I read books every day. I keep a pile of books by my bed and other stacks all around the house. But only a few books — very few — have actually changed the way I see the world. Richard Powers’ novel "The Overstory" was one such book. And I was hardly alone. "It changed how I thought about the Earth," said Barack Obama, sharing some of his favorite books of the year with Ezra Klein. The book also changed Powers’ own life. As he was writing it, he moved to the Smoky Mountains so he could live near one of the largest stretches of old growth forest in the Eastern U.S.
“The Overstory” won the Pulitizer Prize in 2019. At the most basic level, it’s a 500-page novel about trees — a poetic reverie on the intelligence of trees, a treatise on the emerging science of forest ecology, and also a portrait of the scientists and activists who devote their lives to studying and saving trees. The book comes about as close as you can get to writing a story from a tree’s perspective.
Powers talks about the perils of "species loneliness," and he believes we need a new kind of nature-based literature. "If we live in this culture where the only source of meaning is what you can make for yourself, then we're going to have a kind of literature that doesn't travel very far beyond either the psychological crises of individual people trying to come to terms with their own conflicted interior ambivalence, or the literature of the sociological or political," he told me.
Powers is on my mind again because we’re re-airing "The Secret Language of Trees" this weekend. He’s also come out with a new novel ,"Bewilderment," which was just shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The book picks up some of the themes from his previous novel. As the dust jacket says, "At its heart lies the question: How can we tell our children the truth about this beautiful, imperiled planet?"
—Steve