Trees by Percival Everett
Trees is Anthony Jeselnik’s October book club pick. Once again, I went in knowing nothing about the book. The only novel I’ve read by Everett is James, his pretty brilliant and funny take on Huckleberry Finn. And I loved Stranger than Fiction, the adaptation of his novel Erasure.
Trees is a genre-bending novel, a bit police procedural, a bit (maybe more than a bit) supernatural horror, and a bit political satire. I read the book fast. It’s got a snappy move-along-now pace, useful for any storyteller to master, and an intriguing mystery: various male characters in Mississippi (some of them real, historical people) are found dead, strangled with barbed wire and castrated. Their testicles are found in the clutches of a dead black man laying nearby. The problem is the dead black man appears to have been deceased a very long time, has a passing resemblance to Emmett Till, and keeps vanishing from the coroner’s office and reappearing at the next murder scene.
It’s an irresistible premise. As the mystery deepens, bringing in additional investigators, similar crimes begin happening across the country, and we’re introduced to a variety of characters, including a 105-year-old African American woman who might practice a form of magic and who has spent years cataloging every known instance of lynching in the United States.
I ended up with mixed feelings about the book. As I’ve said many times, it’s character exploration rather than plot that engages me most as a reader, and is generally what I focus on as a writer. I don’t think Everett was terribly interested or invested with character in Trees. For the most part, everyone has the same voice, particularly the outsider detectives. They have a few character quirks that vaguely distinguish them from each other, but that’s about it. For the most part, much of the dialogue is determined to be as deadpan and quippy as possible. That’s clearly a decision Everett made vs a storyteller’s inability to create characters, and I think he made it because the driving goal of the book seems to be creating a broad social satire where the characters are moving through an absurdist play. The absurdism is the point, and all the deadpanning augments it. In that sense, I’d compare Trees to a novel like The Crying of Lot 49. Indeed, there’s quite a bit of Pynchon-esque elements in Trees, particularly the introduction of characters with fairly ridiculous names.
The other issue for me is that I just didn’t find the novel all that funny. The humor was too broad for me, more content with gleeful stereotypes than anything else. The small town Mississippians are all gross, obese hick racists. (There’s a pimple popping scene that could have come straight out of Pink Flamingos, and I admit it’s the first of two times when I laughed out loud). There’s a mostly undeveloped subplot involving a pseudo ninja squad who are partly responsible for some of the initial mystery. Many, many more additional characters are added as the curious phenomenon spreads through the United States, but they exist as little more than names on a page. Then we’re given a sequence where there’s an attack on the White House, and we’re given a pitch-perfect reproduction of a President Trump speech, which is the second time I laughed out loud.
I’m definitely glad I read the book, and I’d recommend it to anyone. It just doesn’t have the sharper ambitions of a novel like Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada.
