The Overstory: Final Report

Whenever I read a book I find truly great, I almost don’t want to say too much about it. Because I think you should read it for yourself and if you’re like me, you won't want many details going in. The Overstory is one of those books. It’s masterful and will give you just about anything you could want from a novel. There’s beautiful language and great storytelling; there’s philosophy and spirituality and at times, sentimentalism. There’s science and art and madness and weakness and glimpses of the stalwart goodness of people. And there’s trees, lots of information and insights about trees.

 

Let me tell you about the structure. The first section, called “Roots,” is made up of the chapters I wrote about before—each one titled for a character. This section runs about 150 pages and is like an exquisite short story collection. The characters have no relation to each other, but they all have some type of meaningful connection to a tree or trees. In the next sections of the novel, called “Trunk,” “Crown,” and “Seeds,” relationships between these characters are drawn. Often characters come together in unexpected ways. For me, these sections ebbed and flowed. I had trouble at first remembering one character from the other. Powers does a good job of giving reminders but even so, often in “Trunk,” I had to refer back to earlier chapters to remind myself who was who.

 

I see a lot of movies and for probably the past decade, I often leave the theater thinking “Well, that could have been twenty minutes shorter.” And I will admit that at times in these latter sections, The Overstory lost me a little. I was more interested in some storylines and characters than others. And yet, all along I noticed the amazing things Powers was doing with theme and structure and as I mentioned before, this feeling that all was building and growing together, pushing toward something great. Could he have cut fifty pages or so? Perhaps, but given his prodigious talent, I certainly wouldn't be the one to suggest it.

 

Several times throughout the novel, the first line of Ovid’s Metamorphosis is referenced:

 

“I want to speak about bodies changed into new forms.”

 

I don’t want to say too much about the characters or what happens to them in terms of a plot. But I will say that each character has a revelation that paralleled mine as a reader: each of us saw trees, and the world we inhabit alongside them, in a new light. And I think if you get a copy of The Overstory, it will have an impact on you as well.

 

Also, I very much enjoyed Bookworm's discussion with the author, which you can listen to here.

 

Next week I’ll be diving into Meetings with Remarkable Trees, a lovely, best-selling picture book. The author, Thomas Pakenham, rocked the botany world in 1998 when this was published. The book is the result of “a five-year odyssey to most of the temperate and tropical regions of the world to photograph sixty trees of remarkable personality and presence…Many of these trees were already famous—champions by girth, height, volume or age—while others had never previously been caught by the camera.” The book has captured the attention of scores of readers, has been recorded in audio form with an accompanying pdf booklet, and inspired a BBC series. I'm very much looking forward to feasting on this book and the photographs within its pages. After that, I’ll conclude with The Hidden Life of Trees and because I won't have a reading update next week due to travels, I may very well have both books completed when I come back. Join me in reading these last two Summer of Trees books!

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Summer of Tree Books: The Overstory update

Here’s the trouble I’m having with The Overstory (which isn’t really much of a trouble at all): it isn’t a fast read. Each story/chapter feels like a place to stop and think, and I also take breaks while reading to look up facts, and words I don’t know, and things about which I’m now interested. After a chapter, I usually want to stop for a while and digest. Not after all of the chapters, perhaps; some are quite short. But the long ones, like that first chapter that I gushed about—some of the long ones feel complete and satisfactory, all on their own.

 

One such chapter is “Patricia Westerford,” which, basically, tells the entire life story of the so-named character. She’s a misfit in some ways, and her father eschews traditional school for her, choosing to take her into the “woodlands world” and teach her things about nature instead. This chapter is full of interesting tree facts:

“If you carved your name four feet high in the bark of a beech tree, how high would it be after half a century?

She loves the answer to that last one: Four feet. Still four feet. Always four feet, however high the beech tree grows. She’ll love that answer still, half a century later.”

and

“He tells her how the word beech becomes the word book, in language after language.”

 

Also, there are wonderful, wise sentences I want to read again and again:

 

“As certain as weather coming from the west, the things people know for sure will change. There is no knowing for a fact. The only dependable things are humility and looking.”

 

and

 

“There are a hundred thousand species of love, separately invented, each more ingenious than the last and every one of them keeps making things.”

And the beauty of some of these isn’t merely in the words, which are lovely, but in the way that each piece of this chapter ties back to and cooperates with everything else, much as the forest is described here:

“Everything in the forest is the forest. Competition is not separable from endless flavors of cooperation. Trees fight no more than do leaves on a single tree.”

There is a lovely, layering effect happening with this novel, much like the rings of a tree, as I can feel everything connecting and growing, one chapter to the next. Anyway, it’s quite remarkable. And I’m chagrined to admit that Patricia Westerford’s chapter was another that made me cry at the end, because of how good it was.

Also…I’m keeping a running list of the vocabulary that sends me to my phone for definitions while reading. For most, I was able to get a contextual gist, but I looked them up anyway. I'll share a couple of them here, in lieu of a tree poem this week.


Understory: a layer of vegetation beneath the main canopy of a forest.

Pleach: entwine or interlace (tree branches) to form a hedge or provide cover for an outdoor walkway, such as this photo.

 

This last definition reminded me that I had seen something online recently, about how newlyweds used to plant sycamores on either side of a walkway, so they could grow together. Like this:

 

Lastly, quite suddenly the other day it occurred to me that the title of my first novel, The Qualities of Wood, came from a metaphor, about looking closely at the grains and growth pattern of wood to ascertain its qualities, much as you look closely inside someone to try to know them better. And remembering those inspirations from many years ago is now enriching my reading of The Overstory as well.

 

I'll have some time on airplanes this coming week, and expect to make great progress on the book, and will no doubt have something to say again next week.

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Summer of Tree Books: The Overstory (lack of) progress, Grief, Midsommar

Reader, I ain’t gonna lie—I haven’t made much progress this week on The Overstory. But I plan to, soon, and even though I didn't get many pages read, I’ve been thinking about the book nevertheless, and about trees, and lots of tree-related things.

***

The Overstory is written in a series of stories. Each chapter is a complete branch, if you will, about a unique character or characters, not related (at this point, anyway) to the other branches/chapters of the book. And like any collection of independent stories, I like some better than others. All of them are vivid. An Indian boy of immigrant parents finds his freedom in computers after falling from a tree and becoming paralyzed. A couple’s romantic history takes plant-related twists and turns. This week, my thoughts kept returning to the third chapter, titled "Adam Appich," which tells the story of a family with four children. When each child was born, the father chose a tree to plant:  “Leigh’s elm, Jean’s ash, Emmett’s ironwood, and Adam’s maple.” Somehow, the characteristics of each tree seem to correspond to the characteristics of the children, now grown, and in some cases, to  have directed the course of their lives. And this seemed to me a sort of reverse idea to that aspect of Rules for Visiting I talked about last week—when May and her dad were trying to choose a tree at the end of his life, to represent him.

***

When I was an adolescent, once I wrote a note to God and buried it under the tree in our front yard. I don’t remember what I wrote, but I’m sure it was something pleading. Like many people who end up being writers, I had many emotions and a flair for drama even then. I think about driving up to see that tree, to see if it’s still there, to see what kind of tree it is.

***

My mom passed last year and in the worst throes of grief, I feel like I’m floating, rootless. Around the same time she died, I was forced from my home, where we had chosen every element under our feet: tile, landscaping, dark wood floor. I lost that house, other places that felt like home, and my mother, all at the same time. A couple of weeks ago I was missing her, suffering, but also coming out of this latest round, feeling strong and counting blessings, and a thought occurred to me: maybe when all foundations are pulled out from under us, that is when we realize it’s been our own two feet holding us up all along.

***

I saw the movie Midsommar last night with two of my sons. It’s one of the strangest movies I’ve seen in some time—innovative, with thrilling and disturbing visuals. The main character is suffering from grief; the acting struck me as raw and true. It’s not a film that’s easy to describe and I won’t try. But there are strong themes throughout about nature. When old people in a commune die, the bodies are cremated and their ashes placed into the trunk of a fallen tree. In the surrounding forest, trees seem to pulsate with life and in one scene—I swear—the main character takes mushrooms and as she hallucinates, her shoes seem to be filled with roots instead of flesh and bone. Rooted. Her own two feet.

***

This week, my friend bought some new plants and I picked up the old ones to plant in my yard. I’m terrible with indoor plants. The only things I’ve managed to keep alive are three braided money trees. They’re a type of bonsai, I believe, and almost impossible to kill, either with too much water or sun, or not enough. They’re often given as memorial gifts, and I received one of them from a friend when my mom passed. Another was a gift from the housekeeper I had for seventeen years, before we parted ways when I moved. I can’t remember where the third plant came from but it’s over three feet tall now. Anyway, I’m hoping my friend’s plants thrive here, that they’re able to find some footing.

 

And now...a tree poem:

 

Roots and leaves themselves alone

by Walt Whitman

 

Roots and leaves themselves alone are these,
Scents brought to men and women from the wild woods and pond-side,
Breast-sorrel and pinks of love, fingers that wind around tighter
than vines,
Gushes from the throats of birds hid in the foliage of trees as the
sun is risen,
Breezes of land and love set from living shores to you on the living
sea, to you O sailors!
Frost-mellow'd berries and Third-month twigs offer'd fresh to young
persons wandering out in the fields when the winter breaks up,
Love-buds put before you and within you whoever you are,
Buds to be unfolded on the old terms,
If you bring the warmth of the sun to them they will open and bring
form, color, perfume, to you,
If you become the aliment and the wet they will become flowers,
fruits, tall branches and trees.

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On this second Friday of summer, I'm still reading The Overstory, by Richard Powers, and while perhaps that first ecstatic response has cooled, I'm still enjoying it quite a bit. I'm about one hundred pages in. At this point, the novel feels like instruments in a symphony warming up. I don't feel like saying much about it at this point, so I give you a lovely tree-ish poem instead:

In the Tree House at Night

by James Dickey

And now the green household is dark.   

The half-moon completely is shining   

On the earth-lighted tops of the trees.   

To be dead, a house must be still.

The floor and the walls wave me slowly;   

I am deep in them over my head.   

The needles and pine cones about me

Are full of small birds at their roundest,   

Their fists without mercy gripping

Hard down through the tree to the roots   

To sing back at light when they feel it.   

We lie here like angels in bodies,

My brothers and I, one dead,

The other asleep from much living,

In mid-air huddled beside me.

Dark climbed to us here as we climbed

Up the nails I have hammered all day

Through the sprained, comic rungs of the ladder   

Of broom handles, crate slats, and laths

Foot by foot up the trunk to the branches   

Where we came out at last over lakes

Of leaves, of fields disencumbered of earth   

That move with the moves of the spirit.   

Each nail that sustains us I set here;

Each nail in the house is now steadied

By my dead brother’s huge, freckled hand.   

Through the years, he has pointed his hammer   

Up into these limbs, and told us

That we must ascend, and all lie here.   

Step after step he has brought me,   

Embracing the trunk as his body,

Shaking its limbs with my heartbeat,   

Till the pine cones danced without wind   

And fell from the branches like apples.   

In the arm-slender forks of our dwelling

I breathe my live brother’s light hair.   

The blanket around us becomes

As solid as stone, and it sways.

With all my heart, I close

The blue, timeless eye of my mind.   

Wind springs, as my dead brother smiles   

And touches the tree at the root;

A shudder of joy runs up

The trunk; the needles tingle;   

One bird uncontrollably cries.

The wind changes round, and I stir   

Within another’s life. Whose life?

Who is dead? Whose presence is living?   

When may I fall strangely to earth,

Who am nailed to this branch by a spirit?   

Can two bodies make up a third?

To sing, must I feel the world’s light?   

My green, graceful bones fill the air   

With sleeping birds. Alone, alone

And with them I move gently.

I move at the heart of the world.

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The Overstory: First Impressions and "Wild Orchard"

I’m afraid this won’t be a very rational post. I started reading Richard Powers’s The Overstory this week. I’ve read twenty-three pages: a prefatory section called “Roots,” and the first chapter, “Nicholas Hoel.” I read these twenty-three pages over two readings, with a few days in between, because it was so good I waited to pick it up again until I could give undivided attention. Twenty-three pages. In them: a saga that stretches over almost a century. Four generations of a family and a story about the chestnut tree brought west as a seed. Twenty-three pages full of characters and yet, I cared about each one. I cared deeply about that tree. Actually, I cared, already, about all trees. There were so many wonderful things happening in those pages and as I read, I couldn’t believe the things that were possible with words: descriptions, humanity, rhythm, emotion, so many universal, a-ha moments. Really. And at the end of the first chapter, I cried. I know that sounds very dramatic but I did. Like the way you’d cry if you saw a baby born, or a particularly impressive natural phenomenon your mind almost can’t process. Or an exquisite painting. Or how you'd cry if you just read fiction that fuels the part of you that believes in the boundless ability of words to touch hearts and souls, that part of you that has always believed but sometimes forgets, for a while.

I don’t know if the next 480ish pages will be able to maintain this level of wonder for me, but for now, I’m loving The Overstory, irrationally. Obviously.

 

This chapter also deals with the history of the chestnut blight in America, which you can learn about by watching this brief video:

 

And now, as promised, your first tree poem...

 

Wild Orchard

by William Carlos Williams


It is a broken country,
the rugged land is
green from end to end;
the autumn has not come.

Embanked above the orchard
the hillside is a wall
of motionless green trees,
the grass is green and red.

Five days the bare sky
has stood there day and night.
No bird, no sound.
Between the trees

stillness
and the early morning light.
The apple trees
are laden down with fruit.

Among blue leaves
the apples green and red
upon one tree stand out
most enshrined.

Still, ripe, heavy,
spherical and close,
they mark the hillside.
It is a formal grandeur,

a stateliness,
a signal of finality
and perfect ease.
Among the savage

aristocracy of rocks
one, risen as a tree,
has turned
from his repose.

 

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All About Trees: Summer Reading Project, 2019

Readers of this blog may know that every summer, I like to have some sort of reading project. Last year, I read only novels by Michael Chabon, for better or worse. One year I read several short story collections and another, I tackled the Hilary Mantel series. My idea for this year's annual event started with a chunky novel on my to-read shelf, The Overstory by Richard Powers. The winner of this year's Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, it's "a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of - and paean to - the natural world." And from what I understand, it has much to do with trees. I bought the book and was very interested in it, but then it arrived and it was very long (500 pages) and so, because it was a hectic, non-summer time, I put it on the shelf. I'm quite excited about this read, which I know several of my friends have enjoyed.

Then I remembered that once I had really wanted to read a non-fiction title: The Hidden Life of Trees. So I bought that and suddenly, the All About Trees summer project was born. This book by Peter Wohlleben "makes the case that the forest is a social network," and claims "a walk in the woods will never be the same again."

After I decided on theme, things fell together. I already had an arc of Jessica Francis Kane's recent release, Rules for Visiting. This novel is a summer buzz book, about a middle-aged woman who is "more at home with plants than people" but decides to set out on a journey to reconnect with old friends. The book has lovely tree illustrations by Edward Carey, such as the one pictured here and so, more than qualifies for my project.

The final entry, Meetings with Remarkable Trees, I discovered online once I started looking around, and it's a gorgeous, illustrated book originally published in 1996. From the inside jacket: "With this astonishing collection of tree portraits, Thomas Pakenham has produced a new kind of tree book...The sixty trees are grouped according to their own strong personalities: Native, Travellers, Shrines, Fantasies and Survivors." And I think that last bit - the grouping titles - is what got me to buy the book. Not sure what a fantasy tree would be, but I intend to find out.

For those who have expressed interest in joining me on this reading quest, I'll read the books in the order listed above, with no particular timeframe other than to try to finish by Labor Day. If you need quantification, it's over 1200 pages of tree-filled goodness. I hope to post an update each Friday, starting next week, along with a tree poem or two. Join me! Spend some time embracing nature (at least, thinking about it) and learning about trees.

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