colin lavery

To me, few authors come off as thoughtful or as wise as Percival Everett. His brilliance comes through most often in his sharp humor, but it’s clear that he’s also a master technician with great emotional insight, is very well-read in literary and linguistic theory, and most importantly, tells a great story. In short, the perfect writer. Because I hold him in such high regard, my initial reaction to this Southern Gothic, murder-mystery, The Trees, was mild confusion.

The plot is absurd enough to be compelling in its own right, and his humor is peppered throughout, which is always a treat. Compared to his other novels though, the characters were so much flatter; mostly stereotypes rather than people. Everett is so efficient in his writing that it often takes me a day or two to fully appreciate everything he accomplishes in his relatively short books, so I figured at some point I would get the hidden message in this hyper-violent and graphic depiction of racial animosity in the United States. Upon reflection though, the message of this book is straightforward and legible on its surface – a heartfelt middle finger to racist white america.

Almost none of the characters are developed beyond what the plot or comedic timing demands of them. I’ve read five of his other novels, all of which featured first person narration, whose ponderings guide us through the events of the novel. The Trees is the most plot-driven of his that I’ve read. He moves from third-person narration focused on separate groups of main characters to news broadcasts of presidential speeches that feature the N-word. One chapter is just a list of names of real life lynching victims in the United States.

The main plot centers around the investigation of a horrifically gruesome series of murders. In each instance, the victim or the victims – exclusively white racist men – are found severely beaten, strangled, and wrapped in barbed wire, with their throats slit to near decapitation and their testicles missing. The testicles are invariably found in the hands of a Black or Asian man’s corpse, which also appear at every crime scene, though their bodies appear to have been spared from the bloody deaths that their white counterparts experienced.

Despite the grotesque subject matter, the dialogue feature’s Everett’s normal wit and deadpan humor. Even the characters have funny names, like Reverend Cad Fondle or Herbie Hind. Most of the story is set in Money, Mississippi, the town where Emmett Till was murdered. The first three victims in the book are the fictional descendants of the real men who were acquitted for Till’s murder. We learn later on that these deaths were planned revenge killings for Till’s death, but those who executed the racist descendants become alarmed when copycat killings begin happening across the country. Even Congressmen, many of whom really are descended from racists or are actively racist, are not safe by the end.

By depicting all of these white racists in the most two-dimensional, stereotypical way possible, Everett is refusing to let anyone off the hook. When we get glimpses of the American South in this book, it’s still the impoverished place that time has neglected since Till’s lynching, and the novel does not care to know this world or its characters beyond that. Whatever is human in them is there for comedic or slightly dramatic effect; at one point, a racist widow mourning her husband’s death chooses to “look at” a science magazine because she didn’t want to read about the intellectual elites in People magazine.

Humanizing them further would demand a level of sympathy or understanding that Everett is not willing to extend. A refreshing take. One of the hallmarks of the Trump era, which is explicitly the setting of this novel, was the onslaught of mass media trying to understand the appeal of his blatant xenophobia. Most of this just ended up being really cringeworthy, the “friendly Klan member next door” writing that masquerades as class analysis minus any discussion of the policy decisions that created this reality. To all of that, Everett seems to be saying, “no.” There are real people who hold these racist beliefs and act violently on these beliefs all across this country. In The Trees, Everett is reminding us not to overcomplicate things, that the world will be a better place without these people in it.

Of course, this novel has some interesting commentary on history and the written word as well. This is a Percival Everett, after all. If there is a hero in the story, it’s the jittery professor, Damon Thrush, who may or may not be responsible for the broader trend of revenge killings. He meets an informal historian of Money, Mama Z, Who has recorded every lynching in America since her birth in 1913. He’s hardly in the book at all, as far as page count or words goes, and even he doesn’t seem to understand his role in the wider happenings of the story most of the time. He was summoned for his smarts, to make sense of the nonsensical. It’s never clear whether he will be capable of the task that history has bestowed on him.

Damon’s feelings largely track with Everett’s own ambiguous feelings as to the role of history and writing, as he expressed on the literary podcast, Between the Covers. Nearly all of his works are historically informed, pulling in real life people (Sidney Poitier, Ted Turner, to name a few) or events to help contextualize his highly satirical storylines. He again relies on the real atrocities of American history to serve as a backdrop in this novel, but seems to express some ambiguity as to the practice of written history and the redemptive value of recording all of these events. The Trees confronts the adequacy of language to represent or recall these events in the first place, a doubt which perhaps informs the aesthetic decision to leave the actors in his continued telling of American history as two-dimensional as possible. 

Ultimately, Damon’s role is pretty minor and even the investigation into the initial killings fade into the background as more and more racial violence is avenged across the country. The climax of the book is not a resolution of the murder mystery that brought all of the main characters into focus, but an orgy of violence, gaining in intensity and becoming less discriminatory as it progresses. Everett seems to be saying that the logic of violence can only be understood by its own terms, a flat and cruel expression of hatred, and signals that this could be the ultimate culmination of a nation’s history that has so much violence ingrained. 

On the other hand, by ending the novel in the midst of this violent eruption, he seems to be pondering how cathartic such a revolution would be. After all, the original “victims” were probably among the least sympathetic living Americans for their involvement with the Emmett Till lynchings. And the novel is fun, at heart. Are we to mourn the victims whose murders are being investigated by somebody whose name is, roughly, “her butt”? 
These questions only solidify that Everett has gifted us another gem and mastered another genre of fiction writing, the murder-mystery. It’s simultaneously fun and deadly serious, callous and deeply empathetic, curious and flippant, the kind of book that only a modern master could execute as flawlessly as he did in The Trees.