The Trees

Percival Everett has spent decades building one of the most quietly radical bodies of work in American fiction, and with The Trees he detonates it all in the most spectacularly controlled way imaginable. This is a novel about race, history, and the particular American pathology of racial violence, and it arrives wearing the costume of a southern Gothic murder mystery while doing something far more explosive underneath. The book is funny in the way that great satire is funny: the laughter catches in your throat because the thing being laughed at is monstrous, and because the laughter itself is a form of grief.

The setup is deceptively simple. Two Black detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, Jim Davis and Ed Morgan, arrive in Money, Mississippi, to investigate a series of murders. Money is not chosen casually. It is the town where Emmett Till was kidnapped and murdered in 1955, and that history saturates every page. The victims in the novel are found next to a bloated, unidentifiable Black male corpse that vanishes before anyone can examine it. The local sheriff, a man named Jetfry, is among the first victims. His wife, Granny C, is a woman whose family tree connects directly to Till’s killers. As more white men in Money begin dying, the vanishing corpse keeps reappearing, and no one can say what it is or what it wants.

What Everett has built is a machine for processing historical atrocity through the mechanisms of genre fiction, and the machine runs on a kind of savage, precise fury. The novel does not sentimentalize the dead, does not offer easy catharsis, and does not let its readers off any hooks. It demands that you sit with the weight of what it is saying even while it makes you laugh at the absurdity of its small-town grotesques and bureaucratic buffoons.

Character Arcs

Jim and Ed are a marvel of compressed characterization. Everett does not build them through backstory or interiority in the conventional sense. Instead he builds them through voice, through the dry, exhausted precision of men who have seen too much and learned to keep their reactions behind a professional veneer. They finish each other’s sentences, share the same mordant humor, and communicate in the shorthand of people who trust each other completely. Their partnership is one of the few genuinely warm relationships in the novel, and it grounds the reader in something human even as the narrative tilts toward the allegorical.

Mama Z, an elderly Black woman who has been quietly recording the names of lynching victims for decades, is the novel’s moral center in a different register altogether. She is patient, purposeful, and terrifying in her clarity. Her project, which involves a ledger of thousands of names, connects the novel’s local horrors to the full breadth of American racial violence. Her arc does not resolve in any conventional way, which is precisely the point. The work of bearing witness does not conclude. It accumulates.

The white characters, including the detectives’ nominal boss, the Mississippi Bureau higher-ups, and the small-town officials, are rendered with a satirical exaggeration that sits just close enough to recognizable reality to sting. Everett does not mistake caricature for characterization, but he does use exaggeration to strip away the comfortable complexity that often allows readers to keep such figures at a distance. These men are not complicated tragic figures. They are the ordinary instruments of an ordinary horror, and the novel refuses to make them interesting in ways that would distract from that function.

Pacing

The novel moves with the rhythms of a procedural thriller, and Everett handles those rhythms with the confidence of someone who has studied the genre carefully enough to know exactly which conventions to keep and which to subvert. The mystery mechanics work. Bodies accumulate. The detectives investigate. New figures arrive with new information. The pace accelerates as the scope of what is happening becomes clear.

But Everett also deploys a formal inventiveness that keeps interrupting the thriller momentum in precisely calculated ways. Lists of victims’ names. Bureaucratic memos. Interludes that pull back to a wider historical and geographical frame. These interruptions are not failures of pacing. They are the novel’s argument about what pacing itself is for, about what we expect narratives about racial violence to do and how those expectations can be weaponized against us. When the novel slows down to make you read a list of names, it is asking you to slow down for a reason.

The final third of the novel expands in scope dramatically, moving from a local murder mystery to something that feels more like a national reckoning. This expansion is handled with considerable skill. The transition never feels forced, because Everett has seeded the larger frame throughout, and because the logic of the narrative, a logic rooted in history rather than plot mechanics, demands it.

Deeper Thematic Exploration

The central image of the novel, a corpse that cannot be identified, that keeps reappearing, that refuses to stay buried, is one of the most precisely constructed metaphors in recent American fiction. It is the return of the repressed in the most literal possible form. American culture has spent decades trying to bury the specific body of Emmett Till, to contain it within the past, to move beyond it, and The Trees insists that this is not possible and has never been possible. The wound does not close because the wounding has not stopped.

The novel is in active conversation with the literary tradition of the American South, with Faulkner and O’Connor and the whole apparatus of southern Gothic fiction. It borrows from that tradition’s formal strategies, its grotesque humor, its sense of the past as a living presence, its understanding that place is never neutral, while simultaneously interrogating the racial assumptions that tradition has historically carried. Everett is asking what southern Gothic looks like when it is written from inside the experience it has historically observed from outside.

There is also a sustained meditation on the nature of justice, on what justice even means in the context of crimes for which no mechanism of accountability has ever functioned. The novel does not offer resolution on this question. It offers instead a kind of dark clarity: the history is the history, the names are the names, and the question of what to do with that knowledge is one that the living must answer.

Style and Voice

Everett’s prose is spare, exact, and laced with a comic timing that lands with the precision of a surgeon. The dialogue, in particular, is extraordinary. Jim and Ed speak in a register that manages to be simultaneously deadpan, funny, and laden with the weight of everything they are not saying. The exchanges between them feel effortless in the way that only very precisely calibrated writing can feel effortless.

The novel also moves between registers with remarkable fluidity. The satirical grotesque of the small-town scenes, the procedural dryness of the investigative sequences, the lyrical solemnity of Mama Z’s passages, and the almost surreal quality of the corpse’s appearances all coexist without the novel ever losing its grip on tone. This kind of tonal control is a rare technical achievement, and it is what allows The Trees to function simultaneously as entertainment and as something closer to a moral indictment.

The formal inventiveness, the lists, the memos, the shifting perspectives, is never showy. Every structural choice feels motivated by the novel’s larger project, which is to find a form adequate to the subject matter. That adequacy is not about matching the gravity of the subject with a gravity of style. It is about finding a form that can hold grief and rage and dark comedy in the same space without collapsing any of them.

Verdict

The Trees is a magnificent, necessary, and formally audacious novel from one of the most gifted writers working in American fiction. It belongs on the same shelf as the great American satirical novels, in the company of books that use laughter as a vehicle for truths too large and too painful to approach directly. The Booker Prize shortlist in 2022 was one of the few moments when the machinery of literary prizes seemed to be functioning correctly. Everett deserved the prize, and the fact that the novel exists at all is a gift to readers willing to sit with its demands. For anyone who wants to understand what American literature can do at its most ambitious and most unflinching, this is essential reading.

FAQ

Is The Trees based on a true story?

The novel is fiction, but it is rooted in the documented history of racial violence in the United States, and most specifically in the 1955 murder of Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi. The fictional murders and detectives are invented, but the historical context, including the names, the locations, and the broader record of lynching, is grounded in documented fact. Mama Z’s ledger of victims’ names functions as the novel’s direct acknowledgment of that documentary history.

What genre is The Trees?

The novel operates primarily as a satirical thriller with strong elements of southern Gothic fiction. It uses the conventions of the murder mystery, including detectives, crime scenes, and an escalating body count, as the scaffolding for a broader literary and political project. Calling it simply a thriller would be accurate but incomplete. It is also a satire, an elegy, and a formally inventive work of literary fiction.

How does The Trees handle the subject of Emmett Till?

With precision and purpose. Everett does not dramatize Till’s murder directly. Instead he uses Money, Mississippi, and the families connected to that history as the setting for a novel about the long consequences of unaddressed racial violence. Till’s name and story are present throughout, but the novel’s argument is less about a single historical event than about the pattern of violence of which that event was a part.

Is the novel difficult to read emotionally?

It is demanding. The subject matter is painful, and Everett does not soften it. At the same time, the novel’s dark comedy and its propulsive thriller plotting provide a kind of momentum that keeps it from becoming purely oppressive. Many readers report finding it both upsetting and darkly exhilarating, which is precisely the tonal tension Everett is working toward.

Why was The Trees shortlisted for the Booker Prize?

The 2022 Booker shortlist recognized The Trees for its formal ambition, its thematic scope, and the quality of its prose. The Booker jury cited Everett’s ability to hold comedy and tragedy in productive tension, and the novel’s willingness to engage with American history in ways that felt both urgently contemporary and deeply literary. It lost to a novel by Sri Lankan-British author Shehan Karunatilaka, but its inclusion was widely seen as overdue recognition for one of America’s most consistently distinguished novelists.

How long is The Trees?

The novel runs to approximately 320 pages in its hardcover edition, making it a relatively compact read for the scope of what it attempts. The density of meaning in each page means it rewards slow reading, but the thriller pacing means that fast reading is equally possible. It is the kind of book that repays a second pass considerably.

Is The Trees suitable for book clubs?

It is an exceptionally rich book club choice. The novel generates substantial discussion on questions of historical responsibility, the relationship between genre fiction and literary ambition, the ethics of satire when the subject is racial violence, and the question of what justice means in the context of unaddressed historical crimes. Groups should expect conversation that goes beyond the book itself into the history it engages.

What should I read before or after The Trees?

Readers new to Everett might benefit from starting with his earlier novel Erasure, which addresses race and the publishing industry with similar formal invention. For historical context, Timothy B. Tyson’s The Blood of Emmett Till provides essential background. Readers who want to follow The Trees with another formally inventive treatment of American racial history might consider Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad or Mat Johnson’s Pym.