The Overstory

 The Overstory, besides being a catchy title punning on a literary work and the top layer of a forest, is one of the few contemporary novels that Jeopardy contestants have to name the title, whereas other clues usually gave the name of the novel and ask for the author, or some other iteration, but The Overstory is its own level of importance, having won the Pulitzer Prize for author Richard Powers in 2018 and telling a powerstory about preservation of trees and the environment. The story is well-adapted for a movie already already with various story lines and character arcs including a paraplegic Indian computer coding mastermind (think maybe Karl Penn or Dev Patel) with a war veteran (think like Jake Gyllenhaal or Mark Wahlberg or something) with disavowed academic who is just on her own in the wilderness (think Reese Witherspoon) and a loving couple who are unable to conceive a baby but put their efforts instead into the environment (think any iteration of Ryan Gosling- Emma Stone types). I'm not a good writer, but I'm a decent reader, and even an unpolished boor like myself can discern what is exquisite writng with the prose and quality of plot, although not as much dialogue as I would like liked (remember I am a big stickler for dialogue in stories), but the trees and urgency of the global environmental crisis and deforestation drives the plot and gives plenty of impetus for the reader to keep going, as well as plenty of literary references to classic works (Powers is a writer, after all, and makes plenty of references through his characters reading certain books in their storyline like Thus Spake Zarathustra by Nietzsche). I also like that Powers probalby wrote from his own experiences, as he lives in the foothills of the Great Smokey Mountains according to the author bio flap, adhering to one of the earliest tips for writing I ever got: "write what you know." The energy and knowledge of the topic shines through in specific situations, not just about environmentalist tree huggers and geographical descriptions of the Pacific Northwest/ Santa Cruz Mountains near San Francisco but even in just the short one-page summary of the couple going through infertility problems and the pain and agony that couples face trying to decide whether they should continue trying to have a genetic baby or "settle" for adoption (the book characters ponder whether to move to Russia or China where there are ample babies who need parents). 

I also like reading about real (as real as characters in a novel can be) people with real problem, instead of all the narratives and social media narratives we are fed that provide a warped sense of the world nowadays. One can easily be manipulated just staying at home and being fed versions of the world through a screen without ever actually talking to real people anymore (especially with the 2024 US election just a month away now- gulp). I almost looked forward to jury duty this past Monday at my local courthouse, just to see what normal people look like. Instead of a self-selecting population of people I usually run into like at Costco (lots of Indian and Chinese/Korean Americans looking for good deals) or the crowd at Mom's (people taking their diet seriously with fresh veggies and usually vegans), jury duty is just a random group of people who live in the city who are U.S. citizens and have an address on file with the DMV. That's pretty much everybody over the age of 18 (and under the age of 70 for my particular county, it turns out who are exempt from jury duty). And the mix of people was about as ecletic as you could get: not supermodels, not social media influencers, not people whose stories have been curated by the media to get the type of spin that they want, just normal people living their lives, all a little irritated at having to report to jury duty at 8:00AM on a Monday morning (although the $30 in jury pay for the day might alleviate those compliants just a tad) A good portion of people were overweight, a big tell that we're not operating in TV land anymore, this is what America is now, and people reading books, waiting for instructions from a government entity. This is not "normal" in America now; people don't wait and people don't wait for instructions. So as much as I dislike jury duty as a concept and think it's a waste of time for a group of normal citizens to determine the guilt of a random person's incident, jury duty nowadays might be one of the only ways to get people like me to experience a gathering of real people, to be amongst my fellow citizens. And I guess the jury population doesn't include homeless people, so I'm not REALLY getting into certain areas of the population, but this level of working class, middle class, feel like real people to me. I don't care about the problems of the elite or the celebrity class or the manufactured problems of those who don't necessarily deserve all that attention; I care about those in the working class who are ignored and not heard from, like me. I want to hear their "overstory."