Percival Everett’s The Trees is the second of the Booker Prize 2022 shortlist that I have read and loved (the first being Elizabeth Strout’s Oh William, a completely different novel which I also adored).
Percival Everett is an award winning African American author and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. The Trees was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, winner of the 2022 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, finalist for the 2022 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and longlisted for the 2022 PEN/Faulkner award for fiction, so you can see why I had high expectations of it. I can say with joy that every one of my high expectations was met!
The Trees is a darkly comic police procedural crossed with a supernatural race revenge story. Yes, let’s cross a multitude of genres in the one book and do so while making the reader smile sardonically at this treatise on historical trauma. I know! How can he make you laugh at a topic as serious and horrific as racism and the practice of lynching and make you feel outrage as well? That is the genius of Percival Everett.
Everett portrays the white people of the South as both the victims and the butt of the joke, and yes, even in all the horrible everyday racism and ignorance displayed; you laugh {...} It is provocative, fast-paced and morbidly funny and I am recommending everyone get their hands on it and read it for your summer read.
- Jane Cowell
In Money, Mississippi (the site of the murder of young black teenager Emmett Till) white people are being killed in grotesque ways and to add to the horror the same mysterious black corpse is found at every scene. Yes, an already dead black corpse appears, disappears and reappears again. Two big-city black detectives, Ed and Jim, from the M.B.I (Mississippi Bureau of Investigation) are dispatched to investigate. They are not surprised to find that Money is a town proudly upholding the racial codes of the past. Ed and Jim greet the racism they encounter with good humour, noting to each other that Money is “chock-full of know-nothing peckerwoods … living proof that inbreeding does not lead to extinction.” Everett portrays the white people of the South as both the victims and the butt of the joke, and yes, even in all the horrible everyday racism and ignorance displayed; you laugh. We also meet Mama Z, an 105 year-old black woman who has chronicled every lynching since 1913 in a room overflowing with filing cabinets, a woman who is outraged and wanting justice for every life taken in this way. The violence spreads across America with dead corpses being left at every scene and then disappearing. When black FBI agent Herberta Hinds joins Ed and Jim the investigation the fun just increases, with political and spiritual points being made on every page. It is provocative, fast-paced and morbidly funny and I am recommending everyone get their hands on it and read it for your summer read.
Also by Percival Everett:
Erasure: A Novel (2001)
Telephone: A Novel (2020) - Also available in Italian.