In addition to being one of the best written novels I’ve ever read, The Overstory is an invitation to reconnect to something huge we lost long ago. While told through the tales of humans, the real, overarching story is that of trees, ecosystems, and life itself on planet Earth.
As a novel, I found it an astonishing complex, brilliant weave of the lives of human characters touched and forever altered, by trees. A captivating read rife with wisdom and deep in philosophy. What really mattered to me, though, was that it felt like a five hundred page homage to the hard-to-see-today truth my favorite Ed Abbey quote points to:
“A weird lovely fantastic object out of nature, like Delicate Arch, has the curious ability to remind us — like rock and sunlight and wind and wilderness — that out there is a different world, older and greater and deeper by far than ours, a world which surrounds and sustains the little world of men as sea and sky sustain a ship. The shock of the real. For a little while we are again able to see, as a child sees, a world of marvels. For a few moments we discover that nothing can be taken for granted, for if this ring of stone is marvelous all which shaped it is marvelous, and our journey here on earth, able to see and touch and hear in the midst of tangible and mysterious things-in-themselves, is the most strange and daring of all adventures.”
The Overstory is an invitation overboard the “little world of men” into “different world, older and greater and deeper by far than ours,” a world we all come from, and I believe, all deeply, unconsciously miss — a connection with the whole of life we lost many generations ago.