Richard Powers

I like trees just as much as the next guy maybe more, depending on the next guy, but till now I've steered off from Richard Powers's novel about?, related by? trees - The Overstory, despite its many accolades (Pulitzer most recently) and my respect for Powers's work and intelligence - he's always thinking and pushing the borderlines of fiction. But this was one approach that I'd have thought could never work - but did start reading it last night and am keeping an open mind. Judging from first 1.5 chapters, this looks to be a series of short to mid-length pieces each about the relationship between a family (over generations) and a stand of trees or specific tree; the first about a pioneer settlement family that moves from Brooklyn to iowa in the early 19th c and plants a stand of chestnut trees. The trees are nearly all wiped out in the blight, which becomes a parallel story to the life and death of the family and its farm over generations (replete w a melodramatic conclusion). The idea to give us the sense that trees have lives full of biological incident but at a paces and on a breadth not of a human life but of a multiple-generation human life. Lots of info about the science of trees - like most of RP's work as I know it, much info well incorporated into the plot line - research worn lightly not as a deadweight yoke as in the weaker of many other historical novelists.

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