My book report: Day of wrath

 Percival Everett, The Trees, Graywolf Press, 2021

The cover of this novel says it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer.  After binge-reading it in two days I was mystified that it did not win either, but I have a theory.  The committees were unable to agree on a book about mass murder that is at once appalling and funny as hell.

Mass murder, lynching, genocide in slow motion, whatever you call it, it is the nightmare from which America struggles not to awaken.  You know the subject from the first words, "Money, Mississippi," where nothing of significance ever happened but the torture and murder of Emmett Till in August 1955.  When the book opens the only living participant is Carolyn Bryant, who accused the fourteen-year-old of flirting with her and is now an old woman sharing a shotgun shack with her son, his wife and their children.  And then the killings begin.

I won't try to describe the plot because watching it develop is one of the book's great joys.  Everett's love of the act of writing is visible in every character (including the fun he has with names) and every description of a dying Southern town that was never really alive.  Almost imperceptibly the story grows darker and angrier, documented with a list of lynching victims since 1913, many unnamed, a surprising number Chinese, a few of them famous (Leo Frank, Matthew Shepard, Philando Castile).  He quotes in full the lyrics of "Strange Fruit," the Lewis Allan song made famous by Billie Holiday ("Southern trees bear strange fruit") although many of these people, like Till, were not hanged from trees.  And you read David Walker, Annie Walker, David and Annie Walker's 4 children, and then you have to go back and read the whole list.  Aloud.  A work of fiction and a historical chronicle, as if Everett knew that in a few years an effort would be made to erase them all and much more behind the smokescreen of shutting down DEI.  As if the terrible list of names were not diverse and inclusionary enough.  Michael Brown.  Dr. Chee Long Teng.  Giuseppe Venturella.  Tamir Rice.  They should be read out every year, like the victims of the 9/11 attacks.  And this list starts only in 1913, when Mama Z, the book's most compelling character, began writing it.  

And of course, you laugh, too, because at the climax of the national day of reckoning Everett takes us to the Oval Office for a slapstick appearance by the man he must have assumed back in 2021 would never occupy it again.  What an absurd and awful country.  All nations are weird in their own way.  This is us.

To quote Chapter 71 in its entirety:  "Ho to Hind:  'What the hell is going on?'"