Building a Community of Life: Interpretation of Richard Powers’ The Overstory from the Perspective of Spatial Theory

Richard Powers is well known in the contemporary American literary world and he has been hailed as “America’s most promising novelist”. One of his novels The Overstory (2019) is an ode to nature. It is based on eight stories in which humans and trees depend on each other and save each other, presenting a vast, long and subtle world of trees and human society with alienated relationships, and then thinking about the relationship between man and nature. The novel, with its clever design and inventive language, won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was a New York Times bestseller. Therefore, this article tries to use Lefebvre’s spatial theory and Tennis’s concept of community to analyze the process of building a community between man and nature in The Overstory, excavate the social root behind the superficial contradictions in the story, and explore the significance of building a community of life in modern life.