Percival Everett is a seriously playful writer. His 2001 breakthrough novel Erasure lampooned the dominant culture’s expectations of Black authors, in a wonderfully discursive meditation on the angst of the African American middle classes and the nature of literature and art itself (its title is a reference to Robert Rauschenberg rubbing out a drawing by Willem de Kooning). The novel within the novel is a self-consciously absurd parody of “ghetto” fiction called My Pafology. Everett’s latest work, The Trees, now longlisted for the Booker prize, is a harsher, more unmediated satire, a fast-paced comedy with elements of crime and horror that directly addresses racism in a boldly shocking manner.
The setting is a small town called Money, Mississippi, “named in that persistent Southern tradition of irony”. We meet a dysfunctional white family unit with its morose matriarch Granny C, her son Wheat Bryant, and her nephew, Junior Junior. This time it’s the white folks’ turn to be rendered in grotesque caricature, and the actions of this feckless clan are played as broad knockabout, almost like a reverse minstrel show. But an ominous note is struck as Granny C expresses remorse for some past deed: “I wronged that little pickaninny,” she broods. As the tone becomes disturbingly gruesome, a deeper purpose to this cruel humour emerges.
