· · · SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2018 · · · ‘Autumn makes me think of leaves, which makes me think of trees, which makes me think of The Overstory, the best novel ever written about trees, and really, just one of the best novels, period.’ - Ann Patchett 'It's a masterpiece.' - Tim Winton 'It’s not possible for Powers to write an uninteresting book.' - Margaret Atwood A monumental novel about trees and people by one of our most 'prodigiously talented' (The New York Times Book Review) novelists. The Overstory 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: An Air Force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. These four, and five other strangers – each summoned in different ways by trees – are brought together in a last and violent stand to save the continent’s few remaining acres of virgin forest. 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.

So this book was an interesting puzzle for most of NUBClub. Everyone (with the exception of two who didn't complete the book) found the opening chapters wonderful. In particular, the story of Nick's family and the chestnut tree was amazing - we all agreed that it could be an incredible short story by itself -- and other stories, including Mimi's family, were believable and powerful. The issue for most of us came when the book transitioned from the early vignette chapters into the longer chapters that tied the characters together. Here, options varied wildly. Some people like all of it. Some people like the activist parts but hated the programmer and the married couple. Other felt exactly the opposite. Sarah in particular liked the book, and defended the structure as being a collision between the timescale and perspectives of humans vs the timescale and perspectives of trees. A number of members agreed with this sentiment, and we took a lot of time quoting sections that pointed to this contrast -- the Nick chapter in the beginning and the sense of time in it, the human obsession with protecting the 1000 year old tree, the observations about fact that the couple's garden is best helped by doing nothing and letting nature reclaim it. In that sense, The Overstory could be seen as a work of science fiction, in which a tree intelligence was, as Jill put it, fighting back against chainsaws, by manipulating humans to do its bidding, but only at the pace that trees think, over decades. Almost everyone at NUBClub agreed that this theme was at work, but that didn't really redeem the book for anyone. There were simply gestures in the plot -- the husband's coma, the suicide during the TED talk, the conversion and arrest of the sociologist -- that some of us could not accept, and just about everyone hated the sloppy research on the game design (in fact, kind of the whole programmer character) and the psychological studies. We did a lot of analysis on this one, and while most NUBClubbers felt slightly more positive about the book after Sarah's defense and a bunch of thorough discussion about structure, there were just too many cheesy parts of the plot to convince us it was a great work. We don't condemn Man Booker for picking it, but this was not a NUBClub winner.