‘The tree is saying things in words before words’: form as theme in Richard Powers’ The Overstory.

Richard Powers’ 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Overstory, is a very ambitious work which purports to raise the awareness on the life of trees proposing an ecocentered way of being revolving around the enlargement of the concepts of agency and creativity. This article focuses on the formal ways in which Powers has strived to give voice to the-other-than human. Specifically, it presents the structuring of the plot according to the extended metaphor of the tree and its rhetorical functioning according to the parabolic form. These macro principles are translated into two micro choices – the positing of a nonhuman narrator and the present as the dominant tense – that sustain and mirror the novel’s thematic concerns. The close readings of the existential trajectories of two female characters open up to a reflection on Powers’ gender politics.