The Trees - The legacy lives on.
Percival Everett crafts a page-turner with important historical significance.
I was disappointed today to learn The Trees did not win the Booker prize. They say it is an honor to be nominated, which of course it is, but this novel deserves more. And so does Percival Everett, a prolific author, a writer’s writer, meaning he may have a smaller audience, certainly less than the commercially successful, but is revered for his talent and vision. This novel is no less so and should be read widely.
Why? A subtly crafted, macabre, and also sometimes hilarious murder mystery, populated by a quirky cast of characters you may think you recognize, but not. Combined with a cannot-put-down narrative, the novel is original and compelling. It’s that simple, as it Everett’s prose, deceptively so, told largely through dialogue and shrouded in the gauze of dark truths.
The dead can’t tell no time, cain’t read no calendars. They aint got calendar watches, is what I’m sayin’. He who digs a pit will fall into it, and he who rolls a stone, it will come back on him.
No, it’s not all dialect – just enough to capture small town Mississippi, present tense, as it grapples with gruesome and inexplicably weird murders that seem to tie to the lynching of Emmett Till, a teenager abducted, tortured, and hung in 1955 for allegedly saying something seductive to a white woman.
Till’s mother, Mamie Bradley, insisted on an open-casket funeral, in Chicago, to display to the world his heinous, brutal death, and although the perpetrators were brought to trial, they were acquitted by an all-white jury for supposed lack of evidence. Years later, his accuser recanted.
That’s the story behind this story, but the novel takes place today, anchored by a classically amateur and racist police force, so the case is taken up by the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation. Racial tensions of course ensue, as the mystery deepens
Will the American legacy of racism can ever be repaired?
An engaging cast of characters features the two MBI officers, a fetching quirky diner waitress and a 95-year old witch, among others, in a story line that will keep you guessing, and biting your nails. Ironically, a film about Till’s death releases shortly, but this work of fiction is as much, or more, about how the legacy of the past haunts the culture, and politics, beyond the historical record.
I repeat, there are moments you will laugh out loud even as your stomach churns. It’s a very fine novel for readers who care to understand what ails us. Bravo Mr. Everett.