“The Overstory” by Richard Powers (post 3): Multiplex narrative structure not for me, so I stopped reading it

This novel’s book flaps describe its intended readership:

“The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range form antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond, exploring the essential conflict on this planet: the one taking place between humans and nonhumans. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.

“The Overstory is a book for all readers who despair of humanity’s self-imposed separation from the rest of creation and who hope for the transformative, regenerating possibility of a homecoming. If the trees of this earth could speak, what would they tell us?”

As Richard Powers said in an interview, this book was written by his multiple personalities. In the words of the book flaps, each personality tells its own “fable,” and these fables are “interlocked.” This kind of multiplex narrative structure is congenial to some readers, but annoying to others.

1. Richard Powers. The Overstory. New York, W. W. Norton, 2018.