The Overstory by Richard Powers is, as indicated by its title, a text concerned with scale. Just as a forest’s worth of trees contribute to the foliage layer called an overstory, this novel reveals the spider-silk threads connecting its nine human characters to the ecosystems surrounding them. Although they are presented using human understandings of time, these connections frequently break up their own chronological flow, dropping in snippets of foresight that only fall into place tens of pages after they are first mentioned. An Irrealist reader takes this to mean that human chronology is not the metric by which time is organized in The Overstory. What drives each character’s self-discovery and growth, what drives their budding understanding of the ecological big picture, is unique to each of them; hence the gaps between each character’s emotional, physical, and spiritual interpretations of the natural world. For Nicholas Hoel, the mechanism behind his transformation from Iowa farm boy to direct-action ecological activist is his artwork. Nick’s entire life is his ultimate “performance piece,” dotted with individual works that foretell the causes he will someday create for long before Nick becomes aware of it.

After losing his immediate family to carbon monoxide poisoning, young adult Nick finds himself heartbroken and purposeless. When the storyline of Olivia, a college dropout spurred to action by the spirits of redwood trees that only she can hear, intersects with Nick’s, he is living on life insurance policies and creating art for the sole purpose of giving it away. What Nick draws are interpretations of the seventy-six year’s worth of photographs his ancestors have taken of the landmark chestnut tree by the farm, the Hoel Chestnut. This tree is what compelled Olivia to make a stop on her spirit-lead road trip; she senses that “someone planted it here a very long time ago simply to attract her attention” (Powers 173). Nick’s admiration of this tree, his compulsion to draw it in ever-increasing renditions despite the hopelessness pervading his life, is no coincidence. The first thread connecting Nick to Olivia, whose forest-saving quest he will become a significant part of, is the tree Nick spent his childhood sketching the branches of. Charmed by Olivia’s conviction, Nick agrees to join her. The duo buries his remaining artwork on the farm property before continuing on the journey that takes them, eventually, to the Life Defense Force environmental justice group defending the redwoods of Oregon.

Upon Nick and Olivia’s first meeting, the text introduces Nick as “a man ... with hair like a Bronze Age prophet,” a hint that Nick will be important to Olivia’s spiritual quest. (Powers 173). Nick does have a knack for making uncannily prophetic observations; unlike Olivia, though, who “speaks with the authority of one who has already seen the future,” Nick doesn’t recognize his flashes of insight for what they are (Powers 337). In the car with Olivia, Nick quietly thinks that, should he ever be imprisoned or trapped with one other person, she would be his choice. Months later, as members of the Life Defense Force, the duo are essentially trapped together, living atop a redwood called Mimas in order to prevent the massive tree from the logging company set on cutting it down. Now fueled by—if not purely the burning desire to defend tree life, then at least—ardent affection for Olivia, Nick uses his artistic prowess to share the beautiful organisms Mimas houses with the loggers who call up to them from the tree’s base.

Nick’s compulsion to create art mirrors his attraction to Olivia and, over time, her cause; it is a “bottomless weirdness” Nick is helpless to explain (Powers 199). It isn’t until after Olivia’s death, when Nick returns to what was once his family’s farm, that the art he and Olivia buried years ago click into place. Looking over the painting of a sleeping man with a tree branch poking through his bedroom window, Nick realizes “that’s how it happened. He was sleeping, and [Olivia] burst” into his life. Unbeknownst to him, Nick’s art contained “half a prophecy” of what was to come (Powers 407). In a document entitled “Letter of His Holiness Pope John Paul II to Artists,” the pope highlights the unique connection between human artists and the Christian god. Human artists’ drive to create makes them “appea[r] more than ever “in the image of God,”” as God themselves was compelled to create humans in God’s own image (Paul). Given the parallel Powers sets up between networks of trees and divinity, seen most strongly in Olivia, it is notable that Nick’s connection to the tree-gods is only made visible through his artwork. Even at his lowest points—after the loss of his family and later Olivia—Nick continues to make art, first in sketch form and later in the form of hand-painted environmental justice slogans. Nick’s calling becomes his method of calling out, his method of convincing fellow humans to recognize the spider-threads that tie them to not only each other, but to every organism in their ecosystems.

Another method by which Nick’s art shapes his reality is its role in breaking his isolation. Up in the branches of Mimas, Nick and Olivia are simultaneously separate from the rest of humanity and more aware of the interconnectedness of things as they have ever been. It isn’t keeping track of the passing days on a “hand-drawn” calendar that grounds Nick’s mind and body; he “dreams ... of a collective artwork that could do justice to a forest” so much that “he often can’t remember if he has marked off the day already or not” (Powers 290). His drawings, once solely centered around interpretations of the Hoel Chestnut, have become portraits of Olivia and hanging lichens and pools home to tiny fish (Powers 290). As Nick’s range of artistic subjects expands, so does the function of his artwork. His skills become useful for adding terrifying warpaint to fellow tree-defender’s faces; he drops sketches to show the angry loggers exactly what their company is employing them to destroy; he etches darkly hopeful messages about earth’s future beside the tree-killing equipment he, Olivia, Adam, Mimi, and Douglas team up to destroy (Powers 215, 287, 344). Nick’s last word in this story is a piece of performance art: trees planted to spell the word “still” from a bird’s eye view, a message that will eventually fade into the surrounding forest (Powers 502). However individual the experience of creating art may be in the moment, its ultimate purpose is to share its meaning with onlookers, interpreters, fans. This simultaneous isolation-connection quality artists and their work possess is something Powers touches on in an interview about creative endeavors during crises that demand social distancing, like that of the COVID19 pandemic. When asked how the pandemic has affected his work, Powers calmly replies that “novelists are old hands at social distancing,” going so far as to say novels “depen[d] on a fair amount of ... isolation” (Martin). The artist’s dilemma is managing the balance between solo creation and generating connection. Nick’s journey, as told through his artwork, shows a man who learns how to strike that balance—even, in fact, how to contradict it. For his final work, the “still” composed of trees, Nick brings two more sets of hands to help him. 

On a final note, I wanted to zoom out from the lens of Nick’s narrative and examine Powers’ novel itself as a piece of art motivated to draw connections between characters, readers, and the environment. Due to the fiction novel format, readers are never treated to an exact visual representation of Nick’s visual art. Written descriptions of these pieces are all Powers offers: Nick’s early pen-and-ink drawings are “frantically detailed,” while his later slogans are more varied, either painted “with all the care his hand can compose” or splayed out “wild and vivid” (Powers 175, 347, 348). When Nick’s art begins incorporating letters, Powers assigns it a specific font, a completely uppercase text with a subtle, pleasant wobble. Nick’s messages aren’t the only time this font is invoked however: both Adam and Douglas see text that resembles—but is not confirmed to be—Nick’s work, and these are also depicted using Nick’s font. This confusion feels familiar. In the story, Olivia’s accidental death occurs on one of the missions she, Nick, Mimi, Douglas, and Adam take on to destroy tree-killing equipment storage facilities. When her charred remains are found alongside text reading “control kills,” “connection heals,” and “come home or die,” the public incorrectly decides this was a murder instead of the direct-action protest it actually was (Powers 347). The question of who made the art and what their intentions were becomes obscured by the public’s interpretation; likewise, the reader cannot be sure if Adam and Douglas did in fact stumble upon more of Nick’s work because the same font is used for both Nick originals and the possibly-copycat messages. 

Perhaps, as an interpretation via an Irrealist lens would encourage one to consider, this confusion is not only intentional on Powers’ part, but it is a crucial piece of his novel’s message. Perhaps Powers wants to impart the idea that author intent cannot—maybe even should not—be prioritized over the impression their art makes on those who view it. Once a book, or an environmental justice slogan, is released into the world, it is at the mercy of its readership. There is no way to guarantee one’s readership or viewership will accurately interpret what one has made: an author can give as many interviews as they like, but it is highly unlikely that every single person who reads their work will also go to the trouble of checking their interpretations against the author’s. There are entire schools of literary thought that discard author intent altogether. Nick and the rest of his crew tried to send an environmental message, they failed, and now their efforts will be remembered on Environmental Terrorism timelines.

That is, within the world of The Overstory, the crew’s efforts will be remembered as such. The reader understands what the masses in the novel do not: the internal lives and motivations of these characters. This is the (usually) strictly intangible power of the novel art form. Literature provides humanity with an imaginary space in which to explore versions of the world we live in, interpretations of the past, and constructions of possible futures. Mark William Roche hits this point home in his musings about the role and purpose of literature in an increasingly technologically fraught time. It is not the responsibility of literature to provide immediate and concrete solutions for the world’s ills: gender disparities, racial injustice, environmental degradation, and all the rest. Literature’s purpose is instead to explore "promising and unpromising directions" and "motivate [humanity] towards responsible action" (Roche 248). 

The Overstory is a tale as concerned about the world at large as it is about the individual lives of each and every organism in the ecological web. Not everything can, or should, be understood by people, ourselves included. Humans destroy and create, suffer in silence and reach out to help. Nick Hoel is one human of nine. Or, more accurately, Nick is one fictional human out of 7 billion real ones (and trillions of other fictional ones). But if his art can provide him a space to paint a warmer future he doesn’t yet know will be his, if it can compel him to plant trees that spell a word synonymous with resilience, then one more way to read The Overstory is as an encouragement to keep creating, keep reaching, keep trying. At best, humanity may be able to slow down the speed of the planet’s ecological tailspin: a performance piece that requires an entire species to pull off.

Martin, Brett. “Author Richard Powers on How the Virus Reminds Us that Humans Aren’t In Control.” GQ.com. Condé Nast, 14 May 2020. Web. 14 May 2020. 

Paul, John. “Letter of His Holiness Pope John Paul II to Artists.” Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1999. Web. 12 May 2020.

Powers, Richard. The Overstory. City pub: pub, 2018. Print.

Roche, Mark William. “Technology, Ethics, and Literature.” Why Literature Matters in the 21st Century, Yale University Press., 2004, pp. 238–248.