The Overstory by Richard Powers

Published 2018 · 512 pages · 172,960 words · about 13 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction

How hard is The Overstory to read?

The Overstory scores 57 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 55 out of 100
Rich botanical and scientific vocabulary. Powers assumes readers can follow technical discussions of dendrology and ecology.
Sentence structure: 50 out of 100
Flowing, often lyrical prose. Long sentences but well-structured. Some experimental passages.
Abstraction: 60 out of 100
Weaves concrete stories with philosophical meditation on deep time, ecology, and human insignificance.
Information density: 62 out of 100
Packed with scientific information, multiple plotlines, and nine main characters. Demands attention.
Narrative indirection: 50 out of 100
Multiple storylines converge gradually. The tree perspective decenters human drama.
Symbolic density: 65 out of 100
Trees as characters, as symbols, as systems. The Hoel chestnut photographs. The structure as tree.
Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
Powers writes with passionate engagement with ecological crisis, without ironic distance from his subject. The novel is earnest about the catastrophe and about the possibility of transformation.
Resolution withholding: 58 out of 100
The characters reach various endings; the trees continue. Powers offers conclusions for human stories while making clear the larger story is far from over.
Structural complexity: 60 out of 100
Nine protagonists whose stories braid together. Four-part structure named for tree parts.

How The Overstory is regarded

The Overstory holds a literary regard score of 80 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Prizes

Where The Overstory sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (315 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, The Overstory scores 62 out of 100. A second mythos, romance, pulls at it with a weight of 0.25. About the map of stories.

Mode: Low Mimetic (with mythic displacement)
She’s an engineer, for crying out loud.
Symbol: Mythical (Archetypal)
Let me sing to you now, about how people turn into other things.
Mythos: Irony (Tragic Pathos) iv (irony iv)
The tree that promised her that no one would be harmed is gone.
Genre: Novel + Anatomy + Romance
She lays out how fungal hyphae—countless miles of filaments folded up in every spoon of soil—coax open tree roots and tap into them.

Where the story of The Overstory takes place

  • Redwood and Cascades forest wars, California and Oregon, 1990s–2000s (1989 to 2015), the main setting
  • Hoel chestnut farm, western Iowa, 1850s–1990 (1855 to 1990)
  • Shanghai 1948 and Wheaton, Illinois: the Ma family (1948 to 1990)
  • Stanford prison experiment and the Cambodian air war, 1971–1975 (1971 to 1975)
  • Near-future prison years and the rise of the learners

5 things that are true of The Overstory, with the passage for each

  1. John Hoel photographs the same chestnut tree on the twenty-first of every month, beginning in 1903.

    The twenty-first of every month finds him up on his rise.

  2. Patricia Westerford's first paper on tree signaling is reported in the press under a headline that is later mocked.

    “Trees Talk to One Another.”

  3. Olivia Vandergriff is clinically dead for seventy seconds after electrocution.

    SHE’S DEAD for a minute and ten seconds. No pulse, no breath.

  4. Douglas Pavlicek plants fifty thousand trees in four years before learning the plantings help companies cut more.

    My fifty thousandth tree.

  5. Adam Appich receives two consecutive seventy-year sentences for domestic terrorism.

    The court sentences Adam Appich to two consecutive terms of seventy years each.

Scenes in The Overstory that Frye would name

74 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Anagnorisis, untitled
Life is talking to itself, and she has listened in. Patricia recognises that trees signal one another, the book's central discovery.
Point of epiphany, untitled
From underneath, it could be Yggdrasil, the World Tree, with its roots in the underworld and crown in the world above. Mimas is the world-tree axis of the tree-sit.
Pathos, untitled
She struggles for a few seconds to hear the answer, before softening into whatever happens next. Olivia's death scene, the sacrificial center of the plot.
Pathos, untitled
puts a Smith & Wesson 686 with hardwood grips up to his temple and spreads the workings of his infinite being across the flagstones of the backyard. Winston Ma's suicide beneath the mulberry.
Sparagmos, untitled
Pieces of brain dot the stones and tree trunk, like new species of garden slug. Mimi cleans her father's body from the yard.
Displacement, untitled
Someone spoke to her when she was dead. Used her head as a screen for disembodied thoughts. A Pauline conversion/resurrection pattern surfaces in realistic motivation.

Books that share these scenes with The Overstory

About the author

Richard Powers

Simon's essay on this book