The Overstory
Richard Powers · 2018
Nine Americans whose lives intertwine with trees. Powers's pro-nature epic is the rare "idea novel" that also breaks your heart, giving literary form to ecological grief and changing how many readers think about the non-human world. The novel that taught American fiction to be serious about climate.
The case against
Read the opening section, eight compressed novellas as good as anything Powers has written, and feel the next four hundred pages decompress. Once the characters converge on the activist plot, they thin into delivery systems for dendrology, and the lectures arrive on schedule. Trees get the best writing. Humans get the homework.
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