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91 pages 3 hours read

Richard Powers

The Overstory

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2018

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Chapters 6-9

Chapter 6 Summary: “Douglas Pavlicek”

For the last two years, the life insurance payout from the death of Douglas Pavlicek’s parents has funded his lifestyle. Now, with funds dwindling, Douglas has agreed to take part in the Stanford Prison Experiment and make $15 a day. In a realistic touch, he is dragged from his house by the real police. His neighbors spot him being read his rights, and his smirk does not convince them that this is not real.

The police take him to a prison and rechristen him Prisoner 571. The guards and inmates are all volunteers being paid to take part in the study. The guards’ liberal use of violence shows that they are playing up to their roles. At lights out, they beat one particularly truculent prisoner. Early in the morning, Douggie is ripped from his bed for a surprise inspection. By the second day, he is worrying about the experiment but reminds himself that he only needs to survive 14 days. That day, a group of prisoners revolt. Despite the shouted reminders that this is a simulation, the guards put down the protest with reinforcements and fire extinguishers. The guards begin to remove the prisoners’ privileges, such as smoking and bathroom use. Douggie is forced to do hundreds of push-ups.

No one ever breaks character and Douggie begins to understand the inherent danger. He doubts whether he can last the full two weeks. When one prisoner begs to be released, his request is denied. The prisoner breaks down mentally and is eventually dragged away. Douggie cannot help but resent the man, and in the process hating himself. The prisoners are visited by the chaplain and made to write letters home; Douggie is forced to write to his mother. A prisoner organizes a hunger strike but cannot convince everyone to join him. Douggie just wants to be nonaligned, but this is impossible. The next day, the experiment is called to a halt. Douggie struggles to remember who he was a week before; the other participants react emotionally. Guards defend their actions; prisoners vent their fury. Douggie demands that the scientists be prosecuted; he is paid $90 and driven home, where he sits indoors all day, watching TV and drinking beer. A report on Vietnam compels him to enlist.

In the following years, Douggie flies hundreds of trash hauler missions as a loadmaster. Dehydration occasionally causes him to faint. He drinks and experiments with drugs in Thailand as the war winds down; the Thai economy begins to crumble but he considers sticking around after the war. On a mission into Cambodia, the plane is hit. The crew jettison the cargo of ordinance and fuel as a fire eats through the aircraft. Douggie is hit by shrapnel and falls from the plane. His parachute is caught by the wind. His sidearm discharges on landing, blasting out his knee, tibia, and foot. His parachute becomes ensnared in the jungle canopy, and he hangs unconscious 20 feet above the ground. He is found by a group of locals, who came to worship the tree in which he is caught. The tree has saved his life, they say. He is drugged and driven to a hospital.

Douggie is given a medal; his actions saved the lives of his crew. But “the Air Force has no use for gimps” (87), so he is sent back to America, where he pawns his medal. He struggles to maintain a relationship or hold a job. He drinks heavily and, in Idaho, tends to horses while living alone. Trying to talk to people, he creates potholes into an isolated road to make cars slow down. One day, a red Dodge Dart skids to avoid the craters. The woman hears one word from Douggie and speeds away. The memory of her stays with him during the long winter months alone.

When the summer comes, he quits the job and has no idea what to do next. He drives west and stops one night to urinate. Seeing a light in the woods, he investigates. He finds a devastated landscape that reminds him of the war. The thin strip of trees on either side of the road have hidden a ripped-up world that “resembles a gigantic plucked foul” (90). Douggie asks a gas station attendant why the national forests have been stripped bare. He mistakes unprotected national forests for protected national parks. The idea infuriates him, particularly the thin line of trees that masks the devastation. He takes a plane ride to see the full extent of the devastation and spends the next few days at his friend’s house silent. Taking a job planting fir trees, he tries to repair the damage. He spends the nights sleeping in planter camps with hippies and illegal immigrants. For years, he plants seedlings, begging each one to outlast humanity. 

Chapter 7 Summary: “Neelay Mehta”

Neelay Mehta and his Indian immigrant parents live above a bakery in San Jose. One day, Neelay’s Gujarati father brings home a computer. Father and son build the computer together; they pause to examine the microprocessor that the father builds at his job. The computer will do whatever they want it to do, Neelay is told. Assembly takes several days. Their early forays into programming delight Neelay and set the course for his future. He learns to code. He makes worlds, small at first, but they soon grow.

The computer is upgraded more regularly than the family’s 20-year-old car. Rather than the typical obsessions of a teenage boy, Neelay thinks constantly of code. He also reads plenty of books, particularly science fiction. Father and son work on the computer constantly; Neelay makes his father a computerized kite for a festival and makes it dance to Gujarati music. Neelay becomes so obsessed by the project that he begins to work on it in school. He reacts angrily when a teacher takes his notes, and each day he must ask to have his notes returned. His frustration boils over, and he asks her for his “damn notebook” (103). She sends him home without it. On the way home, Neelay considers his options. He climbs a tree and worries about how ashamed his parents will be that he swore at a teacher. He even considers throwing himself from the tree, thinking that an injury might win their sympathy. Deciding against it, he climbs down from the tree but slips and lands heavily on the concrete below.

Neelay awakes in a hospital. He feels his body strapped to the bed and hears his mother sob. Over the coming days, people visit him. His entire body is in agony. Eventually, he realizes he is paralyzed. The injury has a terrible impact on his parents. Days later, his teacher visits. After a discussion about class, she returns the notebook. Neelay thanks her, but she runs from the room before she can respond.

At age 17, Neelay uses a wheelchair, but puberty has made his body grow to an unwieldy size. He grows his hair long and rarely eats. All his days are spent in front of the computer. Neelay is accepted to Stanford two years early, where he has been visiting the computer science department on campus for years. Together with his friends, he sees himself as “evolution’s third act” (108). At first, Neelay gives away his projects and makes them open source. He becomes famous for his games; on the internet, no one knows he uses a wheelchair. When people begin to commercialize his world, he rebels and continues giving away his work.

While working on his latest masterpiece, he takes a break and explores the campus. He accidentally runs over a tourist’s toes and, while escaping the situation, finds “the most mind-boggling organism he has ever seen” (110): a Queensland Bottle Tree. He begins to consider the other trees around him and is astonished by the strangeness and their beauty. He is inspired to make a new game, an epic project that will demand he drops out of school. He will need to sell his current project to eventually fund the new magnum opus. He begins work immediately. 

Chapter 8 Summary: “Patricia Westerford”

In 1950, young Patty Westerford loves the animals she makes from discarded junk. Having not talked until the age of three, she empathizes with the silent creatures. Her hearing is impaired by a deformed inner ear, and she slurs her words when she talks. Nevertheless, she is her father’s favorite. She accompanies him on work trips; she reads his lips as he drives, holding a constant question-and-answer session. Nature is her primary concern, and her father teaches her that it can be just as crafty and curious as humans. He teaches her everything he knows about trees, and she learns that “real joy consists of knowing that human wisdom counts less than the shimmer of beeches in a breeze” (116). They plant a beech tree together, an experiment they will monitor closely.

Patty begins to learn her father’s trade. He gifts her Ovid’s Metamorphosis on her 14th birthday and the stories—of people becoming other things—delight her, particularly those in which people turn into trees. During the winter of her 15th year, Patty’s father dies in a car accident. She reads from Ovid at his funeral and hoards all his possessions.

High school is difficult for Patty, who rejects jewelry and dresses. Her new stepfather knows better than to try to reform her. Just before she heads to college, she remembers the beech and the experiment, which proves her father right. She replants the beech—marking it with her pen knife—and leaves to study botany. At Kentucky State University, she blossoms into someone else. Her dorm soon fills with plants. Other girls nickname her Plant Patty and turn her into a pet project. But she works in the college green house and reads the books from her father’s collection and “never exactly becomes a swan” (121). By senior year, she knows what she wants to do and is surprised to find that she has suitors. One, Andy the English major, captures her attention.

In graduate school, she studies forestry and teaches classes on botany. But by the second year, she begins to dispute her professors; they envisage a different kind of forest (cleaner, more efficient) than the forest of her dreams. Eventually, she becomes convinced that “trees are social creatures” (122). She wants to use a spectrometer to measure the output of trees, making it her dissertation. As the world descends into chaos, she tends to her trees. She feels her father’s presence in the woods and delights in the hard work.

Plant Patty becomes Dr. Pat Westerford, her gender disguised in professional circles. Her work with the spectrometer has proved successful and she begins a post doctorate, living on a meagre budget but delighting in the work. When insects infect her sample trees, she re-orientates her research: she discovers trees’ ability to produce insecticides while under attack, as do nearby trees. This validates her theory of trees as social creatures. She publishes and passes peer review; her work becomes famous. But a group of male scientists try to debunk her theories and soon interest in her findings cools. At one conference, the audience is so hostile to her presentation that her hearing issues and speech problems return.

Her employer lets her go and she struggles to find new work; without access to a lab, she cannot vindicate herself. Desperate, she becomes a substitute high school teacher. She considers suicide and cooks a meal with poisonous mushrooms but cannot bring herself to eat it. She finds herself rejuvenated and free to experiment and discover anew.

Patty spends the next few years underemployed. She takes odd jobs, anything that pays the bills while she conducts experiments of her own. Foraging for food, camping outside, she takes notes of everything. Near Las Vegas, she walks through an aspen forest. She hugs herself and cannot help but cry at how far her journey has taken her. Patty studies the marks in the tree bark and understands that the trees are all a single clonal creature, one of the oldest, largest living things on earth. Patty returns to where her car is parked, near the lake where Winston Ma camped with his daughters. Elsewhere in the country, Nick, Douggie, Ray, Dorothy, and Neelay are all going about their business. Though they are not yet aware, their lives are already connected. The sight of a housing development carved out of the aspen forest hits Patty like a blow to the chest.

By the early 1980s, Patty heads to the American northwest to see uncut forests. She walks through the silent woods, down into a basin, past all the rotting vegetation and animal life. Death surrounds her, “oppressive and beautiful” (133). She thanks the forest as she passes through it. Eventually, Patty finds works with the Bureau of Land Management. She becomes a wilderness ranger, preserving and protecting the natural world. From her cabin in the woods, she spends 11 blissful months working in the forest. During this time, unknown to Patty, a new article is published that restates her old experimental findings. Patty comes across two researchers in the woods one day, imitating owl calls and eliciting responses from endangered species. The scientists photograph the bird and then it flies away. She meets the scientists again three weeks later, and they talk about the forests. One of them attended her talk, many years before, and recognizes her. He wants to show her the progress that has been made on her work since she has been away.

By the end of the decade, she is working with the team of scientists in the forest. Many supporting studies have vindicated her work. Their work proves the importance of the decaying logs and cluttered forest floors. Patty studies Douglas-firs, the roots of which fuse together and join vascular systems. The trees become one giant network, proving her theory. Patty is invited to teach, but she declines. She grows close to Dennis Ward, the research station manager. They eat and walk together, talking science constantly. They become engaged.

Chapter 9 Summary: “Olivia Vandergriff”

Olivia Vandergriff wades through a thick snowstorm, returning to her campus boarding house. She imagines dying in the blizzard, a possible relief from her failing academic career. Her initial interest in actuarial science had faded, replaced by a fascination with sex, drugs, and parties. She is welcomed home by her housemates’ insincere hugging. Olivia announces that she “got divorced today” (146) and is met with muted congratulations.

The long procedure is ended—a relief, putting behind her a brief mistake. Her parents had raged at her marriage to Davy; she and Davy had been determined to prove everyone wrong, to prove that their marriage was not just a fling. But their relationship had been built on a foundation of lies—she had pretended to like flowers and lied about her parents’ professions. The marriage turned abusive, and the divorce had lasted 10 months. Olivia lays in bed, smoking marijuana and listening to trance CDs. She ignores a ringing phone.

Olivia assures herself that she can still be “a semi-bad girl for a few more months” (148). After that, she will get her life back on track. On the other side of the world, the Berlin Wall is being torn down. Once high, Olivia sits at her desk and writes in her song book. She is almost overcome with emotion, wanting to leave her attic room and hug everyone. She washes herself in the makeshift sink in the bedroom corner. Afterward, she lays in bed. Olivia reaches out to turn out her lamp, and her damp hand pats the cheap socket. She is electrocuted to death. The house lights dim, and her housemates carry on with their lives. 

Chapters 6-9 Analysis

Much like the opening chapters of the novel, chapters 6-9 focus on the individual lives of the human characters. However, there is an increasing sense that these people are all occupying the same world and are, in some way, interconnected. When Patty is walking through the forest, for instance, the narrative explicitly pauses to reference the other characters and their specific chronological and narrative positions at that moment. Patty knows nothing about them, but their lives are—or will be—linked together. In this respect, Patty’s chapter provides the most thematic exposition. In her narrative, the novel explores the way all trees are interconnected, sentient beings that form part of a greater network. Their connections live deep underground and out of sight; until Patty researches the issue, conventional knowledge suggested that each tree was an individual with its own interests and goals, disconnected from the other trees surrounding it. But, as Patty proves, these individual creatures are part of a greater natural milieu. In this sense, her research becomes a sub-textual commentary on the narrative. What appear to be disparate, separate strands of story are part of a wider narrative. These individuals are connected by their association with the natural world, whether implicit or explicit. Their thematic link is just like the roots fusing together to connect the trees; these individual strands become the titular overstory.

But while these characters are connected, they do have their own idiosyncrasies. They are individuals in their own right and their relationships to the natural world differ. Patty’s bond with nature is clear: it is an obsession passed down from her father that occupies her entire academic and professional life. But characters like Neelay and Douggie seem less obviously connected.

For Neelay, the natural world becomes an inspiration for his digital creations. Robbed of his ability to walk, he builds worlds and wonder in the digital space of his computers. But searching for stimulation, he happens across the variety of strange and alien plants in his college garden. They seem otherworldly, and the inspiration is real and immediate. For a man who spent his existence exploring the binary world of computers, these plants provide him with a desperate need to share his wonder with the world. They become the vehicle through which he can reach out and connect with others.

For Douggie, the relationship is less academic. A lost and wandering youth, he only found purpose in the military. But when he was thrown from a plane during the Vietnam War, his life was saved by the tree that broke his fall. To the local people, it was a special tree, one worth worshipping. For Douggie, it was the beginning of a period of uncertainty. He spends his post-Vietnam years searching for meaning, asking why he was saved. He lacks the language and the discourse to interpret his emotions through the lens of the natural world. This issue is only made explicit when, driving along a road, he discovers the devastation left by the logging companies. The thin veneer of acceptability—the tree line left beside the roads to hide the devastation—represents society’s hidden ills. To Douggie, who has struggled to express his traumatic past, nature becomes the perfect metaphor for the violence he sees around him. He is militarized by what he sees, just as Neelay is inspired. Though the characters could not be more different, they are brought together by a shared language and experience, interpreted through the discourse of the natural world. 

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