In a book about the wisdom of trees, the stories that shape human life tend, by way of contrast perhaps, to be overdramatic. Characters die, from gas poisoning or suicide or strokes marriages collapse people get arrested. But there is a cost to all this plurality and intellectual energy. Partly because he’s incredibly good at describing trees, at turning the science into poetry. Without the steadily cumulative effect of a linear story, Powers has to conjure narrative momentum out of thin air, again and again. It’s an extraordinary novel, which doesn’t mean that I always liked it. The major players number more than a dozen, all invested with touching humanity, and they arrive with such convincing, fully formed résumés, it’s hard to resist Googling a couple of them to see if they’re real people. The science in this novel ranges from fun fact to mind-blowing, brought to us by characters - some scientists, mostly not - who are sweet or funny or maddening in all the relatable ways. I hesitate to tell more, and spoil the immense effort Powers invests in getting us into that primal forest to bear witness. The descriptions of this deeply animate place, including a thunderstorm as experienced from 300 feet up, stand with any prose I’ve ever read. Using the tools of story, he pulls readers heart-first into a perspective so much longer-lived and more subtly developed than the human purview that we gain glimpses of a vast, primordial sensibility, while watching our own kind get whittled down to size.

his monumental novel The Overstory accomplishes what few living writers from either camp, art or science, could attempt.

The overstory