![]() ![]() ![]() They are given their own chapters, in which we glimpse the budding of their identities and personal mythologies. The “Roots,” comprising the first third of the book, introduce the protagonists. ![]() Appropriately, The Overstory is built like an oak, and the book is broken into four sections called “Roots,” “Trunk,” “Crown,” and “Seeds.” The lives of the nine primary characters grow into this organic mold, and the eventual shape of the novel comes to resemble a plant in its maturity. Across 500 pages of lush, sometimes overgrown prose, Powers nurtures a story of enlightened discoveries, social quandaries, and human disappointments set beside the centuries-long perspective of trees. And so it is in Richard Powers’s latest novel, The Overstory. The understory of a forest or the ecosystem of a novel?Įvery forest is full of trees, but it is the trees that make the forest. And everywhere green, green, and still more green. Black mud sucking at boots in tiny pools, surface a-skitter with paratrooper swarms of translucent mosquitos. Red smears of fox prey, turquoise flashes of diva birds, purpled cursive looping vines. Moon-pale mushrooms jut from fallen trunks like leering, drowsy eyes. Tree bark and humus curl past the edge of sight in choppy, gray-brown waves. There, out of direct sunlight, life rushes out in cacophonies of saturated color. ![]() Step beneath the outermost leaves and the temperature drops, the light dapples, the path narrows, the situation becomes uncertain. ![]()
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