The Trees (2021)

My first-time Percival Everett (who just won a Pulitzer, you know): I chose The Trees. I didn’t know how recent it was and barely knew how prolific he is. Aside from all the general raving about Everett, all I knew was that The Trees had something to do with lynching. I had no idea it is basically fitted to the template of a thriller and I had no idea how funny it was going to be. It hit me in much the same way that Elmore Leonard novels can. The pace is fast—over 100 chapters, all very short—and the language is laconic and precise. I suspect Everett may have wanted to call this novel Rise, because that’s the title of the first and only section. The story starts in Money, Mississippi, and mostly it stays in Mississippi, though it ranges wide across the US. Money is where Emmett Till was visiting his uncle in 1955 and where he was murdered. The series of bizarre murders in The Trees starts there. White men are found murdered with Black men. The white men have been severely beaten and had their testicles removed. The Black man—it’s often the same corpse—has been beaten too and is holding the white man’s testicles. Later, the corpse of the Black man disappears from the morgue, only to reappear at the next crime scene. Among other things, this is a great mystery story. Police are baffled. Racial tensions start to run even higher when the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation sends two Black detectives to work the case with the locals. The Trees respects most rules of the mystery / thriller narrative although there are a lot of stretchers along the way increasingly toward the end. I had a great time with this one—once started, reading it was all I wanted to do until it was done. It’s funny, droll and acerbic, and it is full of the pain of the history of lynching in this country. The laughs don’t let anyone off the hook. They just draw you further and further into a landscape that is terrifying when it’s not hilarious. Now I’m looking around thinking about a next Everett.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.