Reading guide: The Overstory by Richard Powers

Nicholas Hoel

Nicholas is descended from a family of farmers, but bucks the trend by becoming an artist. His obsession with trees is expressed through his art as he attends an art school in Chicago. Living a solitary life, he eventually meets Olivia and falls in love, becoming involved in activism. 

Olivia Vandergriff

Olivia is a reckless actuarial science student who is involved in an accident that transforms her perspective. She goes on to become an activist, intent on helping save the redwood trees from being logged. She falls in love with Nicholas, and the two live for almost a year in a camp set up in a giant redwood tree.

Mimi Ma

Mimi is the daughter of Charlotte and Winston, the eldest of three sisters and a successful ceramic engineer. After seeing trees cut down outside her office, she becomes an environmental activist and meets Douglas at a protest, with the two joining forces and eventually getting into a relationship. 

Douglas Pavlicek

A Vietnam War veteran, Douglas falls from a plane and lands among the branches of a large tree, which saves his life. After being discharged and back in America, he becomes an activist after witnessing the deforestation taking place in Oregon. He meets and falls in love with Mimi after the two of them are united by their shared purpose of saving the environment.

Ron Charles, The Washington Post

‘This ambitious novel soars up through the canopy of American literature and remakes the landscape of environmental fiction … What makes The Overstory so fascinating is the way it talks to itself, responding to its own claims about the fate of the Earth with confirmation and contradiction. Individual stories constantly shift the novel’s setting and pace, changing registers, pushing into every cranny of these people’s lives.’

Harrison Hill, The Rumpus

‘Powers has here managed to turn the liabilities of climate change – its vastness, its resistance to decisive heroes and villains – into assets. We get not an isolated story, but a forest of them; not one or two main characters, but a whole thicket. This delirious sense of sprawl serves both as a formal mimicry of climate changes – everything implicates everything – while also allowing Powers to address global warming from a thrilling variety of perspectives.’

Michael Upchurch, The Boston Globe

‘By turns visionary, exhortatory, and doom-stricken, The Overstory is a big, ambitious epic, spanning the last half of the 20th century and asking what we’re doing to our planet. It’s too heady, too rhapsodic, too strange to be characterized as agitprop fiction. But it does have a sobering message … 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.’

Peter Kemp, The Times

‘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.’

Claire Miye Stanford, Los Angeles Review of Books

‘Powers is a master of language, and the meditative prose throughout the novel is utterly engrossing, but the descriptions of these nonhuman worlds give the novel its startling impact … description – like many of the descriptions in the novel – is filled with linguistic beauty, but it also serves a greater purpose; this is the very rethinking of language and narrative.’

The Overstory’s structure revolves around the circles of a tree, separated into four parts: Roots, Trunk, Crown and Seeds. The stories concentrate on nine individual lives, interweaving them within the four-part layout. How did you find this structure and had you come across anything like it in fiction before? Did it enhance the reading experience?

The trees almost serve as a character, with Powers imbuing them with aspects of human behaviour, portraying them as anthropomorphic. He describes them as being able to communicate with each other and as being able to feel emotions. What did you think of Powers’ portrayal of trees? Did it make you think about the natural world differently after you’d finished reading the book?

The novel explores topics including climate crisis, deforestation and environmental activism. How did the way Powers addressed these subjects affect your own relationship with conservation and the environment?

Powers uses trees as a metaphor, describing each character as a certain tree: Olivia Vandergriff is a Maidenhair, Mimi Ma is a Mulberry and Adam Appich is a Maple. Why do you think Powers decided to associate certain trees with particular characters, and do you think these trees reflect the humans’ characteristics?  

In reference to The Overstory and the purpose of the characters, Powers says that, ‘the whole book keeps turning on this question of what is reasonable, practical, inevitable, or sheer nuts. I like the etymological sense of the word bewilder — to be made wild. My nine bewildered characters in The Overstory each must discover, to their own amazement, that there comes a point when you need to take a forest as seriously as a city, and a tree as seriously as a human being.’ Do you think Powers achieved his aims with his characters’ progression and discoveries?

There is a theory among several readers that one of the characters, Olivia, was the daughter of Ray and Dorothy, even though they are described as being childless in the book. This is due to a connection both Olivia and the couple have towards an American chestnut tree which plays a significant role in both of their stories. What other clues have you found that support this theory, and do you believe it?

Many of the characters within the novel have experienced tragic events, including the loss of loved ones or serious accidents. Do you think there is a connection between their adverse experiences and their environmental activism?

The Hoel family planted a chestnut tree in the mid-1800s and started a tradition of photographing the tree from the same position every month to track its growth. This continues throughout the generations until the tree is eventually cut down. What broader meaning did you read into the growth and death of the tree, and what significance do you think it had for the Hoel family?