Reviews
Astonishing.... The book is full of ideas--about trees, root systems, computer games, actuarial science, group psychology.... The Overstory leaves you with a slightly adjusted frame of reference., Vast, magnificent, and disturbing....An array of human temperaments and predicaments as manifold as Charles Dickens' or Leo Tolstoy's....I have never read anything so pessimistic and yet so hopeful., An immense and intense homage to the arboreal world (its biological sophistication, its rich panoply of environmental benefits), the book is alive with riveting data, cogent reasoning and urgent argument. Pages that take you into menaced remnants of primeval forest or contemplate singularly splendid or fascinating trees teem with knowledge and gleam with aesthetic appeal., The Overstory is a visionary, accessible legend for the planet that owns us, its exaltation and its peril, a remarkable achievement by a great writer., A deep meditation on the irreparable psychic damage that manifests in our unmitigated separation from nature., Remarkable....This ambitious novel soars up through the canopy of American literature and remakes the landscape of environmental fiction., This book is beyond special. Richard Powers manages to turn trees into vivid and engaging characters, something that indigenous people have done for eons but that modern literature has rarely if ever even attempted. It's not just a completely absorbing, even overwhelming book; it's a kind of breakthrough in the ways we think about and understand the world around us, at a moment when that is desperately needed, The time is ripe for a big novel that tells us as much about trees as Moby Dick does about whales....The Overstory is that novel and it is very nearly a masterpiece....On almost every page of The Overstory you will find sentences that combine precision and vision., [Powers is] brilliant on the strange idea of 'plant personhood...' opening our eyes to the wondrous things just above our line of sight. Memorable chapters unfold [with] many unforgettable images in a novel devoted to 'reviving that dead metaphor at the heart of the word bewilderment.', An ingeniously structured narrative that branches and canopies like the trees at the core of the story whose wonder and connectivity echo those of the humans living amongst them., The Overstory, a novel about trees and people who understand them, is the eco-epic of the year and perhaps the decade. Unlike the Lorax, who spoke for the trees, Richard Powers prefers to let them do their own talking., This book is beyond special. Richard Powers manages to turn trees into vivid and engaging characters, something that indigenous people have done for eons but that modern literature has rarely if ever even attempted. It's not just a completely absorbing, even overwhelming book; it's a kind of breakthrough in the ways we think about and understand the world around us, at a moment when that is desperately needed., Autumn makes me think of leaves, which makes me think of trees, which makes me think of The Overstory, the best novel ever written about trees, and really, just one of the best novels, period., A magnificent saga....Powers's sylvan tour de force is alive with gorgeous descriptions; continually surprising, often heartbreaking characters; complex suspense; unflinching scrutiny of pain; celebration of creativity and connection; and informed and expressive awe over the planet's life force and its countless and miraculous manifestations....profound and symphonic., A big, ambitious epic....Powers juggles the personal dramas of his far-flung cast with vigor and clarity. The human elements of the book--the arcs his characters follow over the decades from crusading passion to muddled regret and a sense of failure--are thoroughly compelling. So are the extra-human elements, thanks to the extraordinary imaginative flights of Powers's prose, which persuades you on the very first page that you're hearing the voices of trees as they chide our species., Powers is the rare American novelist writing inthe grand realist tradition, daring to cast himself, in the critic PeterBrooks's term, as a 'historian of contemporary society.' He has the courage andintellectual stamina to explore our most complex social questions withoriginality, nuance, and an innate skepticism about dogma. At a time whenliterary convention favors novelists who write narrowly about personalexperience, Powers's ambit is refreshingly unfashionable, restoring to the forman authority it has shirked., One of the most thoughtful and involving popular novels I've read for years....Astonishingly light on its feet....It's an extraordinary novel, alert to the large ideas and humanely generous to the small ones., An extraordinary novel....An astonishing performance....There is something exhilarating, too, in reading a novel whose context is wider than human life. The Overstory leaves you with a slightly adjusted frame of reference....What was happening to his characters passed into my conscience, like alcohol into the bloodstream, and left a feeling behind of grief or guilt, even after I put it down., Monumental...The Overstory accomplishes what few living writers from either camp, art or science, could attempt. Using the tools of the story, he pulls readers heart-first into a perspective so much longer-lived and more subtly developed than the human purview that we gain glimpses of a vast, primordial sensibility, while watching our own kind get whittled down to size., Monumental...The Overstory accomplishes what few living writers from either camp, art or science, could attempt. Using the tools of the story, he pulls readers heart-first into a perspective so much longer-lived and more subtly developed than the human purview that we gain glimpses of a vast, primordial sensibility, while watching our own kind get whittled down to size....A gigantic fable of genuine truths., A colleague of mine once claimed that a critic's opinions are worth less than his or her ability to convey what a book is like. If that's true, never mind that I believe Richard Powers' 12th novel to be a masterwork sculpted from sheer awe. Instead, know that reading The Overstory will convince you that we walk among gods every time we enter a forest.
