Powers has read them all and can recite sentences from each.

The Overstory just came out and has already sprouted a bouquet of glowing reviews. The cast includes an acerbic Vietnam vet, a feckless psychologist, and a partying college student who accidentally electrocutes herself to death only to recover a minute and ten seconds later with visions. Henry David Thoreau meet Georgia-Pacific. It’s an opera of conservation, with emotions ranging across a panorama of American thought and industry. Powers moved here two years ago from Urbana, Illinois, to finish writing his new and 12th novel, The Overstory, about a disparate group of people who discover their inner activists and band together in the Pacific Northwest to save “the most wondrous products of four billion years of life,” trees. Around a bend sits Powers’ home, a dark wood, two-level chalet on stilts, encompassed by trees. After a short drive up a winding road, Powers parks, and we walk down a gravel road. We climb back into the Silverado and head into Townsend, Tennessee, population 444. “A beauty.” Powers beams as the local septuagenarian, in a musical drawl, tells us about the days when the paved road we just drove up was dirt, dotted with farms. Powers strikes up a conversation with a Tennessee old-timer, who’s standing beside an immaculately restored 1935 Ford pickup.

“Holy, crap, sorry about that,” he says, nervously correcting an oversteer, as an oncoming truck whizzes by us.Ī few miles from Powers’ home in the Smoky Mountain foothills, we stop at a scenic overlook. I laugh off Powers’ apology, knowing he’s a good environmentalist, but am a little concerned when he veers into the opposing lane. He’s pretty sure the service-department guy at the Chevy dealer, having identified Powers as a treehugger, is still grinning at loaning him a four-by-four. He apologizes after picking me up at the airport in Knoxville, Tennessee, on a cool evening in early April, that his Chevy Volt, an electric hybrid, is in the shop, and he has to maneuver this beast, with its 20 miles to the gallon, across winding country roads. Richard Powers hates the hulking white Chevy Silverado pickup he’s driving.

Powers the overstory