“Species clog every surface, reviving that dead metaphor at the heart of the word bewilderment.”
Richard Powers, The Overstory
I have cried at the loss of trees three times in my life. The first was a big oak of my childhood, that my father had to take down because it had become a danger hovering over our rural New Jersey house, threatening to collapse upon my bedroom in the next thunderstorm of that hot summer when I turned ten. The second was for the three mature olive trees and their long lilting green hair, robbed of life in my Los Angeles backyard so that we could build a new pool. The third time I cried over the loss of a tree was while reading Richard Powers’ novel, The Overstory – a work of fiction that informs, inspires, and moves its readers toward a richer understanding of the lively natural world we inhabit.
THE FICTION PORTAL
Monarch butterflies – Shutterstock
Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, Richard Powers’ most recent novels, The Overstory and Bewilderment, help to zoom out from the struggles of my small and temporary existence, to see the larger, more interconnected picture. Using nature and the universe, respectively, as leading characters in these works, Powers’ writing combats the notion of Human Exceptionalism, that erroneous sense that people exist independently of, or on some pedestal above, the ecosystems and nature around us. Powers’ writing binds the human experience to nature and adeptly captures the experience of nature and the universe itself. His writing gives nature a narrative, examining its complexity in a deeply emotional way.
In The Overstory the trees have a voice and sing so wisely, strongly, and beautifully about the way their cooperative community exists in our world, “the wildest engines of life on Earth”, that I will never look at a tree in the same way again. As Powers puts it, in a long-ago interview in Bomb magazine, from the late ’90s, “If I could have managed it, I would have tried to write a novel where all the main characters were trees!” Each of the interconnected stories in this novel allows us to see the wonder of the natural world around us …
“There are trees that flower and fruit directly from the trunk. Bizarre kapoks forty feet around with branches that run from spikey to shiny to smooth, all from the same trunk. Myrtles scattered throughout the forest that all flower on a single day… Trees that make rain, that tell time, that predict the weather… The biomass is mad. One swing of a net suffices to fill it with two dozen kinds of beetles. Thick mats of ants attack her [Patricia] for touching the trees that feed and shelter them… Yesterday they counted 213 distinct species of trees in a little over four hectares, each one a product of the Earth thinking aloud.” (The Overstory, 390)
Shallow coral reef in Raja Ampat, Indonesia. This tropical region supports the greatest marine biodiversity on the planet. — Shutterstock
Blue Bird — Shutterstock
Giant Seaweed — Shutterstock
Macro shot of red ladybug and aphids on garden plant leaf — Shutterstock
Scientist turned fiction writer, Richard Powers characterizes his fiction as being “concerned with the intersection of local and global arcs.” His fiction builds from science, but it is not hard to enter because it is infused with emotion. Powers understands and proves that stories are a way to inform, and that writing can work towards change. His choice to impact the world by telling stories instead of in a lab is a bold reminder about the power of literature. His stories are as important as scientific research or discovery, for this spread of knowledge and perspective may be the only hope of collective change. His writing allows us to enter a vast space in which human beings are but a piece and urges us to ponder and respect the great mysteries of nature.
As a child, I remember spending a great deal of time pondering the universe. Somewhere along the line, when I realized that I’d never truly figure it all out, I allowed myself to be distracted by other things: work, love, loss, motherhood, eating at good restaurants, doing sit-ups, doing laundry. While reading Bewilderment, I fell back into my youthful wonder as I visited new planets like Nithar, where “we were almost blind.” Where hearing and taste were so refined and “our eight different hearts made us exquisitely sensitive to time” (Bewilderment, 205). In this novel, it was lovely to embody a father trying to learn from and save his sweet son, Robin, as I, in my own ways, try to learn from and save my own daughter from this trying world. Bewilderment reminded me to foster my daughter’s wonder, and not let the world beat it out of her… or me.
Little girl traveling through a dream world. – Elements of this image furnished by NASA
Sometimes the idea of a peaceful existence on this earth seems like an idyllic dream. Why not accept that we are all lost? There will be war. We will pollute our planet until it can no longer hold us. Politicians will remain corrupt and the rich will get richer as the poor grow poorer. In the morning, when I play “princess” with my three-year-old daughter, she asks to see pictures of princesses on Instagram and I hide my phone and cower, fearing how this device will corrupt her someday. In the afternoons, I do my work at home in front of my computer and try to avoid seeing the news in any capacity, for it has grown too heartbreaking. A nearby field bursts into flames and I can see the smoke rising from my office window, reminding me of our planet’s warming and our world’s perilousness. When I think of basking in hopelessness or simply ignoring the problems of the world, instead, I try to find art, like Powers’, that will urge me not to. To make art and share it in spaces that reach for understanding.
I believe that Richard Powers’ fiction is particularly important at this moment in time. His well-informed and moving stories can inspire us to look not only in but also out, reminding us that we (humans) are not the only living breathing beings that inhabit this vast universe. His fiction is a call to action. As Powers says, “…most of my books try to work their way to an ending where the reader realizes that the story starts when you put it down.” His writing forces readers to ask themselves: How will I answer this call?
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Citation: Bomb Magazine, 1998. https://bombmagazine.org/articles/1998/07/01/richard-powers/
Catie Jarvis is an author of fiction, as well as a yoga instructor, a competitive gymnastics coach, an English and writing professor, a surfer, and a mom. She received her B.A. in writing from Ithaca College, and her M.F.A. in creative writing from the California College of the Arts.
