Athena, Holding Your Hair, Whispering In Your Ear

For me a few are enough, one is enough, none is enough. This is not for the many, but for you. We are audience enough for each other.

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A beautiful long form meditation on trees and how people relate to them through the lens environmental activism and, ultimately, eco-terrorism. The book follows nine characters through a series of sometimes connected narratives, touching on various events both real (the Stanford Prison experiment) and interpolated (combining several historical "tree sits" into a confabulated one for maximal drama), but always with a light touch and a respect for the characters interiority.

The book's core preoccupation is the environmental movement that began in the 60's and 70's, with most of the action culminating in the 80's and 90's. It is, perhaps, unsurprising that the book has a deeply hippieish sensibility, but that sensibility extends far beyond tree-hugging environmentalism. It also dips into numerous other preoocupations of the 60's and 70's counterculture like alternative psychology; Asian art and poetry; and the extended analogy between computing and organic life.¹ It uses all of this machinery to mostly good effect creating a multithreaded, mutually reinforcing set of themes that bind the stories together even though some of them barely intersect narratively.

The writing is generally good and workmanlike, and occasionally drops little apothegms that approach genuine beauty ("the visible is only a placeholder for real desire"). Unfortunately, when the author attempts longer-form high literary sections he tends to stumble, repeat himself, or spool out and turn to non-rhetorical plot devices to rescue the wooly prose. For example, late in the book, one of the characters gives a long speech at a conference where the author strives for rhetorical and emotional fireworks, but effectively repeats huge sections of what the book has already explored. It forcibly reminded me of John Galt's radio speech at the end of Atlas Shrugged (a needless and repetitive resume of the argument so far, in case the reader was too dull to grasp it the first few times). The passage is only made interesting by suspense injected towards the end about the fate of one of the characters, which was resolved in a way that is largely unexplained, and, in my opinion, betrayed the author's doubts about the efficacy of the speech as an emotional set piece (he felt the need to prop it up with a little artificial drama).

But those are really quibbles. The author's characterization, plotting, and thematic work are all generally careful and very satisfying. While he's not an exceptional stylist, I found the book rewarding in almost every other way. He also addressed his subject matter in enough depth that it prompted me to do a little more research about it, which is always a good signal for fiction. Recommended.