The bends in the alders speak of long-ago disasters. “The tree is saying things, in words before words.” Those first paragraphs hold the key to this novel. The Overstory compelled further attentive reading. Some new way of looking at life, at nature. The beginning of the novel wouldn’t let go of me. Like any other novel, I read the first few pages to see if The Overstory would appeal to me before I spent any more time with it. I don’t read every Pulitzer prize fiction but the prize makes me curious enough to check out a book. I picked up the book, in the first place, because it’s a Pulitzer Prize winner (2019). A humbling realization for one who lives at the edge of a county park rich in vegetation. I believe I have a fairly wide vocabulary but I was dismayed to find I had no inkling at all of this literal meaning of “overstory.” That when it came to trees and foliage, I was an ignoramus. 2 : the trees contributing to an overstory.

Only later, fascinated by the story that transpired and having finished reading it, did I decide to look up the meaning of overstory.ġ : the layer of foliage in a forest canopy. My misconception proved, in the end, that I knew nothing about forest growth. You, the reader, must venture into the depths of a multilayered story to tie the sub-themes in order to access that overarching theme.

I guessed “overstory” referred to an overarching theme, the most important one that subsumes some more obvious sub-themes. I interpreted it in terms of the usual conventions about books, especially fiction. The Overstory-I didn’t know for sure what the title alluded to when I first encountered this novel by Richard Powers.

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