From the Bookshelf of FoCo Readers…

The Overstory

Richard Powers

Start date: June 3, 2019

Finish date: July 30, 2019

Discussion: Book Club

Why we're reading this: We're excited to explore the inner-lives of trees through this Pulitzer-prize winning novel. It's been pr…more
[close] We're excited to explore the inner-lives of trees through this Pulitzer-prize winning novel. It's been praised by critics and friends alike. Happy summer reading everyone!

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Book Club

* The Overstory by Richard Powers
By Beth · 5 posts · 23 views

last updated Jul 29, 2019 07:09PM

* Eva Luna by Isabel Allende
By Evan · 7 posts · 16 views

last updated Jul 08, 2017 10:25AM

What Members Thought

Sep 01, 2019 Danny Hesser rated it it was amazing

The Church of the Spreading Vegetative God is a cathedric chestnut whose liturgy is its fathomable presence in the Iowan plains, in a script which has become a sacrosanct quest led by the biophilia we have for, yes, trees, but also for nature herself. Richard Powers seems to do the impossible in The Overstory. I turned to the back of the book within the first chapter to see if there was an appendix or glossary – this novel is encyclopedic – and yet the delving into lives, the intertwined trees’ The Church of the Spreading Vegetative God is a cathedric chestnut whose liturgy is its fathomable presence in the Iowan plains, in a script which has become a sacrosanct quest led by the biophilia we have for, yes, trees, but also for nature herself. Richard Powers seems to do the impossible in The Overstory. I turned to the back of the book within the first chapter to see if there was an appendix or glossary – this novel is encyclopedic – and yet the delving into lives, the intertwined trees’ and the people’s, captivated me. Every few pages, a sentence floats above the page, among the fluid prose. Solitary strings of thought that stand alone, and yet in the context of the narrative, punctuate our desires, or further our fears. What I’ve really been marveling at, though, is how I think Powers suggests that our memory itself, nascent and ancient at the same time, is somehow vegetal, that something tree-like is vestigial within us. A flipbook of the Iowan chestnut, planted by an immigrant within our first story, is a multigenerational art project composed of one snapshot a month from the same position, for almost endless months. It is a sort of short film of unfurled memory, as if the landscape itself forms and holds it. The tree itself becomes a harbinger and progenitor, in a way, of two central protagonists who will become helpless tree guardians. Seeing that idea fleshed out in the more-than-human trees and the mad churn of characters, I have a better idea of where our amour for forests comes from. We might be kindled, unwittingly, in the company of trees, in wild woods whose spirit world is felt.
Near the end, we are like one of the saddest characters I’ve known, the man desperately in love with his wife, confined by a stroke to his bed, whose access to nature consists of the view of his yard through the bedroom window. We are stymied by knowing exactly what we need to do, but so stultified, eeking out an existence in a capitalistic world. And yet we are storied, we are tree’d, all the while embedded in an artificial world, the veneer to the real world, Powers seems to suggest. Our heritage lies in the natural world, in trees, where humility functions like roots, bringing nutrients from the unseen milieu, a silent, difficult work of empaths. And yet it seems a sea-change in our perception of the natural world will be rife with civil disobedience. New Earth Guardians, not just tree aficionados, will find much to inspire them in this tome.
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