The Trees (2021) by Percival Everett

Book Review

The Trees (2021)

by Percival Everett

   The Trees is another 2022 Booker longlist pick written by an American author.  Everett, a Professor of Literature at USC, is a classic author where I am just amazed to be hearing about for the first time after a nomination for a major literary prize.  Dude teaches in Los Angeles, where I live.  He has been publishing novels since 1983.  He is African American, and many of his books contain edgy satirical themes, which are some of my favorite themes in literary fiction.  None of his books are about newly divorced urban intellectual dads or nervous urban intellectual expectant moms.   And yet, literally had never heard of him before he got nominated this year. Shame on me!

   The Trees is an interesting blend of crime fiction, satire and allegory that takes off after the mysterious deaths of two Emmett Till-adjacent rednecks in a small town in Mississippi.   The local sheriff is non-plussed when the state of Mississippi sends up two African-American agents to assist with the investigation into the lost corpse of an African American found with both dead racists.   The plot spins out from there, written from a variety of perspectives but mainly shifting between the two state investigators and the local sheriff.  There is also a female African American FBI agent who joins the fun, an ancient local woman who has compiled files on every lynching in the history of America (including police shootings, which she says, "count as lynchings."

  Everything stays pretty close to the parameters of a work of southern crime fiction written from a contemporary African American perspective until... they don't.  It is, of course, this divergence from traditional genre constraints that elevate The Trees into Booker longlist territory, a la Paul Beatty's 2016 win for The Sellout.  The plot really goes off the rails in the third act and the last fifty pages is bonkers mccrazy stuff.  Readers will have to abandon any expectations formed by the semblance of the beginning of The Trees to a more or less conventional work of crime/supernatural/fiction and adapt to what Everett is really saying but I found The Trees provided an almost visceral satisfaction upon completion.  I don't think it will make the longlist, but I'm glad to have heard about Everett- I will certainly be taking a look at his back list this fall and winter.