Book Review of THE OVERSTORY: A 21st Century Moby Dick
The Overstory is the best contemporary novel I have read in the past few years. When I finished it, I worried that it might not garner a major award because it was written by an established, highly acclaimed white male writer. I was overjoyed to read that it won the Pulitzer but saddened to see how little traction it received afterwards.
I cannot help but compare it to Moby Dick – a 21st century, environmental version. Instead of whales and an ocean, there are trees. Melville’s dark and difficult novel was a literary lightening bolt, ahead of its time, filled with foreboding of what terrible things we are capable of as deluded, avaricious human beings. Richard Powers serves up the same dish without the Old Testament language of Melville. Rather, his characters (and there are a lot of them) are very much from our world, his language is ours and the tone is bittersweet and, ultimately, strangely redemptive. All hands may be going down as they did on Ahab’s Pequod. Our natural world is dying around us. We are tragically and terminally blind. Powers is telling you all of this. But, rather than a hooded white whale from the depths of the ocean, Powers gives us trees - trees of every kind. Each with a story that mirrors ours. Each story so compelling it moved me to tears. Trees that have witnessed all we have wrought, that have suffered from our restless wills and that will outlive us. Occasionally a writer creates a symbol that captures one’s imagination in such a way that every day life remains altered by its presence. Certainly part of our profound connection with the world’s whales comes in part from Melville’s Moby Dick. Powers transforms one’s relationship with trees in the same wondrous, metaphysical way. I could not read another novel for weeks.
The Overstory
by Richard Powers (2018)
502 pages