Category: Fiction Reviews

The Overstory, by Richard Powers


This is a remarkable book, a feat of imagination, research, imagery, and character development. The winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in fiction, it can be a challenge to read—no cruise-control mindless scanning will get you through this one. But once you finish, your world will look different. You’ll sit in your backyard and wonder what the trees are saying to one another. You’ll take a special trip to check out one of the few remaining chestnuts in Iowa. You’ll start noticing trees on your daily walks—how one gingko loses its leaves all at once and another does so gradually. You’ll recognize trees as part of their own communities and as protectors of our own. This book will stay with you, and it is worth every minute you give to it.  

In The New York Times, Barbara Kingsolver wrote about how author Richard Powers, a recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant, created a work of art with significant scientific merit:

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

Powers told the Guardian that he read at least 120 books on trees and this research changed him. He talked about his motivation for the book and its effect on him:

When you look at the statistics of what’s happening to species, to rainforests, to forests of all kinds, it’s so overwhelming that it’s difficult to believe it. It’s utterly daunting. I wanted to tell a story about ordinary people who, for whatever reason, have that realisation about the irreversible destruction that’s happening right now and who get radicalised as a result. The book explores that question of how far is too far when it comes to defending this place, the only place we have to make a home. The act of writing this book has made me more radicalised, for sure.

In a PBS Interview with Jeffrey Brown, Powers explained the scientific backbone of the book:

Whatever I present in the book as scientific fact was, to the best of my ability at the time of publication, verifiable, consensually repeated and agreed upon. 

The book seems so real that, as Kingsolver wrote, readers Google characters to see if they actually exist. In some ways they do. One of the central characters, Patricia Westerford, is a scientist who discovers that trees communicate with one another, creating a community in which members help others in crisis, plan for the future, and guard against common threats. This is based on the ground-breaking work of real-life ecologist Suzanne Simard. In The Overstory, Westerford writes a book, The Secret Life of Trees. In reality, author Peter Wohlleben wrote  The Hidden Life of Trees in 2016, using Simard’s work as a central focus. 

Literary Hub writer Kevin Berger spent a day visiting Powers in his Appalachia home and was there at the poignant moment when the author read Kingsolver’s review for the first time. “I have found my people,” Powers said. And, for every writer who feels compelled to crank out words for the sake of words, Powers emphasized the importance of the contemplation he learned living near the forest, a truth for most of what we do in life:  

When I lived in cities, I wrote out of a tremendous work ethic. I felt if I were to be a serious writer, I needed to produce 1,000 words a day. When I didn’t, I was tremendously anxious. But since coming down here, and committing myself to communication with the plant world, I’ve been much more comfortable in letting an hour or two or more go by in a reverie state. I don’t feel compelled to have a word count at the end of the day, but rather to prepare myself as a ready receptacle for whatever might happen.

This is a book about trees, but it’s also about us. Trees have natural resilience. Those we destroy today will provide roots and seeds for regrowth, which may take hundreds, even thousands of years. Whether humans will be around to see that resurgence is an open question.

—Pat Prijatel

The Dutch House, by Ann Patchett

Patchett is a connoisseur of imperfect characters who are compelling mixes of the saintly, the clueless, the wise and loving, the selfish and manipulative—characters the reader can’t help but care about because they are just so human.

In The Dutch House, Patchett uses the grand VanHoebeek’s mansion that came on the market after World War II as the spine of the multi-generational story. When Cyril Conroy buys the Dutch house (with all the VanHoebeek’s personal possessions and three servants included) as a surprise for his wife Elna, it is a cruel gift to the quiet, would-be nun. 

The changes brought about by moving into the Dutch house eventually send Elna fleeing to Bombay to work with Mother Teresa (who is actually in Calcutta). After she leaves, the Conroy children, Maeve and Danny, are in the capable, loving hands of the housekeeper, the cook, and the nanny, Fiona (aka Fluffy), who is a warm, humorous presence from before the beginning of the story through the end, three generations later.

Danny, as the narrator, shows us life in the Dutch house. After their mother, who has been disappearing for increasingly long spells, seems perhaps not to be coming back ever, he and Maeve wonder if she is dead. Probably, their dad tells them. She probably died in India. Information which is neither comforting nor edifying. 

Then young and attractive Andrea begins to come and go in the Dutch house. The children are left on their own to figure out what this means. Maeve becomes suddenly and seriously ill with diabetes. Despite all this, young Danny still feels secure and loved by the servants and especially his sister, who has taken on a quasi-motherly role.  

When their dad marries Andrea, she brings two little girls, Norma and Bright, into the Dutch House. Maeve and Danny come to love the little girls, but Andrea—in a vein of casual cruelty, gives Maeve’s room to Norma when Maeve goes off to college. And when Cyril dies of a heart attack shortly after Maeve graduates, Andrea calls Maeve and says of Danny: “Come and get him.” Thus Danny and Maeve are summarily banished from the Dutch house and Norma and Bright.  Equally shocking, Maeve and Danny discover Andrea now owns everything: the Dutch house and all of Cyril’s real estate and investments. Danny and Maeve are left with Maeve’s car and a foundation established for the education of Cyril and Andrea’s four children. 

Thus begins Danny and Maeve’s period of watching the Dutch house and plotting. In Maeve’s car, they take up posts, smoking and talking, with Maeve planning ways for Danny to use up the foundation money by the longest, most costly education imaginable. And from this revenge plot, Danny eventually and unwittingly becomes a doctor, when all he wants to do is get a little money together so he can start investing in real estate and follow in his dad’s footsteps. 

Danny’s girlfriend, Celeste, in training to be the best doctor’s wife ever, discovers she has married a landlord instead of a doctor—repeating Elna’s pattern of discovering her husband was not who she thought he was. And Danny ironically repeats family history too by surprising Celeste with a beautifully restored brownstone in Manhattan not at all to her taste.

Over the years, through various bits of information, Danny and Maeve gradually come to understand their mother is still alive, living and doing good works among the homeless in the city. Danny struggles with how to feel about this, but Maeve embraces the woman she still calls Mommy.  

Near the end of the story, Elna convinces her children, as only she could, to go with her to visit the Dutch House.  This causes a tectonic shift among the characters. Now demented, Andrea is enormously comforted by Danny, who she believes is Cyril returned to her. Ever compassionate (except perhaps to her young children) Elna moves back into the Dutch house (unchanged all these years) and works with Norma (who actually did want to become a doctor) as Andrea’s caretakers. Maeve, who feels abandoned by her mother once again, dies of what is surely meant to be taken as a broken heart.  

As the story ends, Danny and Norma become siblings of sorts (“a half-sister from a second marriage,” as Danny cautiously puts it). Elna begins to disappear among the poor again. Danny finally gives up his rage at his mother and replaces it with “familiarity.” Danny and Celeste divorce. Fluffy visits the Dutch House now and then and sleeps in her old room above the garage. And May—Maeve’s namesake—gains fame and fortune as an actress and ultimately buys the Dutch house and brings back parties reminiscent of the VanHoebeek era. And the portrait of Maeve, originally painted to stare down the VanHoebeck’s portraits hanging across the room, looks to all the world like May. There’s a sense of rightness about this ending. Finally, the Dutch house has come into its own as the Conroy house. 

The Dutch House is a rich and conversation-provoking story showing us the human condition in fascinating particulars.

— Sharelle Moranville

Virgil Wander, Leif Enger

This quiet, gentle story is remarkable for the artistry of it words, the realistically oddball characters, and its touch of Northwoods magic realism. The main character, Virgil Wander, almost drowns when his car slides off the road and into Lake Superior. The accident damages his brain and, as a result, he quietly and gradually reinvents himself, leaving behind his hesitant, staid self—the “former occupant” of his apartment, clothes, and life. In his place is a man willing to take a few risks.

Comparing his flight into the lake with his new life, he says:

“A person never knows what is next—I don’t anyway. The surface of everything is thinner than we know. A person can fall right through, without any warning at all.” 

Virgil owns a down-on-its-luck movie theatre, the Empress, and is also Greenstone’s city clerk. (When he explains this latter job, he addresses the reader directly asking, “Did you think I made a living at the Empress?” It’s a delightfully engaging moment.)

After his plunge into the lake, Virgil has a unique mental quirk: He cannot remember adjectives. But no matter, Enger demonstrates the power of all parts of speech, in quote-worthy paragraph after paragraph, as Virgil creates a new life from the leftovers of his old one. The language alone makes the book a wonder to read.

For example, when Virgil first meets the mystical Rune, he describes how the old man smoked his pipe: “The smoke ghosted straight up and hung there undecided.” Who needs fancy adjectives when you can create an image so economically and so powerfully?

And when Virgil finds the ominous Adam Leer burning clothes behind his house, he again evokes the smoke-in-need-of-direction image, this time using an adjective in a way that makes the reader wonder why other writers haven’t used this description: “Tendrils of tea-colored smoke uncurled to explore the immediate region.”

Some lines are laugh-out-loud funny, as when Virgil observes, “The evidence of my life lay before me, and I was unconvinced.” 

Virgil, who narrates the book, introduces us to his community in the bad luck town of Greenstone, Minnesota, north of Duluth. Residents have landed there by chance, as Virgil did, lured by a lake view and cheap real estate; others were born there, as was the mysterious and sinister Leer; and then there’s the elfin Rune, who shows up on the shore of Lake Superior flying kites. 

But these are no ordinary kites—they’re so mystical that people passing by stop and wait their turns to fly the giant dog, or the bike with wheels that turn, a burning fireplace, or even an anvil. Rune is in town looking for stories of his son Alec, whom he never met, and who flew out over Lake Superior one day in a tiny old plane, never to return. Nadine, Alec’s widow, takes over his neon sign business, creating pieces of art she sells nationally; Virgil loves her from afar, assuming he has no chance with her, until he does. When the two finally connect, he observes, “She kept looking away then back to me, as though at a nice surprise. This was maybe best of all. I never once expected to be someone’s nice surprise.” 

Two fatherless boys, Bjorn and Galen, help pull Virgil toward himself and away from the previous tenant, aided by Ann and Jerry, married but not really, who are trying to move beyond the margins of their lives.  Then there’s a giant sturgeon, a bomb, a festival called Hard Luck Days, and a cameo by Bob Dylan, who wrote a song about Greenstone, but Virgil can’t remember which one. And a priceless set of old movie reels Virgil refers to as imps in a jar, and which get the Empress a new roof.

Like the kites, the characters’ lives move with slow precision and eventually reach a conclusion that ties the story lines and loose strings together. A few bits are left hanging (What actually did happen to Leer?) and some are tied up with a bit of sadness (Jerry’s luck gets harder, although he might have left the city better off).

Toward the end of the book, the community comes together for Virgil, who does not expect it, and he says, poignantly, “Your tribe is always bigger than you think.” 

At the very end, in Rune’s city of Tromsø, Norway, Nadine and Virgil face an unknown future, but with a fresh outlook that mirrors the theme of the book: “We all dream of finding but what’s wrong with looking? When the sun rises we’ll know what to do.”

—Pat Prijatel