new york times book review of the overstory

The Novel That Asks, ‘What Went Wrong With Mankind?’

Richard Powers’s climate-themed epic, The Overstory , embraces a dark optimism about the fate of humanity.

“P eople see better what looks like them,” observes the field biologist Patricia Westerford, one of the nine— nine —main characters of Richard Powers’s 12th novel, The Overstory . And trees, Patricia discovers, look like people. They are social creatures, caring for one another, communicating, learning, trading goods and services; despite lacking a brain, trees are “aware.” After borers attack a sugar maple, it emits insecticides that warn its neighbors, which respond by intensifying their own defenses. When the roots of two Douglas firs meet underground, they fuse, joining vascular systems; if one tree gets ill, the other cares for it. The chopping down of a tree causes those surrounding it to weaken, as if in mourning. But Powers’s findings go beyond Dr. Pat’s. In his tree-mad novel, which contains as many species as any North American forest—17 are named on the first page alone—trees speak, sing, experience pain, dream, remember the past, and predict the future. The past and the future, it turns out, are mirror images of each other. Neither contains people.

Powers is the rare American novelist writing in the grand realist tradition, daring to cast himself, in the critic Peter Brooks’s term, as a “historian of contemporary society.” He has the courage and intellectual stamina to explore our most complex social questions with originality, nuance, and an innate skepticism about dogma. At a time when literary convention favors novelists who write narrowly about personal experience, Powers’s ambit is refreshingly unfashionable, restoring to the form an authority it has shirked. A former computer programmer and English major at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Powers has written novels about the history of photography, artificial intelligence, nuclear warfare, race and miscegenation, the Holocaust, neuroscience, virtual reality, the chemical industry, and genetic engineering. It was only a matter of time before he took on the greatest existential crisis human civilization faces: the destruction of the natural conditions necessary for our own survival.

“What the Fuck Went Wrong with Mankind” is the central question of The Overstory , as posed by Douggie Pavlicek, a Vietnam War veteran who reinvents himself as a radical eco-activist. Powers has assembled a cast of impeccably credentialed characters to come up with an answer. Douggie himself participated in the Stanford Prison Experiment as a college student, which led him to conclude that “the greatest flaw of the species is its overwhelming tendency to mistake agreement for truth.” Adam Appich is a psychologist who studies the ways in which people blind themselves to catastrophes, particularly those that unfold gradually. Ray Brinkman is an intellectual-property lawyer who asks whether trees can be said to have legal rights. Nicholas Hoel is the heir to a family art project—several generations committed to photographing, once a month, the growth of a chestnut tree—that has instilled in him an awed appreciation of human transience. (The Hoel Chestnut photographs may have been inspired by a similar project undertaken in Norwich, England, from 1914 to 1942, while Patricia Westerford’s discoveries resemble those of the Canadian forest ecologist Suzanne Simard, and of a German forester with the same initials, Peter Wohlleben, whose 2015 best seller, The Hidden Life of Trees , appears to be the basis for Patricia’s book, The Secret Forest .)

Powers’s dominant mode of narrative is synopsis, a necessary crutch given the novel’s mob of characters and epochal chronological scale. The opening section proceeds through five generations of Hoels; three generations of another family, the Mas; and the entire youth of most of the other main characters. Five of them later converge in a series of tree-saving “actions” that imitate the tactics of Earth First (a group itself inspired by a novel, Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang ) and the more radical Earth Liberation Front: human barricades, tree-sitting, sabotage, arson.

By the end of the novel, all but one of the nine have become committed activists. Two end up in federal custody, one dies, one commits suicide, two go into hiding. But all of them earnestly embrace the same platform: Forests must be preserved, or nature will have its revenge. The argument is divided democratically among the book’s voices, but it is unerringly consistent. Each of the following reflections belongs to a different character:

“Some of these trees were around before Jesus was born. We’ve already taken ninety-seven percent of the old ones. Couldn’t we find a way to keep the last three percent?” “We don’t make reality. We just evade it. So far. By looting natural capital and hiding the costs. But the bill is coming, and we won’t be able to pay.” “It’s so simple,” she says. “So obvious. Exponential growth inside a finite system leads to collapse. But people don’t see it.” The towering, teetering pyramid of large living things is toppling down already, in slow motion, under the huge, swift kick that has dislodged the planetary system. The great cycles of air and water are breaking. The Tree of Life will fall again, collapse into a stump of invertebrates, tough ground cover, and bacteria, unless man … Reefs blanch and wetlands dry. Things are going lost that have not yet been found. Kinds of life vanish a thousand times faster than the baseline extinction rate. Forest larger than most countries turns to farmland. Look at the life around you; now delete half of what you see .

E ach might also just as easily belong to Powers, whose authorial voice speaks in unison with his characters. When enormous ancient trees are chopped down, the sound is “like an artillery shell hitting a cathedral.” The tree-ramming bulldozers are “the color of bile.” The police are uniformly faceless and brutal, swabbing a protester’s eye with a Q-tip laced with chemical agents and beating others senselessly. The life of a tree-sitter, by contrast, is idyllic. After Nicholas spends weeks in the branches of a redwood, his senses clarify, his thoughts deepen, his spirit rises—he no longer minds that he has to use his feces as compost for the wild huckleberries that serve as the foundation of his diet. “Who could stay on the ground, once he has seen life in the canopy?” Nobody in his right mind is the tacit rejoinder.

The most rhapsodic prose is reserved for the trees themselves. Powers writes of a character being “drugged” by the glory of the green world, but every one of his characters becomes an addict. Many have visions. One is visited by beings of light, another by a ghost, a third by premonitions—all urging solidarity with threatened trees. When Patricia travels to the Brazilian rain forest, she overdoses:

There are trees that flower and fruit directly from the trunk. Bizarre kapoks forty feet around with branches that run from spiky to shiny to smooth, all from the same trunk. Myrtles scattered throughout the forest that all flower on a single day. Bertholletia that grow piñata cannonballs filled with nuts. Trees that make rain, that tell time, that predict the weather. Seeds in obscene shapes and colors. Pods like daggers and scimitars. Stilt roots and snaking roots and buttresses like sculpture and roots that breathe air. Solutions run amok. The biomass is mad.

Why would anyone want to destroy all this? Powers’s characters blame the usual human motivations: greed, ignorance, inertia, primitive instinct. Nicholas rues the fact that every tree visible from his canopy perch “belongs to a Texas financier who has never seen a redwood but means to gut them all to pay off the debt he took on to acquire them.” We never meet this Texas financier, however, or anyone else who might profit from development or deforestation, apart from several anonymous voices making threadbare arguments about well-paying jobs and preserving their “way of life.”

Such frail opposition is easily overwhelmed. When Patricia gives expert testimony in court, a skeptical judge quickly comes around. “I never imagined!” he marvels, as if ready to cast off his robe and climb the nearest ponderosa pine. “Trees summon animals and make them do things? They remember? They feed and take care of each other?” Patricia and the rest of the activists are right, of course. The great cycles of air and water are breaking, the Tree of Life is collapsing, things are going lost that have not yet been found, and people don’t see it. The bill is coming and we won’t be able to pay.

But why make these points in a novel and not, say, a tract, journalistic report, or polemic? Powers addresses this question within the pages of The Overstory . Ray, the intellectual-property lawyer, blames the collapse of human civilization on fiction itself: “The world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.” Adam, the psychologist, throws a novel against a wall because he is tired of reading “about privileged people having trouble getting along with each other in exotic locations.” (That does, in fairness, sound like a crappy novel.) But Adam’s critique is extraliterary: “The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.” There is a term for stories written with the purpose of converting minds to support a cause. And it is the opposite of literature.

When Douggie sees from the air the effects of clear-cutting in the Pacific Northwest, he observes that “it looks like the shaved flank of a sick beast being readied for surgery. Everywhere, in all directions. If the view were televised, cutting would stop tomorrow.” Would it? If more people understood what was at stake, would they cease to consume fossil fuels or, as one character urges, “become indigenous again”? Is all that stands in the way of enlightenment the lack of a robust public-information campaign or a climate-themed Uncle Tom’s Cabin ?

Y ou’d think Powers , if not his characters, would recognize the flaw in this argument. The climate problem is a human problem. A short-term species cannot adequately prepare for the long term—and won’t, if doing so means sacrificing present convenience. No amount of bad news will change that. No amount of bad news has changed it. That the culprit is misinformation, or a failure to excite the imagination, is a persistent, but self-defeating, fantasy.

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Most Americans do not understand the perils of climate change—or of deforestation, clear-cutting, habitat loss. But those who perpetuate the disinformation campaigns, including the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, the House and Senate majority leaders, and the president of the United States, likely do. It is easier, politically, to claim scientific murkiness than to tell the truth: They value their self-interest over the condition of the world their grandchildren will grow up in. Whether this self-interest is venal or foolish is irrelevant. It’s human nature. And that raises a more difficult question: not whether we should take action, but how to come to terms with the fact that our species has proved itself incapable of doing so.

“Humankind is deeply ill,” Adam concludes. “The species won’t last long.” This is the consensus among Powers’s characters, and it’s a darkly optimistic one. Optimistic for the planet, pessimistic for the fate of humanity. Once man clears out, nature will return. “ Hang on ,” Douggie thinks, addressing his beloved Douglas-fir seedlings. “ Only ten or twenty decades. Child’s play, for you guys. You just have to outlast us. Then no one will be left to fuck you over. ” The best way to cure man’s “endless suicidal appetite” for growth is to hasten the inevitable suicide. From death, life will burst. It’s the foundational lesson of forest science.

Powers’s characters embrace the urgency of activism and the passivity of fatalism, but he rarely places the two forces in opposition to each other. The only character who is consumed by this kind of self-questioning is the novel’s most convincing one. Neelay Mehta, paralyzed in a childhood tree-climbing incident, becomes a Silicon Valley mogul after he creates one of the most popular computer games on the planet—a world-building enterprise that resembles SimCity. Its millions of players sit cocooned in their bedrooms, bathed in the glow of verdant pixels, creating new Earths. With time, however, the game’s exoticism fades. The virtual Earths come to resemble ours, ravaged by gluttony, overdevelopment, and rapacious, short-term profiteering.

“We have a Midas problem,” Neelay tells his indifferent project managers. “There’s no endgame, just a stagnant pyramiding scheme. Endless, pointless prosperity.” He argues for land-use regulations and consumption taxes. His project managers think he’s gone nuts. What’s the fun in limits? And why jeopardize the game’s profitability? Let the obsessed players keep building infinitely, earning ever-increasing profits. The name of the game, after all, is Mastery.

This article appears in the June 2018 print edition with the headline “Rhapsody in Green.”

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The Overstory

by Richard Powers

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"The best novel ever written about trees, and really just one of the best novels, period." —Ann Patchett Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize New York Times Bestseller A New York Times Notable Book and a Washington Post, Time, Oprah Magazine, Newsweek, Chicago Tribune, and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2018 The Overstory is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of—and paean to—the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers's twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.

Excerpt The Overstory

First there was nothing. Then there was everything. Then, in a park above a western city after dusk, the air is raining messages. A woman sits on the ground, leaning against a pine. Its bark presses hard against her back, as hard as life. Its needles scent the air and a force hums in the heart of the wood. Her ears tune down to the lowest frequencies. The tree is saying things, in words before words. It says: Sun and water are questions endlessly worth answering. It says: A good answer must be reinvented many times, from scratch. It says: Every piece of earth needs a new way to grip it. There are more ways to branch than any cedar pencil will ever find. A thing can travel everywhere, just by holding still. The woman does exactly that. Signals rain down around her like seeds. Talk runs far afield tonight. The bends in the alders speak of long-ago disasters. Spikes of pale chinquapin flowers shake down their pollen; soon they will turn into spiny fruits. ...

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

• Why do you think Powers leads with the story of the chestnut trees?
• How has your attitude toward the environment changed in the last 10 years? How about the last 20 years or longer? Has The Overstory changed your perspective?
• Have you been an activist? If so for what causes? What triggered your involvement?
• Which of the characters do you most relate to and why? Which do you find hardest to understand?
• Many of the main characters are associated with a specific tree. Which tree would you pick to represent you? Why?
• Doug, Mimi, Adam, Nick and Olivia are all tied together in a plotline revolving around ecoterrorism. How do you think the Brinkman's, Patricia Westerford's and Neelay Mehta's stories tie in with theirs? How are ...

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Many glowing adjectives can be used to describe a novel by Richard Powers: brilliant, moving, mesmerizing. But one word succinctly captures the feeling I come away with every time I put a novel of his down: awe. Of course, given that I look forward to a new Powers novel just as eagerly as my daughter waited for the next in the Harry Potters series, I will be the first one to admit I come to the table already biased. But Powers meets my ridiculously high expectations every single time. He does it again with The Overstory , a sprawling, messy, breathtaking and yes...awe-inspiring tome about trees... continued

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Briefly Noted

The Overstory , by Richard Powers (Norton) . The preservation of primeval trees and dwindling forests unites nine characters in this capacious novel. Two protesters spend ten months living in the canopy of a redwood wider than a house. A psychologist travels to study the activist group they belong to, wanting to understand their immunity to the bystander effect (the assumption that someone else will fix a problem). After a violent action against the logging industry, the characters are forced to scatter. Powers edges their experiences toward the supernatural, while pressing an ethical imperative, voiced by one character: “When you cut down a tree, what you make from it should be at least as miraculous as what you cut down.”

Theory of Bastards , by Audrey Schulman (Europa) . The protagonist of this genre-blurring novel—set in a vaguely dystopian near-future characterized by extreme weather and an overdependence on technology—is Frankie, an evolutionary psychologist who studies mating habits but whose own sex life has been impaired by severe endometriosis. Following a hysterectomy, she throws herself into the observation of bonobos, primates known for their peaceable ways and their vigorous orgies; she communes with her ape subjects and even experiences desire for a kind married colleague. Then a cataclysm occurs, creating a world in which the “careful theater” of civilization has been stripped away and leaving Frankie, her colleague, and the bonobos dependent on one another.

A Lab of One’s Own , by Patricia Fara (Oxford) . This timely history explores the contributions of British women to science, medicine, and industry during the First World War. Drawing on a wealth of previously neglected archival sources, Fara shows how suffragettes, having laid the groundwork for change early in the century, helped usher women into posts left vacant by men; by the war’s end, some three million women were employed in industry, and female scientists had risen to the highest levels in universities, laboratories, and hospitals. A few received proper recognition (the chemist Martha Whiteley was awarded an O.B.E. for her work on tear gas), but the vast majority were pushed from the historical record as swiftly as they were pushed from their jobs by returning men.

A Mouth Is Always Muzzled , by Natalie Hopkinson (New Press) . Through the lens of Guyana’s 2015 national elections, this essay collection shows how the country’s political and cultural life is still influenced by the twin legacies of British colonialism and the sugar trade. In profiles of artists such as the writer Ruel Johnson, who posts Facebook essays about political corruption, and the painter Bernadette Persaud, who mourns the decay of the national art collection, Hopkinson illustrates the ways that intellectuals chafe against a state that is unable to provide basic necessities, let alone a flourishing cultural sector. “When do ideas become action?” she writes. “When must the state protect society from subversive ideas? When must society protect subversive ideas from the state?”

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The Overstory by Richard Powers review – a majestic redwood of a novel

N o less a writer than Margaret Atwood has said of Richard Powers that “it’s not possible for him to write an uninteresting book”. On the evidence of The Overstory , he is continuing a remarkable run that began when he came to prominence in 2006 with the National Book award-winning The Echo Maker . This is a mighty, at times even monolithic, work that combines the multi-narrative approach of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas with a paean to the grandeur and wonder of trees that elegantly sidesteps pretension and overambition. Early comparisons to Moby-Dick are unfairly lofty, but this fine book can stand on its own.

Powers marshals a diverse central cast of nine characters, dealing with the history of migration to America. We meet, among others, a plant biologist named Patricia “Plant-Patty” Westerford, whose research into the world of trees is controversial and groundbreakingly bold; the Hoel family, a set of Norwegian immigrants whose dedication to a great chestnut tree comes to represent the passing of time; and, most memorably, Olivia Vandergriff. Her surname might suggest a Harry Potter character, but Powers depicts this bored college student, who finds herself fascinated by ecology after nearly dying due to a drug-induced misadventure, with remarkable empathy and interest. Even her romance with a fellow activist who is one of the Hoel boys – which in a lesser book might have seemed like a cheap attempt to reconcile two disparate narratives – is written with a freshness that belies the well-worn subject matter.

As befits a book that spans centuries, there is a richness and allusiveness to the prose that reaches back as far as Thoreau’s Walden , and Emerson – who supplies a wise epigraph, musing on “a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me”, when confronted with the interrelation between man and nature – is an acknowledged touchstone. The Overstory is high-minded but never precious, although it is a pity that Powers does not acknowledge Larkin’s poem The Trees , which, in its final verse, almost anticipates the themes discussed here – “Last year is dead, they seem to say/Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.”

Yet it would not work as a narrative if the main characters were not richly detailed. There is always a risk with a book of this sort that at least one of the strands can feel redundant – dead wood, if you will – and, unfortunately, there are some longueurs from time to time, not least in the shape of Neelay, a paraplegic who is master of all he surveys in his virtual world (named, appropriately enough, Mastery) but who fails to realise that far greater riches can be obtained from the wonders around him. Here, Powers becomes didactic; he seems to write with distaste for Neelay’s “swollen, snapped claw” and how “he’s grown so gaunt he’s set for sainthood”, and the sympathy that he extends to his other creations is in shorter supply.

There are additional minor criticisms. The book is long and could have done with an edit, and Powers’s ecological message, heartfelt though it is, might strike some readers as on the nose in places; his obvious identification with “Plant-Patty” means that, as one character muses, the “burning down the library, art museum, pharmacy and hall of records, all at once” cannot be seen as anything other than a crime against nature, but it is unlikely that anyone would think otherwise.

Nonetheless, when set against Powers’s greater achievements, these are but woodworm compared with the majestic redwood of a novel that he has constructed. It is fitting that it ends with a message of hope. As with Larkin, a belief that humanity is capable of redeeming itself and beginning “afresh, afresh, afresh”.

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The bends in the alders speak of long-ago disasters. Spikes of pale chinquapin flowers shake down their pollen; soon they will turn into spiny fruits. Poplars repeat the wind's gossip. Persimmons and walnuts set out their bribes and rowans their blood-red clusters. Ancient oaks wave prophecies of future weather. The several hundred kinds of hawthorn laugh at the single name their forced to share.

… when you cut down a tree, what you make from it should be at least as miraculous as what you cut down.

This is not our world with trees in it. It’s a world of trees, where humans have just arrived. [. . .] Trees know when we’re close by. The chemistry of their roots and the perfumes their leaves pump out change when we’re near. . . . When you feel good after a walk in the woods, it may be that certain species are bribing you. So many wonder drugs have come from trees, and we haven’t yet scratched the surface of the offerings. Trees have long been trying to reach us. But they speak on frequencies too low for people to hear. (424)

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Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2018

New York Times Bestseller

Pulitzer Prize Winner

THE OVERSTORY

by Richard Powers ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 3, 2018

A magnificent achievement: a novel that is, by turns, both optimistic and fatalistic, idealistic without being naïve.

Powers’ ( Orfeo , 2014, etc.) 12th novel is a masterpiece of operatic proportions, involving nine central characters and more than half a century of American life.

In this work, Powers takes on the subject of nature, or our relationship to nature, as filtered through the lens of environmental activism, although at its heart the book is after more existential concerns. As is the case with much of Powers’ fiction, it takes shape slowly—first in a pastiche of narratives establishing the characters (a psychologist, an undergraduate who died briefly but was revived, a paraplegic computer game designer, a homeless vet), and then in the kaleidoscopic ways these individuals come together and break apart. “We all travel the Milky Way together, trees and men,” Powers writes, quoting the naturalist John Muir. “In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.” The idea is important because what Powers means to explore is a sense of how we become who we are, individually and collectively, and our responsibility to the planet and to ourselves. Nick, for instance, continues a project begun by his grandfather to take repeated photographs of a single chestnut tree, “one a month for seventy-six years.” Pat, a visionary botanist, discovers how trees communicate with one another only to be discredited and then, a generation later, reaffirmed. What links the characters is survival—the survival of both trees and human beings. The bulk of the action unfolds during the timber wars of the late 1990s, as the characters coalesce on the Pacific coast to save old-growth sequoia from logging concerns. For Powers, however, political or environmental activism becomes a filter through which to consider the connectedness of all things—not only the human lives he portrays in often painfully intricate dimensions, but also the biosphere, both virtual and natural. “The world starts here,” Powers insists. “This is the merest beginning. Life can do anything. You have no idea.”

Pub Date: April 3, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-393-63552-2

Page Count: 512

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.

Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992

ISBN: 1400031702

Page Count: 592

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992

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by Donna Tartt

HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad.  The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized).  As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest ) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses).  Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture.  Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

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Richard Powers

American novelist.

The Overstory

Last Updated: April 15, 2019 by semper2013

Winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction Shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize New York Times Bestseller A New York Times Notable Book and a Washington Post , Time , Oprah Magazine , Newsweek , Chicago Tribune , Kirkus Reviews , and Amazon Best Book of the Year

Now Available in Paperback

The Overstory , winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of—and paean to—the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.

• Anticipation for The Overstory
• British and American advance reader copies released
• New novel in Spring 2018

Category: Novels

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Copyright © 2024 · All Rights Reserved · Richard Powers

clock This article was published more than  5 years ago

The most exciting novel about trees you’ll ever read

Henry David Thoreau once heaved a big stone against the trunk of a chestnut tree to bring down a shower of nuts. He loved their sweet meat, but the meal filled him with guilt. “It is worse than boorish, it is criminal, to inflict an unnecessary injury on the tree that feeds or shadows us,” he wrote in his journal in 1855. “Old trees are our parents, and our parents’ parents, perchance.”

During Thoreau’s life, American chestnuts covered a huge swath of the Eastern United States. The author of “Walden” couldn’t have imagined that billions of our woody parents would be destroyed by a blight in the early 20th century. That decimation, sparked by a fungus imported from Asia, was compounded by the nation’s voracious lumber industry, which denuded North America and then lashed out across the world.

In 2016, Annie Proulx captured three centuries of logging in the New World with a fantastic novel called “Barkskins.” Given its enormous length and its encyclopedic examination of wood, “Barkskins” felt like a singular creation, but now it has a monumental companion planted right alongside it: Richard Powers’s “The Overstory.” This ambitious novel soars up through the canopy of American literature and remakes the landscape of environmental fiction.

Long celebrated for his compelling, cerebral books, Powers demonstrates a remarkable ability to tell dramatic, emotionally involving stories while delving into subjects many readers would otherwise find arcane. He’s written about genetics, pharmaceuticals, artificial intelligence, music and photography. In 2006, his novel about neurology, “The Echo Maker,” won a National Book Award. And now he’s turned his attention, more fully than ever before, to our imperiled biome and particularly to the world’s oldest, grandest life forms: trees.

Review: ‘The Echo Maker,’ by Richard Powers

“The Overstory” moves the way an open field evolves into a thick forest: slowly, then inevitably. For a while, its various stories develop independently, and it’s not apparent that they have anything to do with one another. But have faith in this worldmaker. Powers is working through tree history, not human history, and the effect is like a time-lapse video. Soon enough his disparate characters set out branches that touch and mingle: Before the Civil War, a Norwegian immigrant travels to Iowa and begins homesteading in the largely empty new state. Just after World War II, a young man sails from Shanghai to San Francisco. In the late 1970s, an odd kid from a troubled family gets accepted to college. And a sergeant in the Vietnam War barely escapes death when a 300-year-old banyan catches his body falling from a cargo plane. “He owes his own life to a tree,” Powers writes.

That universal salvation is the root of this amazingly complex novel, which keeps expanding to include a video game pioneer, an intellectual property lawyer, an amateur actress, a woman back from the dead and many more. As in nature, there is what seems like extravagant excess. These characters don’t all snap together at some contrived moment like a literary flash mob, but “their lives have long been connected, deep underground,” Powers writes. “Their kinship will work like an unfolding book.” In one way or another, all their lives turn toward the miracle of trees.

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.

As is so often the case in Powers’s books, “The Overstory” includes a radical expert who hypnotizes us with the provocative implications of her field. Patty Westerford is a young botanist in the 1960s who discovers that “trees are social creatures”: They communicate with each other and react to their environment in dynamic and ingenious ways. (Patty’s ideas echo those of Suzanne Simard and Peter Wohlleben, popularized in the best-selling book “The Hidden Life of Trees.”) As we follow Patty’s tumultuous career from initial success to professional exile to eventual sainthood, she becomes the novel’s — and, one suspects, the author’s — green prophet. Like a double helix of Jane Goodall and Rachel Carson, Patty is that rare, cutting-edge scientist whose work reaches far beyond the lab and inspires a kind of mystical awe.

Richard Powers on the power of music to wake us up

Some of the characters moved by Patty’s revelatory research are inspired to more aggressive forms of environmental activism — even ecoterrorism. In harrowing scenes of personal sacrifice — or deadly self-righteousness — we see an unlikely group drawn together by their absolute conviction that our rapacious destruction of trees is an act of mass suicide.

The urgency of that belief gives rise to the novel’s most unsettling theme: the tension between complacency and stridency in the face of existential threats. One character, a deeply conflicted psychologist, dedicates his life to researching “the personality factors that make it possible for some individuals to wonder how everyone can be so blind.” Who’s crazier, he asks, those protesters camping on top of a doomed redwood or the mass of consumers ignoring the flames of their only planet? It’s a question the entire novel grows around with fairly bleak expectations.

“All good stories,” Powers writes, “kill you a little. They turn you into something you weren’t.” That’s a daunting standard for any author, but it’s the feeling one has emerging from the forest of this remarkable book.

Ron Charles is the editor of Book World and host of TotallyHipVideoBookReview.com .

Read more :

Review: ‘Orfeo,’ by Richard Powers

Annie Proulx’s long-awaited, spectacular new novel ‘Barkskins’

What do you think? Leave a respectful comment.

Elizabeth Flock Elizabeth Flock

• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/the-overstory-is-our-november-book-club-pick

‘The Overstory’ is our November book club pick

Become a member of the “Now Read This” book club by joining our Facebook group or signing up to our newsletter . Learn more about the book club here .

Author Richard Powers. Credit: Dean D. Dixon

We’re excited to announce our November pick for “ Now Read This, ” our book club in partnership with The New York Times. It’s Richard Powers’ “The Overstory,” a novel about trees, activism, and our connection to the natural world.

“The Overstory” was shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize and won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

In the book, Powers, the author of a dozen works of fiction, follows a diverse set of characters throughout time and place, all of whom eventually intertwine because of their relationships to trees and efforts to address their destruction.

In a review of the book in The New York Times Book Review, author Barbara Kingsolver writes that “The Overstory” is “a delightfully choreographed, ultimately breathtaking hoodwink” that seems to be a book about people but is actually about trees — and reimagining how we relate to them.

As Powers writes in the book: “The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.”

At the end of November, Richard Powers will join us on the PBS NewsHour to answer reader questions about “The Overstory.” We hope you’ll join us and read along.

Elizabeth Flock is an independent journalist who reports on justice and gender. She can be reached at [email protected]

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Gabriel Popkin

• Book review: The Overstory, admirably ambitious but ultimately overrated

Probably few people are yearning for a review of The Overstory a year and a half after it was published and four months after it won the Pulitzer Prize. But I just finished the book, after considerable struggle. And I think the many fawning reviews the book has gotten ( Barbara Kingsolver’s in the New York Times for starters) could use some balance from more critical voices, even if mine will reach only a small fraction of Kingsolver’s readers. So here goes.

First, a bit about how I approached this book. When I was younger, I read a lot of fiction, but lately I’ve been immersed in nonfiction. The Overstory is, I’m ashamed to admit, the first novel I’ve read cover to cover in several years. I read it because it was about trees, a topic I’ve devoted a sizable amount of my own professional life to, and because everybody was talking about it. I understand through other reviews that the author, Richard Powers, is well-known and has been showered in awards, but I had never heard of him. But a novel (or any work) needs to reach readers where they are. So I write this review from where I am.

I will credit Powers with impressive ambition in attempting to create nine independent characters and weave a narrative that would bring them all together in a meaningful way. And in attempting to build a novel of action around trees, often thought to be static and passive.

But the book’s problems mushroom quickly. The characters are, mostly, not believable as flesh-and-blood humans in the world that I live in. Their actions seem driven not by the sorts of internal desires and fears that animate me and the people I know, but by the plot requirements of the story and the larger didactic imperatives of the book. Powers develops them not by putting them in situations and allowing them to respond, but by simply giving us, for each, a fairly tedious back-story of family history, childhood drama and essential character traits, violating one of the basic rules of writing: “show, don’t tell.”

The dialogue is bizarre. Here’s just one of innumerable examples, between a rough-around-the-edges Vietnam vet who gets a job planting trees and some guy he’s playing pool with in a bar:

“Who’re you planting for?” “Whoever pays me.” “Lotta new oxygen out there, because of you. Lotta greenhouse gases put to bed.”

I’ve never met a real-life person who speaks in this clipped, awkward manner, casually dropping obscure scientific concepts into barroom banter. Not even scientists speak this way! Amazingly, Powers bestows the same verbal tics onto almost all his characters, major and minor. Partly as a result, beyond their differing roles in the story, it would be hard to tell them apart by behavior or demeanor; they seem like slightly altered versions of the same Ur-person, presumably Powers himself. All that said, a few of the characters I was finally able to accept as being complex or conflicted enough to achieve some distinction and verisimilitude. The over-achieving, world-traveling, never-at-peace, hard-shelled yet passionate Mimi Ma evokes a kind of character who inhabits real-life Washington, DC, where I live. Adam Appich, the successful but cynical psychology professor, resembles some academics I’ve met — trapped in a system that forces them to perform a role they know is ultimately hollow.

Other characters never develop beyond stereotypes. Patricia Westerford, the dismissed-then-celebrated scientist who reveals the hidden world of trees to clueless humans, is entirely virtuous, without a character flaw of any kind except perhaps propensities toward solitude and suicidal thoughts, which Powers seems to view as positive traits. Her dramatic denouement is totally out of character and not believable. There is a particularly frustrating character named Ray Brinkman, a self-sacrificing lawyer whose development of a novel theory that trees have legal standing is interrupted by an incapacitating stroke. His theory could have been brought to bear on Appich’s eventual eco-terrorism trial, yet it isn’t, despite a supposed narrative structure wherein the individual characters’ lives intertwine via their relationships with trees. Brinkman instead spends the second half of the novel doing almost nothing except discovering how to identify trees with his long-suffering wife, who eventually takes the radical step of no longer mowing their suburban lawn and letting trees regrow there. Seriously? Why Powers spent dozens of pages setting up such an obvious connection between his characters, failed to capitalize on it, and settled instead for such a meager payoff is baffling. Many reviewers have celebrated Powers for his ability to make trees into characters in the book. I call bullshit. With a few exceptions — a chestnut tree whose centuries-long life anchors the novel’s first chapter and returns later in the book, for example — actual trees make only brief cameo appearances and contribute little to the action. They are often described using all-too-common clichés rather than the nuance and depth I would expect from a decorated novelist. Again, just one of countless examples:

There are trees that flower and fruit directly from the trunk. Bizarre kapoks forty feet around with branches that run from spiky to shiny to smooth, all from the same trunk. Myrtles scattered throughout the forest that all flower on a single day. Bertholletia that grow piñata cannonballs filled with nuts. Trees that make rain, that tell time, that predict the weather. Seeds in obscene shapes and colors. Pods like daggers and scimitars. Stilt roots and snaking roots and buttresses like sculpture and roots that breathe air. Solutions run amok. The biomass is mad.

I would challenge any reader or reviewer to recall from memory even five individual trees that appear in this book. They come and go without making an impression. There is a difference between flash-bang, adjective-heavy writing and precise language born of close, patient observation, and Powers’ prose lands on the wrong side of this divide.

There is one other notable exception, Mimas, a massive redwood in whose canopy several characters spend time around the middle of the story. The tree gets a full, rich characterization before its inevitable demise at the hands of loggers. But I’m not sure Powers deserves all the credit here, because his description of Mimas is strikingly similar to those of another redwood describer named Richard (Preston) who actually followed scientists into the redwood canopy for his book The Wild Trees . Is it possible that Powers captures the essence of a tree only when another writer has blazed a path for him?

Ultimately I feel as though I viewed this whole story through a scrim, or at great remove. I never felt part of the action, feeling what the characters felt, if they felt anything at all. (Sometimes it seems like Powers’ humans are bug-ridden analytical machines tossing off cynical one-liners.) Scenes that should have been dramatic, like the tree sitters’ faceoff with the loggers or Appich’s trial, weren’t. Even when a principal character died, it seemed perfunctory. Little tension was built; never did I feel strongly invested in the characters’ fates. About halfway through the book, I stopped reading it as realism and switched to reading it as allegory. In the Bible, larger-than-life characters such as Abraham and Job may not feel entirely believable, but we accept them for embodying timeless and profound lessons. Perhaps The Overstory ‘s characters need to be read this way. In that case, Powers had better have some damn profound ideas to deliver. Here I give a mixed grade. Powers does powerfully evoke the role of time — that our misapprehension of trees owes in large part to the differing paces and lengths of their lives and ours. It’s not a new observation, but in how he places his frenetic humans amid long-lived, patient trees, Powers brings it to life perhaps better than any other writer I’ve read.

But Powers’ view of human-tree relations ultimately proves stunted. He builds the story around the timber wars of the 1990s, when radical activists attempted to prevent logging of some of the remaining old-growth out West. Everything is conflict; there’s no moral ambiguity: activists and scientists are the good guys and gals; cartoonishly evil loggers, cops and bankers appear and vanish as needed. This is especially odd because many of today’s environmentalists see promise in sustainable logging, as practiced, for example, by the Menominee of Wisconsin . Powers’ all-or-nothing take feels simplistic and outdated. In the end, Powers bestows the possibility of redemption onto a crippled Indian-American computer programmer, who, I guess, finds a way to use big data and artificial intelligence to reveal nature’s truths. I say “I guess” because the conclusion is so sketchy and hasty that it’s hard to tell what’s really going on.   I gather that Powers has previously written about computers and tech. Perhaps that explains his turning back to this world to escape the narrative and conceptual thickets he’s wandered into. But to me, it seems lazy. There are alternative narratives about humans and trees besides conflict and the vague hope that tech might help us find a way out. Powers should have known about one of these, because his author bio states that he lives at the foothills of the Great Smokies, among the largest protected forests in the East. Even during the boom days of logging, enough humans recognized the noncommercial value of these trees to cordon off hundreds of thousands of acres. Yet such truths obviously complicate Powers’ narrative of conflict and human blindness toward nature.

There’s a much more profound and powerful alternative narrative even than that of federal protection. Before white people arrived in America, when the great forests Powers’ characters yearn for grew widely, the continent wasn’t unpeopled. In fact, it was heavily peopled. But these people had a relationship with trees and forests that allowed both to thrive — in fact, they had the kind of relationship Powers seems to want us to have. The descendants of these people are still here, and in many cases, they are trying to reclaim their ancestral relationships with other species. If the rest of us were to listen to them today, it could go a long way toward healing our fractured relationship with the natural world. Yet Powers does not seem to be listening too closely. Exactly one Native American makes an appearance in The Overstory , on page 492 of 502 (in the paperback). He doesn’t get a name or dialogue. He’s just a helper to a white male artist who has apparently figured out what nature is trying to say. If The Overstory is today’s great novel, I found myself wondering what has happened to the novel. In Anna Karenina , to cite just one example from literature, Tolstoy created believable characteristics, put them in ordinary situations and crafted an enduring masterpiece. Here Powers creates unbelievable characters, puts them in extraordinary situations and accomplishes significantly less.

There’s another book lurking in the background: The Hidden Life of Trees . ( My review here. ) The author of that work, Peter Wohlleben, even shares initials with Powers’ fictional scientist (hat tip to a commenter on this Guardian review for this observation, which I hadn’t noticed.) That book too presented a simplistic view of trees, yet earned wide plaudits and massive sales. It makes me wonder if it’s become all too easy for authors to spoon-feed us simple ideas of human-nature conflict and environmental beneficence — and trees. Powers has previously won a Macarthur and a pile of other awards. He presumably has what most writers can only dream of: freedom from the pressure of having to hit deadlines and earn paychecks. That this artistic liberation didn’t generate a better book is disappointing.

When I think of books that achieve a more nuanced look at the relationship between people and the environment — that engage the complexities and the ways in which relationships in nature are just as fraught as those of our human society — my thoughts turn instead to Annie Dillard’s celebrated Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass , a book that deserves at least the same recognition as Powers’ and Wohlleben’s.

Lastly, a word about the writing. I found it often clunky, awkward and inelegant. There’s no question that Powers feels strongly about his subject. What he seems to struggle with is molding those feelings into effective language that will help us feel what we need to feel to do the difficult, society-changing, Earth-saving internal and external work Powers clearly wants us to do. As a writer whose own work is often driven by ideas more than characters, I do sympathize with Powers. It’s a tough trick to get humans (real or imagined) to embody ideas as cleanly as we would like. And it was a thrill to see a mainstream fiction author take trees seriously.

The Overstory , as the Guardian reviewer writes, contains ideas that are interesting and important. But the novelist’s job is to use the tools of fiction — characters, plot, dramatic tension — to animate ideas. In this, The Overstory mostly fails.

And yet: It’s easy to critique another person’s effort. It’s far harder to produce something better. In The Overstory, Powers has attempted something big, brave and risky. Though he falls short of greatness, the world is still surely better for having this book in it. Enough readers have said it moved them and changed their view of trees that I must acknowledge it has succeeded in important ways, even if it did not succeed for me.

I have yet to write anything half so ambitious, or half so impactful. If I’m dissatisfied with what’s out there, then, to paraphrase Toni Morrison, it’s my duty to produce the work I wish to see in the world. I’m writing this partly to hold myself accountable. The ultimate success of this review will be not whether it persuades anyone of my view of The Overstory , but whether it leads me to think bigger and aim higher.

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The Overstory: A Novel Paperback – April 2, 2019

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Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction Winner of the William Dean Howells Medal Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize Over One Year on the New York Times Bestseller List A New York Times Notable Book and a Washington Post , Time , Oprah Magazine , Newsweek , Chicago Tribune , and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year "The best novel ever written about trees, and really just one of the best novels, period." ―Ann Patchett

The Overstory , winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of―and paean to―the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours―vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.

• Print length 512 pages
• Language English
• Publisher W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date April 2, 2019
• Dimensions 5.5 x 1.2 x 8.3 inches
• ISBN-10 039335668X
• ISBN-13 978-0393356687
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition (April 2, 2019)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 512 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 039335668X
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0393356687
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.29 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 1.2 x 8.3 inches
• #4 in Class Records & Lesson Books
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• #277 in American Literature (Books)

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Richard Powers

Random House of Canada

20 April 2021

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For This Writer, Chaos Was an Essential Human Condition

Even when the Polish novelist Witold Gombrowicz worked within mass-market forms, he veered toward playful disorder.

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By John Banville

John Banville’s novels include “The Book of Evidence,” “The Sea” and, most recently, “The Singularities.”

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In late August 1939, the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz arrived in Buenos Aires on the luxury liner Chrobry — the Brave — as part of a diplomatic tour. Less than two weeks later, the Germans invaded Poland. Set to return to a Europe at war, the 35-year-old Gombrowicz once more boarded the ship, but as the gangplank was about to be raised, he grabbed his suitcases and sprinted back to the dock.

He had, as he tells us in his sort-of autobiographical novel “ Trans-Atlantyk ,” “96 dollars in all, which could suffice at best for two months of the most modest living.” Yet despite chronic poverty, and repeated squabbles with the Polish émigré community, he was to remain in Argentina until 1963.

The quitting of the ship was a typical existentialist gesture by a man who was forever spiritually at sea. Gombrowicz, the son of a rich Polish-Lithuanian family, always saw himself as a displaced person; indeed, displacement was for him the essential human condition. As the critic and translator Stanislaw Baranczak has written, Gombrowicz viewed the individual as “suspended between the external ideas of Form and Chaos, between total subordination of the ego to the generally accepted patterns of behavior, logic, language and so forth, and total liberation from all that is inherited or imitated.”

Given such a stern and seemingly uncompromising conception of the world, the self and other people, one might expect Gombrowicz’s work to be heavy going intellectually. On the contrary, his novels, plays and journals — a compilation of the last, “Diary,” is unquestionably his masterpiece — are playful to the point of irresponsibility. Photographs of him present an austere, brooding figure; his writing might be the product of a mischievous toddler who has been given a pen and an inkwell to play with.

In his first novel, “ Ferdydurke ” (1937), the 30-year-old protagonist, if we may call him such, is reduced to the status of a schoolboy, with preposterous and often riotous results. Yet Gombrowicz in his fiction and his drama is never just funny , and if we laugh at his antics, our laughter is tainted with discomfort and a certain dread, as when a trapeze artist topples into the net and the clowns come bustling and parping into the ring.

He is at his most amusing, if balefully so, in “Diary,” first published in consecutive sections in the Paris-based émigré magazine Kultura. He began it in 1953, when he was 49, and continued until 1969, the year of his death. On the first page his entries are:

Monday Me. Tuesday Me. Wednesday Me. Thursday Me.

So that we are left in no doubt that this is, indeed, a diary, and that for the next 740 or so pages we shall be addressed by one voice and one voice only.

The recently reissued novel THE POSSESSED (Black Cat, 395 pp., paperback, $17) , which Gombrowicz wrote for money under a pseudonym, also appeared first in serial form, in a Polish tabloid. What on earth the newspaper’s readership made of this disruptive and disrupted farrago is anybody’s guess; tabloid readers in 1930s Poland must have been very different from those in Europe and America today.

Serialization of the novel was interrupted by the war. The final three chapters were rediscovered in 1990, and the complete work has now been translated into English for the first time by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. Hers is a workmanlike, though in places jarringly anachronistic, version in idiomatic American English.

There is no plot, not in the accepted sense; rather, the novel is a Frankenstein’s monster made of wildly disparate story lines bolted together with the clumsiest spanner the author could find. The result is a dark fantasy along the lines of “Gormenghast,” of a Sadeian romp without the romping sex, and of tennis-inflected films such as “Strangers on a Train” and “Match Point.”

The main characters are Maja Ocholowska, a beautiful but wayward ingénue; Cholawicki, her on-again-off-again fiancé; and Marian Walczak, a male tennis coach to whom Maja is said to bear a striking physical resemblance, and for whom she develops a curious, half-demented passion that soars and sinks with baffling and ultimately irritating volatility.

After a few chapters Walczak’s name is changed to Leszczuk because, as a footnote from the tabloid’s editors informs us, there turned out to be a real tennis coach called Walczak. “What a strange coincidence!” the footnote merrily remarks. No doubt this intrusion of real life into a fictional world appealed to Gombrowicz’s anarchic attitude toward artistic decorum — or, as he might say, the contamination of Form by Chaos.

The central setting of the novel is an ancient castle in the depths of a forest, the ancestral home of an old prince who lost his wits after the disappearance of his illegitimate son. There is a great deal of madness in this novel. At the heart of the castle we find, needless to say, an “evil chamber,” which is in fact “the old kitchen.” Anyone who spends a night in this room is reduced to a gibbering wreck. And what is the thing in the kitchen that most terrifies? It is a towel, “gray with dust, hanging on an old iron peg,” which quivers ceaselessly — and “it was taut .”

Honestly, I am not making this up.

At this level the book is a mildly entertaining if somewhat wearying spoof on the Gothic novel. However, the author’s main preoccupation is not bats and bumps in the night, but … tennis. Match after match is described in detail, rally by rally, in prose any sportswriter would be proud of. The game is a stylized metaphor for the love match, or mismatch, between Maja, Cholawicki and Leszczuk. Meanwhile, Skolinski, an itinerant professor, is trying to get his hands on the castle’s priceless but neglected artworks, which ——

Enough. The depths of absurdity into which Gombrowicz plunges eventually freeze the reader’s brain. One feels like the one person in the company who sees the point of the joke that is splitting everyone else’s sides but does not find it in the least funny. True, Gombrowicz’s aim is not to make us laugh, or if there is to be laughter he wants our teeth to be chattering at the same time from existential angst.

The trouble with “The Possessed” is that nothing in it possesses our imagination. It is impossible to care for Maja or her rival swains, for the prince or the professor, or for anyone else at the crumbling castle and its environs. The riposte could be made that we do not care for Kafka’s characters either — Gombrowicz’s novel is Kafka lite — but we care deeply for the cold passion with which they are delineated. Gombrowicz is indifferent to the wants and wishes of the common reader; despite working within the mass-market form, one issue at a time, he is decisively drawn here to Chaos. Adam Thirlwell, in his shrewd introduction to the book, adduces a telling quote from its author: “Sincerity? As a writer, that’s what I fear above all. In literature, sincerity leads nowhere.”

Get hold of “Diary.” If Gombrowicz is great — and he is — that is where his greatness lies.

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