Abstract
Abstract Richard Powers takes the literary concept of “organic form” to new exploratory lengths–and satellite heights–in his latest ecofiction. In particular, the novelist who has proselytized voice-recognition software for the dictation of novelistic prose offers with that advice an unexpected leverage on the structuring “understory” (the botanical term) for his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Overstory (2018). In both textual phonetics and mapped thematic links, marked patterns of recurrence are to prose, here as elsewhere, what rhyme and meter are to poetry. In a novel that seeks to attune us to the secret “semaphores” of forest life, such elicited traces of nonhuman signaling articulate a vital terrestrial network evoked through a scale of decoded pattern that, in developing its own stylistic echosystem, answers to the environing field of narrative action, and forest activism, across eight different biographical plotlines in the novel's convergent cast of characters.
Highlights
Remain true to form, poetry may often decide to rhyme; to keep house, long prose must at least repeat, with a harmonizing difference each time around
Lyric recurs to its own phonetic beat and measure; the novel returns at less regular intervals to its themes, and sometimes to the wording that
Whereas Pirandello once thrust onto the surrealist stage six unfinished dramatic characters in search of an author, a century later, in The Overstory, Powers sends out a third again as many fictional characters in search of a plot
Summary
They are tropes, but tropes all but literalized in narrative, as with the novel’s first of countless plays on words: “Roots” for the separate routes that will carry many of the tracked characters west, along various personal paths and paved roadways, to the redwood forest, or merely forward in place to associated revelations at a geographic distance, as in the case of Ray, the property lawyer, wrestling at one point with a brief punningly called “Should Trees Have Standing?”1 The ecological torque of this novel turns repeatedly on such subterranean turns of phrase and their tacit off-rhymes.
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