Organic reformations in richard powers’s the overstory

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 envi-roning field of narrative action, and forest activism, across eight different biographical plotlines in the novel’s convergent cast of characters.