The Overstory.

Richard Powers’ The Overstory won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in what feels like a crowded year of critical favorites, with Tommy Orange’s There There taking home one of the honorable mentions. Powers has woven a complex tapestry of narratives and seemingly disconnected characters around a central story of environmental degradation and injustice, a novel that feels extremely important but that suffers from the breadth of his vision and ambiguous characterization.

Trees are at the heart of The Overstory, both in terms of the characters’ interactions with trees and humanity’s degradation of the planet’s forests and climate. Powers rages against the human machine throughout the book, decrying everything from our failure to appreciate the beauty and diversity of nature to the capitalist impulse to plunder our forests for profits and rationalize it away. The characters themselves seem to lose hope for the planet as the novel progresses, and Powers himself is certainly no optimist, but there’s at least a strain of possibility throughout the story that gives us an inkling that we might still have time to save ourselves if we stop denying the truth and act to reverse the damage we’ve done.

Powers’ thematic ambition spreads to a diversity of central characters that seems to be beyond his ultimate reach. He has nine core characters in The Overstory, and I’m not sure I could name an author writing today who’s up to the task of managing that breadth of personae across 500 pages; Powers is game, but the characters bleed into each other far too much to keep them distinct or explain their varying purposes on the pages. Nick and Douglas, two middle-aged white men with personal tragedies in their back stories, become harder to distinguish, especially as their stories on the pages eventually connected, intertwine, and separate; the same is true to a lesser degree with Mimi and Olivia, who are a bit more sharply drawn but still are too similar in personality and speech to keep them completely separate in the reader’s mind.

An overstory is either the layer of foliage in a forest canopy or the trees that give the canopy its foliage, so Powers is playing with words here, as he’s layered the story of the trees, and how they have been indispensable to life on earth, on top of this story of nine characters who start the novel with no connections to each other but several of whom find themselves connected and even relying on each other in emotional symbiosis. It’s a clever conceit for a novel, but to make the understory work, you have to make at least some of those characters compelling and/or sympathetic. Powers doesn’t do that, at least not enough for me; I think one of the nine characters, the researcher and would-be professor Patricia, who may have autism, was well-drawn enough to stick with me, and even that was as much a function of the injustice the world of the novel does to her – laced with misogyny and the human tendency to reject new ideas – as it was to the depiction of her character.

There’s one common theme among the characters in the novel that serves as a functional metaphor for the environmental cause he’s espousing, that of death and rebirth. The novel opens with prologue chapters for each for the characters, and nearly all of them experience the death of a loved one, often a pivotal figure like a parent (at least two fathers die in this section, so steel yourself), as part of their back stories. The idea that new life comes from death recurs throughout the novel, including a discussion of how much one dead tree lying on the forest floor feeds the next generation of life in the forest, from fungi to insects to new plants; Powers extends the metaphor so that many of the characters in the novel find the paths of their lives determined or at least directed by the deaths that altered their childhoods.

There is an actual core plot in The Overstory, as five of the characters unite at a logging protest and end up splitting off to form an eco-terrorist cell, which has some of the consequences you’d expect and a few you wouldn’t – but Powers doesn’t resolve this story in a remotely satisfactory way, and the connections to the other four characters, notably the invalid lawyer Ray, are tenuous at best. There are many great ideas in this book, but it never comes together into a coherent narrative.

Next up: Iain Banks’ The Player of Games, part of his Culture universe of novels, currently on sale for $2.99 for the Kindle.