The Trees

Oh, spare me the pious moralizing. You're all still trying to read *The Trees* as if it owes you a coherent message about race or justice or the American soul. It doesn't. It owes you nothing but the exquisite pleasure of watching itself fall apart. Let me be clear: Everett isn't writing a novel *about* lynching. He's writing a novel that lynches the novel itself. The corpses don't just multiply—they become a structural joke. A black man is murdered in Mississippi, and then another white man turns up dead, and then another, and the bodies keep replicating like some grotesque literary virus. This isn't realism; it's metafictional metastasis. The text is mocking our desire for resolution, for catharsis, for meaning. Consider the detective plot. It's a sham. A parody. The "mystery" isn't whodunit—it's *why does the novel refuse to be a novel*? The answer is obvious: because Everett knows that any traditional narrative about racial violence would be a lie. A lie of coherence, of closure. So instead, he gives us a text that bleeds irony, that doubles back on itself, that makes the characters whisper about their own fictionality. And the narrator? Unreliable doesn't begin to cover it. The narrator is a trickster, a shapeshifter, a ghost in the machine of the story. One moment we're in a grisly crime scene, the next we're in a slapstick comedy. The tonal whiplash is the point. Everett is saying: *You want a story about America's original sin? Fine. But I'll give it to you in a funhouse mirror, where every reflection is a distortion, and the only truth is that there is no truth.* You want meaning? The meaning is that the novel is a constructed object, a puppet show, and we're all watching the strings.

Let us dispense with the treacle of sentiment. Everett’s *The Trees* is not a novel about justice, nor about the spectral horrors of America’s past. It is a masterclass in the spectacle of wasted emotional energy, a parade of souls who have surrendered their reason to a frenzy of vengeance and grief. Look at the detectives, the townsfolk, even the victims—do they pause to ask themselves: *What is within my control?* No. They seethe, they rage, they chase phantoms. The killings are merely the external; the internal chaos is the true tragedy. The novel is a mirror held up to the undisciplined mind, and what we see is a populace that would rather burn itself alive on the pyre of history than master the one thing it can command: its own judgment.

Let’s not mince words: Percival Everett’s *The Trees* is not a whodunit—it’s a who-gets-to-be-a-victim, and the answer is always the same. This novel rips the mask off the American justice system, revealing it as a patriarchal theater where Black bodies are disposable props and white womanhood is the sacred, untouchable center. Look at the opening: a white woman dead in her bed, and suddenly the entire machinery of the state lurches into motion. But where is that machinery when Black women are brutalized? Where is the outrage, the investigation, the cosmic revenge? Nowhere. Because in this patriarchal order, a woman’s value is only currency when she’s white, and her pain is only a tool for white men to flex their power. Everett exposes this hierarchy with surgical precision: Black women in this novel are spectral, voiceless, or dead—because their stories are never allowed to be central. The trees themselves? They’re not just Emmett Till’s vengeance. They’re the natural consequence of a system that commodifies and silences women’s bodies, then calls it justice. This novel isn’t a ghost story. It’s an autopsy of a patriarchy that eats its own daughters and calls it tradition.