Richard Powers is a professor at the universities of Stanford and Illinois, as well as author of twelve award-winning novels. The Overstory could be classified as a "thesis novel" that tries to answer the commercial claim of its back cover: if the trees could talk, what would they say to us?
Powers imagines a few characters (a traditional Chinese immigrant family in the USA, an environmentalist activist, a cheerful college student who narrowly escapes death by electrocution and becomes sensible from then on...) that coincide through their love for trees. The characters chosen by Powers will be the mouthpiece of a concrete ideology: the trees have coalesced silently so as not to die devastated by a technological civilization that prefers the Manhattan steel jungle to the breeze of a forest in autumn. The author will skillfully integrate the vital incidences of the characters -Appich, Cazaly, Pavlicek, Metha, Westerford, Vandergriff- with the scientific observations of the current forestry, which reveal unsuspected dimensions of the biology of the tree species. It describes, for example, the underground continuity, for hundreds of kilometres, of the rhizome of poplars, sequoias and firs; the longevity of millennia of highly diffused species; the self-grafting of common roots; the emission of chemical messengers that allow them to anticipate plagues; the thousands of species, microscopic or not so much, that are kept alive as guests of the giant plant that hosts them.
Although these pages undoubtedly offer interest for the layman, the text must be reproached for its finalistic, enthusiastic and exalted spirit, using a language that freely ascribes to vegetables the characteristics of animals and men. He paints the forest as a living being who knows what it is doing and foresees the future, and thus the trees are generous and give themselves for others to live; the chemical signals they emit are assimilated to human thoughts; the trees are social creatures; they have hidden forms of synchronization and support; plants are stubborn, cunning and have goals, like men. All this prepares the reader to assimilate larger affirmations that explicitly adhere to New Age ideology: the world is not made to be useful to us: what use are we to trees? The author considers it legitimate to talk about the rights of plants, and thinks human beings are not the supreme species they believe themselves to be.
The overall assessment should take into account the moral permissiveness that is reflected in the behavior of some characters (lesbianism or cohabitation) as well as fundamental philosophical errors: rigid evolutionism, that reaches messianic heights with phrases such as a random and self-replicating cell learning to convert; and the mentioned ideology of the globe as the only living being, in which the human parasites swarm; the only ones that until now harbor the consciousness of the whole. But everything will be done, for this enthusiastic author, who colors the scientific instead of adhering to the sobriety of technical language.