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| The Overstory, a novel by Richard Powers, published by Norton. |
Jake Tapper is our guide to the smoky backrooms of political deal making in Washington, D.C. Richard Powers takes us to virgin forests in the Pacific Northwest and Brazil where trees communicate with each other.
As noted in previous posts, I’ve been working my through the New York Times best-selling fiction list from the sales period April 22-28. (None of the 15 titles are on the current list.) I crossed off two titles recently; one I finished, the other I gave up on.
The Hellfire Club, by Jake Tapper. This story starts out with a bang, or should I say crash. An inexperienced congressman comes to after an automobile accident (or was it sabotage?), and finds a woman passenger dead. He has no recollection of how she got in his car. Just in the nick of time, a political fixer arrives on the scene and whisks the young politician away.
Then the story, set in 1950s Washington, D.C., shifts into flash-back mode. We learn how the congressman, Charlie Marder, earned his seat (he was appointed to fill a vacancy). We meet his wife (a respected zoology scholar). And we’re introduced to the influential politicians of the era, including Jack and Bobby Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Estes Kefauver. We learn that Marder is a principled academic scholar (history) in his own right. The conflict is set up early in the book: Will he go along to get along in the smoky backrooms of the Capitol, or risk his life in standing up for his beliefs? In other words, will Marder become a martyr?
I can’t tell you. I gave up after 100 pages because the story-telling gets bogged down in detailed attempts to render the 1950s accurately; there’s a clumsy reference to a television remote control called the Lazy Bones. Popular movies and Broadway shows of the time are sprinkled on the pages like salt and pepper. Details like this call attention to themselves and get in the way of moving the plot forward. The Hellfire Club reads more like a history book than a political thriller.
I really wanted to like this, because it’s written by the CNN political journalist Jake Tapper. He shows that he knows how Washington works, with its deal making and log rolling. But the flashback pages, which serve to give us the background on Marder, go on too long and I lost interest.
The Overstory, by Richard Powers. This is the book you have to read. Trees (of all things) are the overarching theme of this novel, which begins with nine short stories. The first involves a multi-generation Iowa family whose farm is marked with an American chestnut tree that dominates the Iowa landscape. Then there’s a Vietnam vet who survives a helicopter crash when he lands in a banyan tree. There are stories about a Chinese immigrant family, a college-age woman who is electrocuted but comes back to life and a scholar whose theories about trees are first celebrated and then later dismissed by mainstream academia.
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| Trees really are wonder-filled creatures. This panel is at The Morton Arboretum in Illinois. |
In the second part of the novel, several of these individuals later find each other and become active in an environmental movement to stop the clearcutting of old growth trees in the Pacific Northwest. Powers writes so movingly about the forest that the trees themselves become characters and we’re sad when these 1,000-year-old creatures are cut down.
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| A child said, "If you want to feel safe, hold on to a tree." |
He is good at explaining, in popular terms, the science of tree growth. You’ll learn that even a dead tree continues for years to sustain life for animals, insects, mosses and microorganisms. This is a very pro-science story. Trees have a lot to offer us, but we have to listen to them. After finishing this book, you’ll be listening hard.
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| Trees show us the future, states this panel at The Morton Arboretum in Illinois.
I have five more books to read:
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