Finished Richard Powers'
The Overstory last night and then went on to read Caleb Crain's review of Ted Chiang's new fiction in
The New York Review of Books.
Hmmm, I thought,
The Overstory is certainly a big, sprawling novel with a lot of story, but at its heart are ideas. Is this good or bad?
Powers has said that he read more than 120 books to research the novel. He told The Guardian: "I wanted to tell a story about ordinary people who, for whatever reason, have that realisation about the irreversible destruction that’s happening right now and who get radicalised as a result. The book explores that question of how far is too far when it comes to defending this place, the only place we have to make a home. The act of writing this book has made me more radicalised, for sure."
And he says several times in the book that the only way to change someone's mind is tell a story.
Does he succeed? Will anyone who is not already convinced that the world is in dire straits read it, let alone be changed by the book?
I doubt it, although I give him A for Effort. The many intertwined histories that he portrays can be absorbing, and I found myself nodding, yes, I've read about this. But I can't see a climate change denier picking it up, out of the blue, and letting himself/herself be carried along to the conclusions that all the characters come to.
That said, I have three other criticisms. The first is that a selected bibliography would be great: I found myself thinking of references he must have read, but I would like to know more about the formal foundation for his characters.
Secondly, he only mentions in passing the fact that forests have been under siege for thousands of years. People have cut them down for all sorts of reasons, but one underlying ones is that savannas are what anatomically modern human evolved in, and where we feel most at home--a few trees are great, but grass is what we like. (I write a lot about that in two of my books:
Road Through Time: The Story of Humanity on the Move and
Green City: People, Nature, Urban Life) While forests are wonderful, interconnected things, any battle to protect them must take that into account.
Thirdly, there is little mention of children or mothers in the book. Powers says he has chosen not to have kids, which is in many respects a principled choice. But for ordinary folks, making sure there is a world worth living in for future generations is a primary motivation for environmental action. The female characters in the book either have no desire to have children or can't, and the mothers of all characters are largely absent (three of them a either silly, literally demented, or mentally unstable.) Perhaps the novel would be twice as long if Powers included their stories, but judicious trimming might have made room for them, thus adding another level to the novel's punch.
