“Can you smell the negative ions?” The novelist Richard Powers and I were sitting on the banks of a river in the Great Smoky Mountains, and I could scarcely hear him above the water crashing against the rocks. The sound was both violent and serene, like being trapped inside a white-noise machine. These collisions, he said, release negative air ions, electrically charged particles with beneficial health effects.
Sometimes he liked to wade into the river and sit among the rocks, letting the cold water pound his body. I took a deep breath, and the air did, indeed, smell fresher. Was I experiencing a surge in my serotonin levels, or am I just impressionable? Before I could decide, Powers was on to the next wonder.
“Do you know your trees?” he asked. Since the nineteen-eighties, Powers has built a reputation as a novelist of unusual intellectual curiosity and range—as interested in probing the frontiers of technological innovation as in expanding the possibilities of fiction. He’s written prize-winning, best-selling novels about computing, virtual reality, neuroscience, and nonhuman forms of consciousness, often focussing on the process of discovery and invention.
But it was his twelfth novel, “The Overstory,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2019 and sold more than two million copies, that turned him into an unlikely sensation. The book is a five-hundred-page multigenerational epic that follows nine characters whose only overlap is some form of relation.