Far From Brooklyn

The Overstory, by Richard Powers

This is a much lauded novel by a very smart guy, one of the brainier American novelists of the past 30 or so years. It’s brainy but, IMO, not emotionally satisfying. I read some of his earlier stuff, “The Gold Bug Variations” and “Three Farmers…”, if I remember correctly. I don’t recall anything about them other than reading them, or some part of them.

This new (ish) book is a many, many-stranded thing, each strand anchored in the tale of a particular tree. I read the first few strands with some interest, not wholly bought into the storytelling, but interested enough in some of the arborial ephemera. (For instance, I hadn’t known about the early 20th Century chestnut blight.) But the didactic tone of the whole enterprise ultimately cooled me.

Photo credit:  Adarsh Kummur on Unsplash