The Overstory

The Overstory

by

Richard Powers

Teachers and parents! Our Teacher Edition on The Overstory makes teaching easy.

The Overstory: Part 3: Crown Summary & Analysis

Summary
Analysis
An unnamed man in the far North lies with his head sticking out of his tent, looking up at the tops of five white spruce trees. He thinks about all the messages the trees are constantly sending out, and he can even sense some of them himself, from these spruces and others all through the valley where he is camping. The man rolls over, still communing with the trees, who seem to subvert his sense of despair. The man wishes that he himself were more like a tree, and that slow growth and light, water, and soil would be all that he needed in life.
While Part 2 is called “Trunk”—when most of the characters come together as one unit—Part 3 is called “Crown” after the branches and foliage of a tree. Just as a tree’s branches continue to divide and grow in their own way yet remain connected to the trunk and roots, so too do the book’s protagonists split apart in this next section while still being bound together in the narrative and in their individual lives. It’s later implied that this passage’s unnamed man (as this introduction echoes the beginnings of the previous two parts) is Nick, living alone in the forest after Olivia’s death and trying to change his very self to become more tree-like.
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The narrative jumps to 20 years after Olivia’s death but describes the group’s memories of that night. Nick collapses, and the others place Olivia’s body in the flames. They have to force Nick into the van, and then they flee the scene. As they drive Adam and Nick argue, and Douglas suggests that they surrender themselves. Adam insists that they all keep quiet. Back in Portland, the group disperses.
Time shifts suddenly in the narrative in the wake of Olivia’s death. The group splits apart just like a tree’s branches, no longer a trunk but now all growing in their own separate directions.
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Nick immediately returns to Mimas and camps atop its stump, longing for Olivia and the life they shared in the redwood’s branches. Mimi and Douglas strip down and deep clean the van they used for the mission, and then sell it. Mimi also puts her condo up for sale, and tells Douglas that they can’t see each other anymore, as they’ll give each other away if they do.
Nick feels lost without Olivia and returns to the site of their happy time together. Mimi is again the most practical member of the group, while Douggie tries to cling to her despite the suspicion his presence might generate.
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Investigators find Olivia’s bones among the ashes, and what would have been a mundane crime becomes a major story. The police can’t identify her body, and the only clues are Nick’s cryptic painted words on the side of the trailer. Most people decide that the tragedy is the work of a “deranged killer.”
Even the group’s environmentalist message is obscured by the fact of Olivia’s death, though the tragedy does at least make the story spread nationwide.
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Adam returns to Santa Cruz, knowing that doing otherwise would only seem suspicious. He hides away in his sublet apartment, riding out waves of excitement and anxiety. Sneaking into his department to get his mail one night, he is confronted by a fellow student, who playfully asks him about his absence. Adam tries to use all his knowledge of psychology to best deceive her, and so instead of fleeing he invites her out to eat. The narrator notes that using these same tactics, in 20 years he will be a tenured professor and famous in his field.
Adam quickly learns to live a lie, to essentially trick everyone he meets using what he knows about how human beings think. Having studied humanity’s tendency toward herd mentality for years, he now uses this knowledge to blend into society. This mindset ironically leads him to become extremely successful in society.
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Nick knows that he can’t stay in the area, but he still feels the need to wait for some kind of message from Olivia. He rents a cabin at the foot of the logged mountains, where he and Olivia lived atop Mimas, and lives there in total isolation. One day, after a downpour, a landslide comes down the mountain. Nick manages to escape in time, but his cabin is flooded with earth, and his neighbors are only saved by a thin row of redwood trees that stop the avalanche. One of Nick’s neighbors points to the trees that just saved their lives—they are all marked with X’s, meaning they are slated to be cut down next.
This passage is a literal example of how old-growth forests provide value other than just their wood—here, for instance, by maintaining the integrity of the land itself. In relentlessly pursuing immediate profit, people have caused future tragedies that they cannot even imagine. It’s assumed that even these last trees will be cut down as well, despite having just saved human lives with their mere presence.
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Douglas keeps returning to Mimi’s condo, no matter how often she tells him to stay away. He has a recurring dream of Olivia telling them that everything will be okay, and he feels the need to tell Mimi about it. Finally, she tells him that she is selling her condo and leaving, and that he needs to disappear too. Douglas is shocked, and that night he dreams again of Olivia. The next morning, he goes to tell Mimi about his dream once more, only to find her condo sold and vacated.
Douglas is aimless once more, clinging to Olivia and her sense of mystical purpose even when everything seems to have fallen apart. Mimi, however, takes the situation seriously and acts quickly to preserve both herself and the rest of the group.
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Without Mimi, Douglas feels totally aimless. He abandons his job at the hardware store, loads his possessions into his truck, and starts driving east. When he makes it to Idaho that night, he feels a need to see the site of Olivia’s death. He knows this is a bad idea, but he can’t help himself. As he approaches, he sees construction work going on—nothing has been changed by the fire. Douglas lingers for only a few seconds and then drives on. He passes into Montana and sleeps in his car that night.
What Douglas sees in this scene reiterates the tragic fact that seemingly nothing can stand in the way of humanity’s need for constant growth and mastery. The characters have tried peaceful protest, direct action, arson, and even (accidental) manslaughter—but the march of human progress continues on unhindered.
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The next day, Douglas keeps driving at random, generally headed east. He stops at a grove of trees that seems to emerge in the middle of nowhere. As he explores the area, he realizes that it used to be a town. Now nothing is left of its buildings, but the trees planted by the people who lived there remain.
Despite the scene’s eeriness, The Overstory presents this lost town as an almost hopeful image: a potential future in which humanity and its destructive power have faded away, yet the rest of nature continues to thrive.
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Mimi gets her father Winston’s arhat scroll appraised by an art gallery run by a man named Mr. Siang. He has had the scroll for weeks, and now he is late to his meeting with Mimi. At last, he appears and leads her to a back room. As Mr. Siang talks about the scroll, Mimi worries that getting it appraised was a bad idea. Then he tells her what the ancient inscription says: it is a poem about three trees. Mimi suddenly gets goosebumps, remembering her father’s words, which she now realizes were echoes of this poem—though Mr. Siang says only a scholar or calligraphy student would be able to read it.
The poem that Mr. Siang translates echoes Winston’s words when he first showed Mimi the three jade rings, and they themselves were an echo of his own father’s words when Ma Shouying sent Winston off to America. Even years after his death, Winston remains a mystery to his daughter, as Mimi wonders if he could actually have translated the ancient text on the scroll.
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Mr. Siang finally puts a price on the scroll: a figure much higher than Mimi was expecting. She meets his gaze and holds it—after experiencing Olivia’s dying stare, she is an expert at eye contact. After only a few seconds, Mimi realizes that Mr. Siang is underselling her, and he has discovered that the scroll is a “long-lost national treasure.” She offers to take the scroll to a museum instead, and Mr. Siang immediately offers a much higher sum, enough to ensure financial security for Mimi, her sisters, and their children.
Mimi has gained an almost mystical power to communicate entirely through eye contact ever since her experience with the dying Olivia. Here, she uses that power—an example of another kind of consciousness than what people are used to—to see through Mr. Siang’s deceptions.
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Mimi calls Carmen and Amelia to ask their opinions on selling the scroll. She says nothing about losing her job, moving, or the scar on her face, saying only that she “hit a rough patch.” Carmen suggests that they keep the scroll, just like Winston did, as a family heirloom. Amelia says to not get sentimental about it, and to go ahead and sell it. That night Mimi seems to hear her father’s voice telling her to prune the past like a tree so that it might grow.
Though it's never directly stated, the books implies that Mimi does indeed sell the scroll with her father’s blessing. Winston’s advice to her further suggests that she may use these funds to start an entirely new life.
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In the Brinkman house, Dorothy now tends to Ray every day. He lies in a mechanical bed, only his eyes moving, barely able to make noises. Dorothy uses her acting skills to seem exaggeratedly cheerful as she feeds and cleans him, all while trying to interpret what he might be saying with his eyes. She initially thought she could never live like this, but weeks have passed, and she has settled into a routine.
Ray and Dorothy’s arc at this point is a story of two ordinary people adjusting to a new lifestyle and sense of time. Though Dorothy previously wanted to divorce Ray, now she remains as his steadfast caretaker.
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Today Dorothy starts to read the newspaper aloud to Ray, but he seems agitated. Then he manages to make two sounds that she can interpret: “crossword,” his morning ritual for years. Dorothy gets the crossword, reads the clues aloud to him, and tries to interpret his noises and eye movements. One of the clues she gets stuck on is “Bud’s comforting comeback?” Later she serves him lunch, which is always an arduous event, and then reads to him. After his dinner, she finally goes out to have her own meal with Alan, the man she’s now engaged to.
Dorothy and Ray must also learn a new way of communicating, something analogous to the signals other characters receive from trees or Mimi and Olivia communicating through eye contact. Now, after Ray’s aneurysm, everything in the Brinkmans’ life is slowed down.
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Dorothy returns to Ray two hours later. She expects to find him sleeping, but instead he grabs at her and tries to speak. At last, she realizes that he’s asking to write something down, and she gives him a pen and paper. Very slowly he scrawls out a word: “releaf.” Dorothy is confused at first, but then realizes that it’s the answer to the crossword clue she was stuck on earlier—“bud’s comforting comeback.”
Ray’s consciousness is clearly still functioning, but it is now operating on a different sense of time, slowing down and becoming tree-like in its patience. Even the crossword answer is tree-related and connects to the idea of trees dying and being reborn, when their leaves fall in autumn and when they produce new life through their seeds.
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The narrative briefly touches on Patricia, Douglas, Nick, Adam, and Mimi as 20 years go by. Patricia continues to write as more species go extinct, and Nick “hides and works.” Time keeps passing, but as Adam proves in one of his studies, humans cannot see “slow, background change, when something bright and colorful is waving in our faces.”
The narrative again plays with the passage of time while also commenting on how humans are limited in our perceptions of time and change. Massive changes are taking place across the world, but because they are not immediate, it is easy for us to ignore them as “slow, background change.”
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Quotes
Neelay is now playing Mastery 8, experiencing the world anonymously among the millions of other players. At a market exchange within the game, Neelay’s avatar encounters another player who is mocking everyone. The man complains that he used to love Mastery, but now it has become just like real life—all about building, competing, and spending money. Despite Neelay’s protests, the man claims that Mastery has a “Midas problem”—all it can do is endlessly grow until it fills up. Neelay can tell that the man is right.
In Neelay’s Mastery games, the players inhabit new avatars of themselves, a type of consciousness that they control but that’s digital rather than human. Subduing the world of the game (like exploiting nature in the real world) leads to immediate satisfaction but no long-term happiness, just as the mythical King Midas could turn anything he touched to gold but ended up destroying his family and dying of starvation.
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Adam Appich is now about to become an associate professor in Ohio. One night while watching the news, he sees a report of an arson in Washington, accompanied by the words: “CONTROL KILLS; CONNECTION HEALS.” The newscaster says that investigators are linking the fire to other attacks from years ago, and Adam suddenly feels like he’s an arsonist again. He suspects that Nick or Douglas might be behind this new attack. The camera then pans to another spray-painted message: “NO TO THE SUICIDE ECONOMY.”
At first, it seems likely that Nick is behind these new attacks, as the painted slogans exactly echo his words from years before. All the characters connected to the arson have similar experiences to Adam’s here, where it seems like their present self is suddenly stripped away to reveal a past self—the one who watched Olivia die—that is still very much there. This experience resembles the rings of a tree, which contains all its past selves even as its outermost ring lives in the present.
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Three months later, there is another attack, accompanied by similar slogans. Mimi reads about it as she sits in a park in San Francisco, where she is now earning a degree in counseling. Reading the article and seeing the paper’s accompanying “Timeline of Ecological Terror,” Mimi feels sure that she will be arrested soon. Nevertheless, she continues on with the life she has now made for herself and heads to class.
All of the characters have made lives of their own but are still connected by the traumatic event of Olivia’s death. Here, Mimi has a similar experience to Adam’s, feeling like the last decades never happened at all.
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Nick never hears about these new fires. He has recently found a job as a forklift operator at a massive book “Fulfillment Center” in Bellevue, Washington. Nick enjoys the hard and mindless work, though he knows he is working for a company that is preying on people’s endless desire for convenience, and that his job will soon be performed by machines. All around the world, new “Fulfillment Centers” spring up every month.
It’s quickly revealed that Nick wasn’t actually behind the new fires and isn’t even aware of them. Here, the book uses Nick’s job to comment on the rise of Amazon (though it never names the company directly) as something similar to Mastery. Both capitalize on the human desire for immediate satisfaction.
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At night, Nick paints murals on bare walls around town. He knows that it’s risky to draw any kind of attention to himself, but he feels compelled to keep making art. Tonight’s project is painting an enormous chestnut tree on the side of a law office building. Next to it, he paints the words of a poem by Rumi—one that Olivia first read to him in the branches of Mimas.
Nick continues to both live in the past and to use his art to try and continue the mission that he once shared with Olivia. Making public art brings him a sense of purpose, as he might even be influencing someone else who sees it.
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Ray and Dorothy continue their routine. Ray frequently tries to tell Dorothy to leave him and go live her own life, but she either can’t understand him or pretends not to, and he also can’t help feeling happy every morning when she arrives. On this particular day, she feeds him and then turns on the news, which is showing footage of protesters clashing with police in Seattle.
Dorothy has her freedom now, but she still chooses to stay with Ray and comes to enjoy their routine together. The couple now live detached from the hectic pace of life that they watch on television.
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Dorothy turns off the news and reads aloud to him, as is their usual routine. Over the years, they’ve been making their way through “The Hundred Greatest Novels of All Time.” Ray loves fiction now (though it used to make him impatient), but he has learned that all the novels share a single core: they assume that humanity and its character are all that matter in the universe. This, the narrator suggests, is why the world is failing—“because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.”
Here, Richard Powers makes his own goal explicit: in The Overstory, he is trying to make the struggle for life on Earth as interesting and “compelling” as a drama that exists solely between people. Ray, then, is presented as an example of someone who has achieved this wider view of life and humanity’s place within it. He enjoys the novels that Dorothy reads to him, but he also recognizes their limitations.
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Quotes
Ray drifts off to sleep and wakes to find Dorothy asleep as well. He looks out the window into the backyard, as he now does for most of each day. He can see all the trees that he and Dorothy have planted over the years and the creatures living among them. Living as he does, Ray has now slowed to the pace of the world outside his window, so that what was once happening too slowly for him to notice now seems dramatic and exciting. Dorothy wakes up and apologizes for abandoning Ray, but Ray now feels that no one can ever be abandoned—life is always occurring all around them.
Only at this time in their lives do Dorothy and Ray become truly close to trees. Having played out their own dramatic interpersonal story, they are now learning to appreciate the stories of other kinds of life beyond the human. Ray can better sense the interconnectedness of beings in their backyard because of his many long hours of patient observation, and perhaps even because of how his brain functions since his aneurysm.
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The year 2000 arrives, and Douglas is living in a remote BLM (Bureau of Land Management) cabin in Montana. He is working as a caretaker for “the Friendliest Ghost Town in the West.” In the summer, he gives tours to the occasional visitors—but in the winter, he is snowed in and totally alone. To pass the time, he has been working on his own “Manifesto of Failure,” writing down the events of his life as a defender of trees. He doesn’t use anyone’s real name, only their tree-name aliases. He has just written about how it felt to watch a police officer wipe pepper spray into Mimi’s eyes.
Douglas has returned to a life of isolation among nature, just as he was living before going to Portland and meeting Mimi. He also feels that all of the actions he has taken on behalf of the trees have failed, as evidenced by his manifesto’s title. This physical document will become an important plot point later.
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Today Douglas writes about what he perceives as humanity’s mass blindness to the fact that “we’re cashing in a billion years of planetary savings bonds and blowing it on bling.” He thinks that it’s easy to recognize this truth while living alone in a cabin, but it seems insane when surrounded by other people going along with the status quo.
Again, Powers’s own voice seems to be speaking through his characters here, reiterating his argument that humanity’s short-sighted greed is causing devastating long-term consequences. He also admits that it can be hard to reach this conclusion when living in the midst of a society that rejects it.
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Douglas tends to his fire and then makes his usual rounds, walking through the snow in snowshoes and examining the buildings. Looking out over the forested valley below, he walks to the edge of a ridge and the ground suddenly collapses beneath him. Douglas tumbles downward, flying off the edge of a cliff and only saving himself by catching onto the trunk of a tree. He lies among the snowy branches for a while, his nose broken and his shoulder dislocated. He wants to give up and just fall asleep in the snow, but then he has a vision of Olivia telling him that he’s “not done yet.” He gets up and starts the long slog back.
Douglas is saved by a tree again, just as he was after falling out of the plane in Thailand. For him, at least, Olivia still acts as a spiritual guide and source of continued hope and purpose in life.
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Patricia is getting older, but she works harder than ever. She regularly travels around the country giving talks and asking for funding for her seed vault. She uses every tactic she can to convince her audiences that humanity’s current way of life is unsustainable. The other part of her job—the part she loves—is traveling the world and gathering seeds. Her actual vault is a bunker in Colorado filled with thousands of canisters, all kept at -20°. Inside the vault, Patricia can feel all the potential surrounding her, like the seeds themselves are singing. Reporters sometimes ask her why doesn’t focus on the most “useful” plants first, but she knows that “Useful is the catastrophe.
Patricia recognizes that humanity’s limited sense of what is useful and valuable is what has caused the environmental crisis in the first place. We can only consider the nature of value in our own terms, and so we don’t tend to think about exploiting or destroying what might be valuable in its own right or useful to other beings. Patricia is more connected than ever to trees, as she can sense the patient potential in all the seeds around her as a kind of language.
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Patricia visits the Amazon rainforest in Brazil and is overwhelmed by the sheer mass of life before her. She spends a week there taking a census of all the trees she can find, working long days but continuously awed by the diversity of life she finds. She is accompanied by a group of men who make their living harvesting from the rubber trees, including two named Elvis Antônio and Elizeu. They carry rifles, and at night tell stories about people they know who been killed in disputes over the rubber trees. Elvis Antônio and Elizeu “tap” the rubber—a sustainable practice that can last for generations—while others poach it, which kills the tree but makes more immediate profit.
Again, the book lingers on descriptions of the untouched forest and the vast, complex web of life that we will never be fully able to comprehend. In this environment, gathering immediate profit from the forest is sometimes a life-or-death matter, and people often don’t even have the choice to act sustainably and wisely—it’s either kill the trees or die themselves. This is mostly the result of economic demand from wealthier countries like the U.S., who want their rubber to be cheap and readily available but don’t think about the consequences of its extraction.
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While Patricia is camped out in the Amazon, Dennis is back in Colorado working at the vault. He hasn’t been quite convinced by Patricia’s project yet. She tells him about seeds that have germinated after thousands of years in the frost, but she knows that his real worry is that there will be no one around to plant her seeds in the future.
Patricia and Dennis aren’t concerned about their seeds’ survival or the limit of trees’ patience, but rather about the humanity’s capacity to ever change—or even to survive.
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The next day in the Amazon, Patricia and her men come across a patch of forest that has recently been logged. The men are immediately on alert—there must be rubber poachers nearby. Patricia hears a gunshot and then a motorcycle driving away.
Again, economic conditions and demand for cheap and readily available goods drive this wanton destruction of the forests.
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Later that same day, Elvis Antônio finds something extraordinary that he immediately shows to Patricia. It’s an enormous tree of a species unknown to Patricia, and its trunk has grown into a remarkable image of a human woman. Patricia knows that human brains naturally find patterns in random places, but she feels like the tree really does look exactly like a woman, her branch arms uplifted to the sky. Walking around the tree-woman, Patricia remembers reading the myths of Ovid in her youth, and the stories about people turning into trees. She has found similar myths all around the world in her recent travels. Everyone gets out their cameras to take pictures of the tree.
Powers continues to use Patricia’s storyline to mix science with fantastical elements like this tree-woman, who recalls the myth of Baucis and Philemon being rewarded by being transformed into trees. The Overstory draws attention to the prevalence of this myth in other traditions as well, as many cultures recognize and celebrate our connection to trees. This, the book suggests, is something we have largely forgotten in the modern world. If we saw trees as being like people, we would not cut them down so cavalierly.
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When Patricia returns home, she doesn’t show the pictures of the tree-woman to any of her colleagues or staff, knowing that they are only concerned with data and have no interest in myth. She does show Dennis, however, and he is delighted by it. He suggests that Patricia should use the image to make posters. That night, Patricia wakes up to find Dennis slack and limp, and she turns on the light to see that he is dead.
With Dennis’s death, Patricia loses her only real emotional connection to the wider human world. She will probably still continue her project of the seed vault, but in terms of close personal connections, she only has the trees now.
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More years of the same routine have passed: Dorothy tends to Ray day and night, only spending a few hours with her fiancé Alan. Finally, Alan grows impatient in his desire to get married and live together, but Dorothy is still unwilling to leave Ray. She knows that they were on the verge of a divorce before his aneurysm, but she still feels that she must keep her promise to take care of him now that he can’t sign any agreements or even talk. Faced with a choice to have Dorothy as she is now or not at all, Alan chooses to end their relationship. One morning afterward, Dorothy hears Ray crying out in the other room. She rushes in to see the news footage of planes striking the twin towers of the World Trade Center, and together they watch in horror.
The narrator quickly summarizes the passing years as time starts to change for the Brinkmans. In a change from her younger self, Dorothy now chooses to prioritize the patient generosity she has learned with Ray over the immediate pleasures of her engagement with Alan. After her engagement ends, the Brinkmans are even more disconnected from the outside world, but they still cannot escape it or avoid the horrors that humans continue to inflict on each other and their world, here in the form of the 9/11 terrorist attack.
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Mimi Ma now lives in San Francisco and works as a therapist. Her reputation as an “unconventional” practitioner has grown quickly, and now she is usually fully booked. She only sees two clients a day, because the sessions take so much out of her. On this day, she sits recovering from her first client and preparing for her second. To calm herself, she looks at the old photo of her Chinese grandparents and thinks about her family and her own past. She is interrupted by the sound of a chime—it’s time for her next patient, whose name is Stephanie.
The narrator doesn’t immediately reveal what is so “unconventional” about Mimi’s therapy practice, but she has at least become successful in her new life while still keeping some connection to her old one, here via her photograph of her grandparents.
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A red-haired woman enters, and Mimi makes sure that Stephanie has left all her electronic devices at the front desk and has already eaten and used the bathroom. Then she has Stephanie sit down. Stephanie wants to talk some first, but Mimi tells her that soon they’ll both know all they need to know without speaking. Mimi stares into Stephanie’s eyes, and tells her to just keep their gazes locked. This is very uncomfortable at first, but Mimi and Stephanie already seem to be sending messages between them with only their eyes.
Mimi has honed her skills over the years since Olivia’s death, and she’s now able to communicate directly with another person’s mind through only eye contact. This is another fantastical element of The Overstory, but it fits with the different kinds of consciousness and communication that the book illustrates as taking place between trees.
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Time passes as the women continue to stare into each other’s eyes in silence. In their internal dialogue with each other, Stephanie first seems friendly and easy-going, then defensive. Mimi, meanwhile, reveals her real name—she’s changed her name to “Judith Hanson” since moving. Stephanie continues with her therapy, all while staring into Mimi’s eyes: she remembers her high-school girlfriend, a fight with her mother, and then her mother’s death.
This therapy is based in a very different kind of psychology from what Adam studies. Mimi’s practice is anything but detached and scientific— instead, it involves an intimate connection between two people that goes deeper than words.
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Mimi then seems to let Stephanie into her own memories, showing her family and their mulberry tree. After half an hour, they are both revealing secrets to each other, and two hours later their most terrible secrets of all. Finally, both of them start crying. Stephanie asks what’s wrong with her, and Mimi says (still in their silent dialogue) that she is mourning something that she doesn’t even know she has lost: “a great, spoked, wild, woven-together place beyond replacing.
Mimi reveals as much of herself as Stephanie does in this raw and emotional exchange. The Overstory implies that all human beings are mourning something that we cannot even explain, the wild world that we have destroyed and now long for. This, the book suggests, is the source of so much depression and anxiety in the modern world.
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Stephanie jumps up and hugs Mimi, crying, and when she recovers enough, she leaves the office. Out on the street, Stephanie feels entirely changed and tries to remember everything she has just learned, but the feeling quickly fades as she is distracted by the noise of the city and the “irresistible force of other people.” Then a tree branch scrapes her cheek, and again she remembers.
The scene of Stephanie leaving Mimi’s office briefly illustrates the difficulty of taking these lessons into the “real world” of other people. It is so easy to be distracted and to go along with the group, but we can be reminded of the truth by continuing to interact with trees.
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Nicholas Hoel drives through Iowa on his way to his family’s old farm. When he reaches it, he sees that the farm is now a factory. The chestnut tree is gone. Nick parks his car and approaches the dead stump, forgetting that he no longer owns this land. From the stump’s base he sees dozens of new chestnut shoots sprouting up; the sight makes him hopeful, but then he remembers that these trees too will inevitably be struck by the blight. The house is still there, though it’s fallen into disrepair and no one is living there. He looks into the windows and considers breaking in just to sleep in a bed, but instead he just sits on the porch and waits.
Everything about Nick’s past life has been destroyed, most importantly the ancient Hoel chestnut tree. As he notes here, even the hope of saplings growing up into new trees can never be realized because of the prevalence of the chestnut blight. Like many of the other protagonists, Nick has learned to live with great patience and attention. His natural reaction to this situation is just to sit and wait.
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When the sun starts to set, Nick gets a shovel from his car and finds the place where he and Olivia buried his art. He unearths the carton and opens it, looking at his old paintings of trees. Seeing them reminds him of Olivia, and he thinks of how hopeful and whole they felt when they first met. Now that she’s dead, Nick is “sleepwalking” again, and nothing they did has stopped the cutting of trees all over the world. Nick digs up another box and finds what he is really looking for: the book of photos of the Hoel chestnut tree.
All of Nick’s memories reiterate the tragedy and failure that he has lived through, and how nothing much has changed in the wider world despite all of his and his companions’ efforts and losses.
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Nick loads half of the art into his car, but as he returns for the rest, he sees a police car approaching. The car pulls up and a voice orders Nick to get down on the ground. The cops immediately handcuff him. Nick is worried that they’ll run his fingerprints, but when they see that he only has homemade art with him, they call the manager of the property and then let him get the rest of the art—including the chestnut photo book—and leave.
This close call with the police builds tension in the narrative, as each member of the group is constantly at risk of arrest even so many years later. The police and property manager see Nick’s art and the photo book as entirely without value, so they don’t care if he takes it all.
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At his office in California, Neelay calls a meeting with his five top project managers: Nguyen, Rasha, Kaltov, Boehm, and Robinson. All of them are dressed like teenagers, and they’re all millionaires now, thanks to Neelay. Neelay lays out what he sees as the problem at the core of Mastery—its “Midas problem.” The others object, giving examples of how incredibly successful the games and the company have been. Boehm suggests adding new technologies and a new continent to Mastery’s world, but Neelay says that this just feels like postponing the problem.
Mastery’s project managers only know how to keep growing and expanding the game and company, just as Mastery’s players act within the world of the game itself. Neelay, however, is now trying to change the entire mindset of the game so that it’s no longer really about “mastery” at all.
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Neelay presents the issue as a disconnect between the Earth itself (a massive living biome of infinite complexity) and the game (a series of flashing pixels on a screen). Neelay then holds up a book: The Secret Forest. The others start arguing with Neelay, trying to come up with ideas to avert what they see as his final point. They feel that Neelay is going to destroy the company, and with it their own wealth and success. Neelay reads a passage from The Secret Forest and then lays out his plan; he wants a new game that is about “growing the world, instead of yourself.” Neelay goes around the room, and everyone else votes no on the idea. Neelay realizes that he has lost control of his own creation.
Neelay has now been influenced by Patricia’s book as well. Like most of humanity, the project managers want to keep their wealth and keep increasing their immediate gains, despite recognizing their current model as unsustainable. Neelay is determined to try something that won’t be as popular or immediately entertaining, but that really is sustainable and might have a positive impact on the world.
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Ten years have passed since Douglas’s fall on the mountainside. He still lives in his same cabin and now regales tourists with an exaggerated tale of his adventure. One particular woman, an Eastern European backpacker named Alena, seems extremely interested in his story. She stays behind after everyone else leaves and asks Douglas if he has anything to eat or knows of a place to camp. Soon she is in his cabin flirting with him, and then she starts to kiss him. Douglas finds himself crying as she touches him. She lets go, saying that he is a strange old man.
Douglas still feels broken by his past heartbreak over Olivia, and so he finds himself rejecting any human connection beyond conversation.
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Douglas apologizes and offers to let Alena sleep in his bed, while he’ll sleep in the other room on the floor. Alena seems excited by this offer, and Douglas notes that her light is still on late that night—he assumes that she’s reading. Two months later, Douglas has already forgotten about her—but he remembers when federal agents arrive, tear up his cabin, and find his journal. Douglas is arrested and feels like he has become “Prisoner 571” all over again. His journal is essentially a confession, but the investigators now want the real names of his associates.
Alena clearly read Douglas’s “manifesto” and later went to the police about it. Douglas has experience in jail—both real jail and the Stanford Prison Experiment—and knows how it can break a person mentally. Notably, the authorities don’t yet have the names (only their tree aliases) of any of Douglas’s accomplices.
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More years have passed, and Dorothy brings Ray his breakfast as she does every morning. Today he seems preoccupied, and he slowly asks Dorothy about a tree in their backyard. Dorothy returns to their old library, filled with all the guidebooks for adventures they once planned to have and finds a tree identification book. She opens the book and finds a handwritten poem from Ray. She brings him the book and starts flipping through it, explaining all her thoughts aloud as she goes through the steps of identifying the particular tree that Ray asked about.
Most of The Overstory’s protagonists eventually move toward their own kind of enlightenment. For the Brinkmans, this means finding joy and peace in their backyard, just being attentive and patient together.
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The process takes Dorothy several trips back and forth between the room and the backyard to examine the tree’s needles and cones. At last, she has an answer: eastern white pine. By now Dorothy can essentially read Ray’s thoughts through his eyes and movements, and she can tell that he’s thinking “A good day’s work.” That night Dorothy reads to Ray all about the pine and its history of use around the world. A storm picks up outside, and the Brinkmans feel like they, too, are alone in wilderness, just like the early settlers they read about. Ray thinks about all the old forests that are now gone.
Ray and Dorothy find great joy in this small activity of just identifying a tree in their backyard, but this is also an example of how attention, humility, and patience (characteristics of trees that can also be applied to one’s relationship to trees) can bring happiness. Dorothy’s growing ability to communicate with Ray entirely without words is another echo of Mimi’s practice and the signals from the trees themselves. This passage also returns to the idea of grieving for all the forests that have been destroyed and can never be replaced.
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Even after Dennis’s death, Patricia still speaks aloud to him as she writes alone in her cabin at night. She is finishing a new book, a shorter work that is also rather bleak. She has tried to be optimistic about the forests’ chances of survival, including stories of her own favorite trees, but she can’t escape what she believes to be the inevitable. She keeps returning to one particular passage about how trees can sense that humans are near and pump out certain chemicals. They’ve always been trying to talk to us, she writes, just in “frequencies too low for people to hear.
Patricia remains pessimistic about humanity’s future but continues to learn more about the forests and tries to make as much positive change as she can. Her words about trees trying to talk to us is another example of nonverbal communication between two kinds of consciousnesses. Furthermore, her writing about trees talking in “frequencies too low for people to hear” hearkens back to the book’s opening passage, when the unnamed woman (presumably Mimi) heard tress speak to her in “the lowest frequencies.”
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Just before mailing off her draft to the editor, Patricia revises her final sentence. The book was going to end on her hope that her seed vault would allow future people to plant the seeds someday. Now she adds: “If not, other experiments will go on running themselves, long after people are gone.” Patricia then gets in bed and reads, finishing with the same Wang Wei poem that Winston Ma left behind after his suicide. Patricia says goodnight to Dennis and falls asleep.
Patricia doesn’t have much hope for humanity, but she does hope for the continuation of life beyond us. Now connected to other people primarily through her memories of Dennis, Patricia loses herself in the wider view of life and time that The Overstory also tries to illustrate—one in which humanity is not very important at all.
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Adam is in New York, where a rapidly growing movement opposing the corruption of the wealthy has risen up. Adam wanders among the protesters as they chant, sing, and offer various services for free. Adam comes across a free “People’s Library” and looks through it, finding his childhood favorite: The Golden Guide to Insects. Flipping through it takes him back to his youth and his first fascination with observation and study.
Here, The Overstory touches on another major historical event: though not specifically named, it’s heavily suggested that this is the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011. The Occupy movement (which protested economic inequality) is another example of people trying to use whatever power they have to go against a system that is inherently destructive and unsustainable.
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As the crowd chants the word “Occupy!” Adam recognizes a familiar face. Doug-fir and Maple greet each other and embrace, though seeing Douglas immediately makes Adam feel like an arsonist and murderer again. They start to walk together, briefly catching up on the past decades. As they walk, Douglas, who keeps fiddling with his baseball cap, says he hasn’t seen anyone in the group since the accident, but Adam says that he feels like he keeps seeing Watchman’s art everywhere.
For all the characters involved in the arson, the moment of Olivia’s death remains within them like the rings of a tree, not left behind in the past but still there beneath the outermost layer of their present selves. The mention of Douglas fiddling with his hat is suspicious, especially as the reader knows that he has already been arrested by federal agents.
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Douglas asks about Adam’s research, and Adam says that he is essentially studying what “keeps us from seeing the obvious”—and the answer is usually just being around other people. They also both consider the other side of the equation—why some people are able to see the obvious, despite society’s conditioning. Douglas then brings the conversation to their activist days, and Adam admits aloud that they set buildings on fire thinking that they were the only ones who could see the truth and save humanity from destruction. They ask each other if they would do it all over again, and Adam says that none of it makes up for Olivia’s death.
Both Douglas and Adam reiterate a point that’s been repeated throughout the book: that in the face of such a crisis and so much apathy, the only moral response is extreme action. At the same time, they feel that they have failed because of Olivia’s death—and also because nothing they fought for has seemed to make much of a difference at all.
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Douglas accuses Adam of being in love with Olivia, and Adam admits that he probably was. Douglas then asks Adam why he came back that night instead of going for help. Adam gets angry and says that he was doing what was best—if he’d gone to the police, she still would have died, but they’d all be in prison too. Parting ways, the men hug, but it’s more like a test of strength than a show of affection.
Adam is sometimes presented as selfish, but he also recognizes the harsh realities of many situations that other characters refuse to see. Here, Douglas lets some of his anger at Adam show, as he still hasn’t forgiven him for coming back that night instead of getting help for Olivia.
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Neelay sits in the terrarium at Stanford’s inner quad, the site of his first inspiration, but the trees now refuse to speak to him. He feels alone and considers calling his mother, who is now dying as well, but decides not to. His phone buzzes—a message from his own personal artificial intelligence. He helped to make this bot, and now it scans the world for anything associated with his latest obsession: The Secret Forest and its ideas about tree communication and “forest intelligence.”
Through Neelay’s character, the book offers another potential way forward through the environmental crisis: using technology. Neelay has converged on the same obsessions as most of the other characters, but he goes about them in his own way, mostly through coding. His AI bots represent another kind of intelligence beyond that of humans.
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Neelay opens the latest message from his bot, which is a video called “Words of Air and Light.” The video shows a hundred years of a chestnut tree’s growth over the course of twenty seconds. Neelay is fascinated by the sense of purpose in the tree’s growth and branching, and he watches the video again. Following the last frame of the chestnut tree, the screen shows a Transcendentalist poem. Afterward, Neelay himself feels transcendent.
It's implied that Nick made this video, and that the tree is the Hoel chestnut tree. Nick has continued to use his art to spread his message, and here it inspires Neelay in a profound way.
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Now living in the Great Smoky Mountains, Patricia receives an invitation from Stanford to speak at a conference called “Home Repair: Countering a Warming World.” Patricia is immediately opposed to the idea, knowing that what these people want is some new technological breakthrough or ingenious idea, but when she looks at the guest list—scientific luminaries, writers, venture capitalists—she realizes that she’ll never have an opportunity like this again. She doesn’t reply yet and instead takes an evening walk through the woods. She feels clearer and better among the trees and animals, and she places her bare feet in a stream. In her mind, she asks Dennis if she should do the “Home Repair” talk, but she already knows that she must.
Again, Patricia must give up her happy solitude and return to the human world that seems more and more foreign to her as the years go by. She also recognizes that the kinds of answers she has to offer are not what people want to hear. They want something immediate that fits into the status quo of continued growth, development, and innovation. The answers she has are based in the opposite of this: humility, patience, and attention.
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Adam is now at his university and giving a lecture when he sees three armed FBI agents appear in the back of his classroom. The men make their presence known but also don’t disrupt the class, and Adam knows he must finish his lecture. Though he has dreaded this moment for years, he also finds a kind of relief that it has finally arrived. Adam, who has won multiple awards for his teaching and his research, realizes what really happened during his meeting with Douglas, and the reason for Douglas’s constant fiddling with his hat; Adam was recorded confessing to their crimes.
It now becomes clear that Douglas turned Adam in (and he was wearing a wire during their conversation at the Occupy protest), but it’s not yet revealed if he named any other names as well.
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Adam delivers a statement to his class: “You can’t see what you don’t understand. But what you think you already understand, you’ll fail to notice.” After a few more remarks Adam dismisses the class and walks up to shake hands with the FBI agents. They arrest him and lead him away, as his students watch in shock.
Knowing that this is his last teaching moment, Adam chooses to end his lesson with the importance of paying attention and staying humble. His lesson is just like the one Patricia learned at a very young age: that “the only dependable things are humility and looking.”
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As the agents lead Adam toward the car, he smells something both rancid and familiar. From inside the car, he looks out the window and sees a tree: the prehistoric gingko tree, or “maidenhair.” All its leaves drop at once as the car drives Adam away.
Maidenhair was Olivia’s alias name, and the gingko’s appearance here suggests that she, too, has now become a tree, mourning Adam’s arrest by dropping all of her leaves at once.
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Ray and Dorothy now have a new daily game: Dorothy brings in various leaves, seeds, and twigs from trees, and then together (with Dorothy reading aloud) they identify the trees that they came from. One day Dorothy feels that they must have made a mistake—they’ve identified one of the trees in their yard as an American chestnut, but they are far outside of its native range and there aren’t supposed to be many mature chestnuts remaining.
The Overstory now returns to the chestnut trees that began the novel. The Hoel chestnut is gone, but somehow another has survived in the Brinkmans’ yard, planted decades before when they still planted something every year on their anniversary.
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Dorothy finds The Secret Forest at the library and slowly reads it aloud to Ray, taking an entire day for only a page or two. They sit together quietly, just looking at their backyard and finally appreciating it. Watching nature unfold, Dorothy feels the same sense of drama that she once did when reading Victorian novels. As she’s about to read more, Ray slowly speaks, telling a story in the few words he can manage: he says that their own daughter planted the chestnut tree from a seedling on their windowsill.
As their lives have changed and their sense of time has slowed, Dorothy and Ray are now better able to perceive the story of life beyond just the stories of people’s interactions with each other. Now they start telling each other a story of the daughter that they wanted but could never have, and how her life is intimately connected to the chestnut tree in their yard.
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Patricia goes through airport security on her way to California and is questioned about her sample collecting kit and a jar of liquid in her bag. Patricia is particularly nervous about the liquid, but she says that it’s just vegetable broth, and the agent throws it out. On the plane, she reviews her speech, knowing that this one is too important to improvise.
Building suspense, the narrator doesn’t explain what Patricia is carrying or why she is so nervous about it. She is clearly uncomfortable and out of place in the hectic world of human society.
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At the San Francisco airport Patricia is supposed to be met by a driver, but she doesn’t see anyone holding up her name. She sits down in the corner, overwhelmed by the constant flow of human activity. She spots several house sparrows flying around inside the building and crumbles up a piece of bread onto the seat next to her. The sparrows approach and gradually grow bold enough to eat, and Patricia sees that they are wearing ankle bracelets reading “Illegal alien.” Patricia laughs at this.
Patricia finds solace through nature even in the sterile environment of the airport. The birds were here first, of course, but people imposed borders and walls that have now made them intruders, or “illegal aliens.”
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Patricia’s driver finally finds her and is incredulous that she doesn’t have her phone on (Patricia doesn’t even have a cell phone) and has packed so little for a three-day trip. Slowly they make their way through traffic to Patricia’s lodging at Stanford. Patricia then spends the afternoon wandering through the campus terrarium, marveling at the variety of trees and collecting extracts to replace those that the TSA confiscated. Standing amid the alien-seeming trees, Patricia stands and listens to them “whispering to each other.”
Patricia has become almost enlightened by this point, communicating directly with the trees and leaving the world of humanity behind. The observation that she has packed so little for her trip shows how frugally she lives, but also suggests that she might not be planning to stay the whole time.
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Adam is placed in a cell and processed. All his family members are dead now except for his brother Emmett, whom he doesn’t speak to anyway after Emmett stole his inheritance. The only people he has to tell about his arrest are his wife Lois and their young son Charlie. Adam calls Lois, who first thinks he is joking when he explains where he is. Once she accepts the truth, she immediately takes action to find lawyers and try to get him out, assuming that he must be innocent. She visits Adam in prison, and he tries to tell her what happened, but she hushes him and assures that she knows he could never do the kinds of things he’s accused of.
Adam’s decades of disguising himself through psychological tricks mean that he is essentially a stranger, even to his own wife and child. Further, anyone who really knew him before his time as an activist is now dead, so the only people close to him are those who met him after he began his new life.
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Douglas is in his own prison cell across town. Every night, he closes his eyes and tries to find Mimi in his mind, to explain to her what he did and why he did it. He knows she’ll find out that he betrayed Adam, but he wants her to know why. Douglas remembers his questioning: the agents said they had all the information they needed and knew who all his accomplices were—they just needed him to identify them. However, some of the pictures they showed him were of people he had never seen before, and he had never heard of some of the arsons they were investigating.
This is another example of people trying to communicate with other consciousnesses in unusual ways, as Douglas seeks out Mimi’s mind. The fact that there are other arsons unrelated to the group shows that new people have been carrying on the same fight, repeating the group’s words in their actions. This suggests that the group’s deeds were not entirely in vain, as they have at least inspired a new generation.
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After two days of silence, Douglas’s captors told him that if he confirmed the face of just one co-conspirator, he could have a reduced sentence, and they would close the case on any fires he admitted to. Douglas thought about this—he knows he won’t last long in prison no matter how long his sentence, but he wanted to save Mimi at whatever cost. Then he saw the investigators’ picture of Adam, whom Douglas always felt was like an outsider to the rest of them, and who had refused to go get help when Olivia was dying. Douglas then decided to identify Adam as “Maple.” This is the message Douglas is now trying to send to Mimi—that he did what he did for her sake, and for Nick, and “maybe the trees.
Douglas made a hard decision, not just sacrificing himself (as he was already lost and knew that he wouldn’t survive prison for long) but also a fellow person in order to save what he considered more valuable: Nick, the trees, and especially Mimi. At the same time, Douglas was also biased against Adam because of Adam’s actions on the night of Olivia’s death.
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Patricia stands at the podium, ready to deliver her speech and looking out over the crowd. She begins, saying that though we’ve learned an incredible amount about the lives of trees in recent years, “our separation has grown faster than our connection.” She then shows various slides showing forest destruction over the years and quotes Rockefeller as saying that he always wanted “just a little bit more.” This, Patricia says, is the problem with humanity that is spelling doom for the planet.
Patricia’s final speech to this crowd of luminaries is essentially The Overstory’s closing argument, as it ties together many of the book’s major ideas. She begins with the notion that human psychology—most notably our constant need for more—has wreaked havoc on our world when it is put into action.
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Patricia pauses, suddenly very nervous, and pours some water into an empty glass on her podium. Then she takes out a vial of liquid, saying that it is composed of plant extracts that she found there on campus the day before. She places the vial on the podium and continues her speech, describing all the incredible chemistry that makes up trees, and then showing slides of some of the strangest and most incredible trees she knows of. She declares that forests have brains of their own, ones that scientists won’t let themselves see because humans only acknowledge intelligence as a human trait.
Again, Patricia’s words introduce more facts about trees to readers. Here, she also reiterates the argument that trees, and even entire forests, have consciousness of their own—and that non-human consciousnesses are just as real and just as important as human ones. We must learn to expand our ideas of what consciousness and value really are, the narrative suggests, because our current limited view is causing untold destruction.
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Patricia continues, veering from topic to topic, and she can tell that the audience is nervous about where she might be headed. She describes the wonder of “thinking green,” and says that if we truly could understand plants, we wouldn’t have to be at war with them; all our interests would be aligned. Then she describes a tree called the “suicide tree” that gives up its life to provide nutrients for its own seedlings. Patricia says she has tried to see the conference’s keynote question—“What is the single best thing a person can do for tomorrow’s world?”—from the perspective of the trees, rather than humanity. Then she pours the vial of extracts into the glass of water.
“Thinking green,” the book implies, is to think communally rather than competitively, like the “suicide tree” that gives up its life to support those around it. This goes against most human societies and even our ideas about nature and survival of the fittest, but Patricia’s findings have proven that there is another side to nature, one that is generous and interdependent. The suspense builds as Patricia continues talking and adding her mysterious extracts to the water.
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Meanwhile Adam is back in his apartment under house arrest, thanks to Lois’s efforts to get him out of jail. He has an ankle bracelet on and isn’t supposed to leave the house. His son Charlie is at Lois’s parents’ house because it distresses the boy to see Adam like this.
Again, the narrative implies that Adam’s wife and son don’t really know him at all, likely because of the psychological façade he has maintained for so many years.
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On the second day of his detention, Adam looks out the window to see a mural appearing on the street below. Cars drive by, drop pools of paint, and then drive through them to make streaks. Slowly an image of an enormous tree appears. Adam wonders why people would do this in his relatively out-of-the-way neighborhood, but then he realizes that they’re doing it for him. Adam goes downstairs and steps outside, wanting to show himself to the artists, but his ankle bracelet goes off and he returns to his apartment. When Lois comes home, she sees the mural and finally realizes that Adam might actually be guilty.
Adam starts to realize that his actions and arrest have become a story that might inspire others. As with the other arsons repeating the group’s words, this street art shows that new people are being inspired and will continue the work, whether through art or with more direct action.
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As she often does lately, Dorothy enters Ray’s room to find him enraptured by the view outside his window. She climbs into bed beside him, takes his hand, and looks out at the backyard, though she knows Ray is seeing much more than she is. Finally, Dorothy asks Ray: “tell me about her.” In a few words, Ray starts to describe their hypothetical daughter. This has been their game this winter, one that Dorothy knows is dangerously close to madness.
Ray and Dorothy continue to tell a human story—their musings on the daughter that they never had—that is closely connected to the story of trees that they observe in their backyard.
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Together Ray and Dorothy think about their daughter and her life, silently envisioning her all through college, back to high school, back to planting the chestnut seedling with Ray as a child. Ray then says, “Do nothing […] no more mowing.” Dorothy remembers a passage from Patricia’s book saying that the best thing someone can do for the land is to do nothing at all—to just let it grow.
The Overstory’s characters offer several possible responses to the environmental crisis, but Ray and Dorothy’s is one that almost anyone can replicate: “do[ing] nothing” and just letting things grow. This may be counterintuitive to how human society usually functions, but the book suggests that just letting life be, rather than trying to control it and hem it in, can have a surprisingly positive impact.
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Adam decides to refuse to name anyone else involved in the arson, though doing so would considerably lighten his sentence. Lois argues with him about this, saying that their son Charlie needs a father as he grows up. Impatient, she asks if Adam would really put someone else’s well-being above his own son’s. Adam realizes that this is the heart of the problem—people are wired to always protect their own at the expense of everyone and everything else. Adam again refuses and Lois storms off, enraged.
Adam sees in his wife’s attitude the human tendency to protect and defer to one’s immediate group. In this case it means saving his family over his friends, but on a larger scale, the in-group can mean an entire species, as humanity prioritizes itself over the rest of life on Earth.
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That night Adam wakes up and sees a huge moon out the window shining down on Manhattan and the Hudson. He looks out over the street and is surprised to see wolves and deer running among the cars. The sight makes him jerk forward and he hits his head against the glass, then falling again and striking the windowsill. His mouth is bleeding now, but he gets up and looks out the window again to see that all the buildings of Manhattan are gone—instead there is just a vast forest, and the Milky Way above.
Again, using vivid and poetic language to describe the wilderness, the book offers a vision of the past that was lost and the glory of a world without humans. At the same time, this could also be a vision of the future, long after humans are gone.
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Adam knows that he must be hallucinating, but he can’t stop staring in awe at the massive trees of the forest. He can see owls, bears, and sea turtles all going about their business here on the island of “Mannahatta.” Adam pauses to check his mouth and sees that he has chipped a tooth in his fall. When he looks up again the vision is gone, replaced by the usual lights and movement of New York.
Mannahatta is the Indigenous Lenni Lenape name for what is now Manhattan, New York. The narrator describes all the wonders of life that do not include humans at all, yet still have their own unique consciousnesses and stories.
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Mimi Ma is in the audience for Patricia’s speech. Mimi remembers reading her book with the others decades before, and Patricia seems very old to her now, but her speech has been piercing and clear. As Patricia nears the end and pours the vial into her glass of water, Mimi immediately knows what she means to do—it’s Patricia’s answer to the same drastic situation that led Mimi herself to arson. All around her, hundreds of people watch in disbelief as Patricia raises her glass, but no one moves or tries to stop her.
This speech finally brings Patricia in direct contact with some of the other protagonists. Here, Mimi recognizes that they are both trying to solve the same problem, to which there is no good solution. Mimi has already been driven to arson, and now Patricia seems to be moving in an even darker direction: suggesting that the best course of action is simply to kill ourselves and thus hasten humanity’s end so that the rest of life might survive.
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Patricia looks down and suddenly catches Mimi’s gaze. As she does in her therapy, Mimi immediately begins exchanging messages with Patricia through her eyes. Mimi begs her not to go through with her plan, but Patricia tells her that she’s thought it through, and that this will at least get people’s attention. Mimi tries to hold her gaze, but Patricia looks back up at the rest of her audience.
Mimi and Patricia have learned similar lessons from their connections to trees, but they take different paths in response to those lessons. Mimi now tries to use her power of wordless communication, which Patricia seems to immediately recognize and understand, but also knows how to escape.
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The narrative returns to Patricia’s point of view. She has one regret—she would have liked to see again the beech tree that she and her father planted, with its little notch four feet above the ground. Patricia raises her glass in a toast to the audience. Everyone is silent and still, but then someone starts shouting. A man in a wheelchair, thin and tall with a flowing beard and hair, rolls up the aisle toward her. Neelay’s shouts don’t make anyone else move, but Patricia feels as if time splits into two branches. Down one branch she toasts to the “suicide tree” and drinks. But down the other—the branch she actually follows—she shouts, “Here’s to unsuicide,” and tosses the cup out over the audience. Then she stumbles off the stage.
This is Neelay’s only direct connection with another of the book’s protagonists, as he confronts Patricia about her impending suicide. Time again acts like a tree here, branching into two at the moment of Patricia’s choice whether or not to kill herself. The branch she chooses in the world of the narrative is to follow the idea of “unsuicide” rather than suicide. Part of this is saying no to the “suicide economy” (as Nick wrote) of endless unsustainable growth. This will mean making drastic changes, but The Overstory suggests that it is the only thing humans can do if we are to survive.
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Quotes
While Adam is finally brought to be tried in federal court, Dorothy, now almost 70 years old, looks out her window at the jungle that has appeared in their backyard. Saplings have popped up everywhere, and the grass is thick with weeds. The whole neighborhood hates them for this. People complain and offer to mow their lawn for free, and the city has written twice threatening a fine. She and Ray have decided to just keep paying the fines and let their little jungle grow. She’s amazed that a little wild greenness can be perceived as such a threat to society.
The Brinkmans’ suburban neighbors echo those who saw the environmental activists as enemies to humanity. Here, this animosity takes place on a smaller scale, but it seems to come from the same subconscious belief system. Again, anyone who dares to place any other kinds of life on equal footing to humans is seen as a traitor to the species.
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There is a knock on the door, and Dorothy opens it to see four young men unloading lawn equipment from a truck. One says that the city is offering to “clean up” her yard for free. Dorothy tells them not to, playing the part of the mad old lady who can’t be reasoned with, and the confused boys leave. Dorothy knows this is just a delay, but that she and Ray will outlast them. After lunch they work on the crossword and then sit in bed together, look at the trees, and think about their daughter.
The Overstory’s characters take many different drastic actions to save the trees, but the Brinkmans’ is one that many people can act on in their own lives. Rather than arson, suicide, or artificial intelligence, people can instead just reign in their desire for control and instead let nature grow wild.
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At Adam’s trial, the prosecution shows pictures of the charred buildings and Nick’s painted words: “COME HOME OR DIE.” They argue that this means an attempt to intimidate the government, which means a charge of terrorism. Adam’s lawyers’ arguments are morally sound but the law itself is clear, and he is found guilty of domestic terrorism. The narrator notes that “the law is simply human will, written down,” and it is human will to destroy every forest, so Adam never stood a chance. When asked to deliver any final words to the court, Adam says, “Soon we’ll know if we were right or wrong.” He is given 140 years in prison.
Here, the book reiterates the point that the law is only about human interests, so the powers that enforce the law will always oppose those who seek to protect the interests of other kinds of life. Adam chooses to take his stand here, arguing that the law itself is immoral and illogical because it upholds the human desire to destroy nature, which is leading to our own extinction. His prison sentence is almost comically long for a human being, but not much compared to the patient growth of a tree.
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