The Trees by Percival Everett Review

"The past is never dead. It's not even past." - William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

“Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees” - Billie Holiday, Strange Fruit

In the small town of Money, Mississippi, a dead white man is found brutally killed in his home with a dead black man nearby holding the white man’s balls. But then the black man’s corpse disappears from the mortuary and later another white man is found dead - with the same dead black man nearby, also holding this new dead white man’s balls. And then the white body count keeps going up, with the same mutilation, with the same dead black corpse nearby. Something odd is happening down south…

Broadly, I liked Percival Everett’s novel The Trees but it definitely has some significant flaws in the narrative that took away from my overall enjoyment of the book. I’ll say SPOILERS at the top because I’m going to mention details so if you’re planning on reading this then stop here, and, if you’re on the fence, I’d say it’s worth checking out - at the very least it’s original, accessible and also undeniably compelling, but know that the ending is, well, shit.

OK - SPOILERS here on out.

The novel is about righteous vengeance for all of those non-whites over the past 100 years and more who were tortured and lynched by American white racists for no other reason than having different coloured skin, and those white racists getting away with their crimes. So the white murder victims in this story are the descendants of those original racists (who, more often than not turn out to conveniently be racists themselves, thereby “justifying” their deaths), particularly the initial victims, who were related to the killers of Emmett Till, a 14 year old black boy who was lynched in 1955 for allegedly offending a white woman, Carolyn Bryant.

So it’s weird that Everett decides to mix in a lot of strained comedic attempts amidst this intense subject matter - to its detriment, I think. The blurb on my edition mentions the novel containing “knockout comedy” and satire “by way of South Park”, but I didn’t find any of Everett’s “comedy” the least bit funny, or even necessary or appropriate, particularly as it mostly pertains to making the white characters caricatures with silly names, doing and saying silly things, in comparison to the black characters, who have real names and behave dignified.

For example, the white characters have names like Pick L. Dill, Peck, Wheat, Donald (who’s of course an imbecilic member of the KKK), Helvetica Quip (who sounds like a Wes Anderson character), Hot Mama Yeller, Junior Junior, the incompetent racist deputy Delroy Digby, Jethro Tull, and Mike Ditka (Everett seems to think giving his characters famous people names is a riot). There’s the Doctor Reverend Cad Fondle and his morbidly obese wife Fancel, who sit around talking about Jesus and eating junk food, and all of them - except Quip, who helps our heroic detectives in their investigation - are bumbling idiots making racial slurs and muttering things about guns, Jesus, etc. They’re cartoon characters of the right wing. Speaking of which, there’s the absurdly evil senator Hickory Stonewall Spit and the unconvincing, and frankly embarrassingly unfunny, portrait of Trump at the end too.

In comparison, there are the black characters: Ed Morgan, Jim Davis, Herberta Hind, Gertrude, Damon Thruff - all normal-sounding names, all of them written as intelligent, capable professionals. Granted, Mama Z is unusual, but she’s also written as intelligent, witty, capable, etc. even despite her advanced age.

I guess that’s the “Swiftian satire” the blurb talks about but it comes off as condescending, humourless, and exactly the kind of one-sided view a cartoon liberal would put across, which is how Everett comes off.

More than that, it feels rather sad, given that this low level characterisation is exactly what white racists did to black people back in the day. Having a black writer do the same thing but to white characters feels small and petty - it seems to me that the right way to behave is not to lower yourself to their level but to set a better example by showing why it’s wrong to denigrate a group of people with offensive stereotypes, rather than propagate that behaviour.

This eye-for-an-eye, Old Testament-style justice that Gertrude and Mama Z are enacting also doesn’t make me root for them or see their cause as anything different from how white racists went about lynching minorities back in the day. I get that the crimes of the past are infuriating to learn about now but they’re also in the past - how does dredging it up like this and behaving in the way you’re condemning the historical criminals did make our present day characters better? Especially as being racist, while reprehensible, isn’t reason enough to kill someone, nor is being related to someone who once murdered someone and got away with it.

The story is generally well-written - it’s very easy to read, the narrative has a good flow - although I noticed a few things this book has in common, oddly enough, with The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. One of the criticisms I remember levelled at Brown’s runaway bestseller was the way he described his protagonist Robert Langdon as looking like “Harrison Ford” and this being held up as an example of his inept writing, that he had to rely on prefab descriptions like this.

Yet Everett does the same thing in his novel, describing Morgan and Davis as looking like Shaq and Sam Jackson (and, later on, another character like Isaac Hayes), and his book is on the shortlist for the Booker Prize! The novels are also superficially similar - they both have short chapters and are both sensationalistic genre stories. I just thought it was interesting how disparate the perceptions of both novels are despite doing a lot of things similarly.

The Trees is quite the page-turner though and I was interested in the mystery. It’s increasingly compelling as the same pattern keeps happening and the bodies keep stacking up. Everett does try to make it seem plausible up to a certain point - we find out Gertrude and her group stole corpses from a company that processed them, and they were responsible for the first three murders at least.

But then things really escalate in the last hundred pages or so and I had the creeping suspicion that Everett wouldn’t be able to explain it all satisfactorily. Especially as, in one scene, the detectives discover the body that keeps appearing at crime scenes IS a match for the battered corpse of Emmett Till from 1955. How could that be possible???

Well, turns out Everett doesn’t even try. The entire ending is a confusing mess and he completely ignores details like the corpse looking like Emmett Till. I’m not someone who dismisses a story because the ending was crap - if the journey had enjoyable moments, and it did, then I’m still apt to think it was worthwhile, and I do think that - but not even trying to make sense of the preceding events did leave me feeling unsatisfied. It also cheapens the whole narrative by coming off as lazy, like Everett was throwing in these exciting twists and turns without providing any payoff in the least or having to work to make any of it fit. The story for the most part is well told except for that awful ending that’s the literary equivalent of a shrug.

Was it implied that Damon the academic writing down the names of the deceased in Mama Z’s house was somehow resurrecting their ghosts who were then enacting vengeance, and just somehow knew to target the “right” people (ie. racists)? Even if that was what Everett was going for, which I don’t think he was though I can’t explain what he was shooting for, what an insane explanation!

The Trees (rubbish title by the way - too forgettable and bland) is a very 2020s novel in that it takes a very easy moral stance by pointing to the old white men of the past and calling their clearly evil actions evil while the minority characters are unimpeachably “good” despite behaving questionably themselves. It’s like a lot of media that’s out there right now with equally simplistic messaging - moral violence is just, racism is the worst except when it’s against whites, etc. It reads like an impotent left-wing fantasy/wish fulfilment that exploits outrage for outrage sake - its politics lets it down.

That and the extremely weak way in which the novel concludes are the worst parts of The Trees. But I also flew through it because the mystery grabbed me, the story was more entertaining than not, and it’s something I’d never read before - it’s certainly original, if poorly constructed. In a strange way, the flaws themselves are interesting failures too and add to the book’s appeal. And, for all that, I’d still say it’s worth reading as it’s quite the unique experience - just don’t expect any of the comedy to land, or for any of the mystery to make sense in the end.