel makes explicitly and tests against the lives of characters who are willing to break the law in its defence.
Nine Lives and One Argument
The characters Powers assembles are carefully differentiated by class, background, and relationship to the natural world. Their convergence in the Tree Trunk section — at an old-growth redwood sit-in, at protest camps, in legal battles and bombings and escapes — is the novel’s most propulsive section, and it asks genuinely difficult questions about political violence, personal sacrifice, and the relationship between love and efficacy. The characters who commit to radical action do not become heroes in any conventional sense. Their actions have consequences that Powers refuses to resolve into clear moral judgement.
The Pulitzer Prize and the Novel’s Ambitions
The Overstory won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, a recognition that its ambition and achievement are inseparable from its subject matter. Powers is asking American literary culture to expand its definition of what a subject can be — to include the non-human, the geological, the arboreal — and the novel’s formal and narrative ambitions are in service of that expansion. It is a book that wants to change how its readers see when they look at a tree. For many readers, it succeeds.
Our rating: 4.2/5
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