NP but RP and the cover of Vineland, so to speak and allude. Another (major) writer influenced by....

[Mark Kohut]

After I had sent this, I reread the review in my delivered print copy of
the Washington Post.
(That review with the terrif, fitting, Powers' homage-like line: "a
character like a double helix of Rachel Carson and Jane Goodall")

but I just wanted to quote that line in service of telling you of the small
art-like, newspaper design craftsmanship of the
printed copy of Charles' review. I wish you all could see it.

It begins on the front page of the Style section, left column, with a small
embedded cover picture and finishes wide and high AND ILLUSTRATED on the
left side again, p. C4---"it is like a feature story," said my
life-partner--and the line illustrations, a fair number of them, are of
individual tree huggers loving a tree, four or five of them high and all
over and the whole illustrated review is
like an overstory, metaphorically reseen, one might say.

Lovely.

On Wed, Apr 4, 2018 at 6:30 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:

> That's as good a summary of Pynchon's virtues at that length as I could
> ever hope for. Powers himself is very VERY good, and I've just bought The
> Overstory.
>
> The Guardian review reminds me of one of the greatest small, drawn-out,
> enduring pleasures of my life. We had a small vacation cottage in northern
> Maine from the 1960s until 2010. North of Bangor, I-95 -- just extended
> there in the 1960s -- crossed a several-hundred-acre bog, the last trace of
> either a post-glacial pond or a very successful beaver colony: in the
> 1800s. Dead flat, featureless except for a few water-tolerant bushes, with
> aspens and half-drowned evergreen saplings all around the edge, full forest
> rising  beyond.
>
> I imagine the drainage system for the highway must have accelerated
> drying: after the first five years I was sure the forest was moving in,
> sapling by sapling. and started to memorize markers for sightlines: a road
> sign, a distant radio tower, an odd-shaped spruce. For a decade moisture
> conditions were right for sparse wild blueberries, while the trees crept
> inward. The last time I saw it, in 2014, there were just a few clearings
> and extra-wide bits of right-of-way left, with a good number of >50'
> birches visible farther into woods. There was random underbrush, enough
> windfalls to make things nature-ally untidy. In another decade or two, only
> the most sharp-eyed driver -- or any forester -- will notice the tight
> age/size mix of the roadside boreal forest there. The forest everlasting.
>
> On Wed, Apr 4, 2018 at 7:57 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> *Contains a wonderful high-praising review of Richard Powers' new novel,
>> The Overstory, by Charles who just won a major award for criticism and
>> well-deserved, I say. His reviews are wonderfully written, as well as
>> being
>> insightful: https://twitter.com/RonCharles/status/981202559959556097
>> <https://twitter.com/RonCharles/status/981202559959556097>*
>>
>>
>> *https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/mar/23/the-overstory
>> -by-richard-powers-review
>> <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/mar/23/the-overstory
>> -by-richard-powers-review>*
>>
>> *AV:* One of your early influences was Thomas Pynchon’s *Gravity’s
>> Rainbow*,
>> which you first read at age sixteen and which you have “re-read portions
>> of
>> . . . every year.” What is it about Pynchon that you admire since your
>> writing styles are dissimilar?
>>
>> *RP:* More things than I can name. One of the many pleasures of Pynchon is
>> that he doesn’t have a single style, but manages to create a whole
>> panharmonicon of voices and styles and tones and moods and registers,
>> borrowing from high and low, sublime and ridiculous, combining the entire
>> spectrum of what prose can do into a symphonic whole. I can’t pretend to
>> do
>> even a fraction of what he manages, but he has inspired me to open up my
>> own stops and try to vary my own style as much as possible, depending on
>> the needs and purposes of any given scene. Pynchon is also the master of
>> casting the reach of fiction far beyond the concerns of the merely
>> personal
>> and domestic, out into the vast world of human concerns, professions,
>> researches, and industries. I learned from him that the sciences and math
>> and engineering are actually the stuff of human passion and obsession, and
>> that the erotics of knowledge can make for a story every bit as mystifying
>> and thrilling as the old questions of who’s up and who’s down, who’s in
>> and
>> who’s out, and who gets to marry whom.
>>
>> At Bard: http://www.conjunctions.com/about/news/event/?id=133678
>> --
>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>>
>
>