Percival Everett

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The Trees by Percival Everett (2021)

Having already read and enjoyed three novels by Percival Everett, So Much Blue (2017), Erasure (2001), and James (2024), when I saw The Trees at the local bookstore when I’d been in a reading rut, I picked it up, knowing it would be a guaranteed entertaining read.

The Trees Percival Everett shortlisted Booker Prize 2021

Percival Everett had already written 21 novels by the time he was shortlisted for The Booker Prize in 2022, won that year by an equally satirical novelist Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka for his The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (my review).

Everett was more of a cult writer, well-known among regular readers, but not a mainstream name. His experimental style, genre-bending and intellectual satire made him more popular in literary and academic circles than in popular fiction. The author describes himself as “pathologically ironic“.

That began to change when The Trees was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2021 and his novel Erasure was adapted into the film American Fiction (2023). And then his 2024 novel James (a reimagining of Huckleberry Finn from Jim’s perspective) won the US National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

The Trees

So knowing the kind of writer Everett is, I read this without looking at the blurb. It was ironic to read about what is a murder investigation into the soul of America’s violent past, immediately after I finished Killers of the Flower Moon, the story of the targeting of the Osage people after they came into significant wealth.

The Trees is about the mysterious murders of white men in Money, Mississippi, an allegorical reckoning with centuries of racial terror inflicted upon Black communities. It is written in lean, precise and economical prose, like a script, unfolding like a crime story with mild, intriguing suspense driving the plot forward.

Copycat Crimes & Condemnation

Photo by cottonbro studio Pexels.com

Every time a man is found murdered, another body appears alongside them, a man who resembles Emmett Till, a young black boy lynched in the same town 65 years before. Locals find him the perfect scapegoat, creating fear and paranoia among the community, until the dead man reappears at the site of a second murder.

Confusion reigns, except for the team from the MBI (Mississippi Bureau of Investigation), who have been sent in to assist, though met with resistance by the local sheriff and townsfolk.

Satirical elements appear in his depiction of law enforcement and the media: their incompetence and self-interest are exaggerated to reveal systemic failings. As a spate of copycat killings spreads across the country, the investigation begins to have wider implications.

Remember Their Names

There is a great grandmother Mama Z who has been compiling files on every lynching that has happened in America since her father Julius Lynch was a victim in 1913, she is remembering their names, lest anyone forget.

When I write the names, they become real, not just statistics. When I write the names they become real again. It’s almost like they get a few more seconds here.

The book I read has an interesting cover, it looks like a dartboard, or a target and the circles are yellow, green, black and red, the colours of the Black Panthers, an influential militant black power organization from the 60’s whose members confronted politicians, challenged the police, and protected black citizens from brutality.

Witness and Memory

The Trees refers to the place where many were hung and I’m guessing that the fruit of those trees, represented on the book cover by twin peaches is a reference to all those who died who could not continue to reproduce. Trees represent historical memory, they are witness to the persistence of racial violence.

One thing I notice is how much easier it is to read about a violent past than it is to watch a twenty first century depiction of it. There’s no over dramatisation of the violence or needless exaggeration of the characters. While here on the page, there are an abundance of literary devices in use to deliver themes of racial violence and historical memory.

I certainly hope they don’t make this one into a film, I would not wish to see it, but I admire the ability of the author to demonstrate the effect of turning the tables and making a white population consider the trauma of having such atrocities committed against them.

Further Reading

Read an Extract from The Trees by Percival Everett

Percival Everett interview: ‘How long did it take to write The Trees? Sixty-three years’

Author, Percival Everett

Percival Everett lives in Los Angeles, where he is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.

He has been nominated for the Booker Prize twice – he was shortlisted for The Trees in and shortlisted for James in 2024 – and is the author of over 30 books since his debut, Suder, was released in 1983. His works include I Am Not Sidney Poitier, So Much Blue, Erasure and Glyph.

A Guggenheim Fellow and Pulitzer Prize Finalist for his novel Telephone, Everett has won the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, the Academy Award in Literature, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, and the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for Fiction. In 2021, he received the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award at the National Book Critics Circle Awards and in 2024 won 4 major literary awards including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with James.

You’ve said in the past that reading is one of the most subversive acts we can perform. Can you elaborate? 

There’s a reason that oppressive regimes often resort to burning books. No one can control what minds do when reading; it is entirely private. We make of literature what we need to make. This is true of art. There is nothing more challenging to an oppressive government than a populace that can read, and therefore think.

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James by Percival Everett

This was my third novel by Percival Everett, having very much enjoyed So Much Blue (2017) and Erasure (2001). I knew James would be quite a different premise because it is connected to the well known, classic adventure story of Huckleberry Finn.

I have a brief sense of familiarity with Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, I may have seen episodes of a television show when I was a child. I wasn’t sure if I had ever read the book it is based on. I don’t think so. Boy and the Sea Beast by Ann de Roo was more my kind of adventure story.

Set in the period just before the American civil war is about to break out, we meet Jim, a black slave, waiting outside for corn bread. Two boys, Tom and Huck are trying to play a trick on him and plan to steal something from the kitchen.

A Boy, A Young Man or an Adult

I admit that for the first 60 pages I thought Jim was a young boy too. When on page 62 he asks after his wife and child I shift my perspective. The way the two boys were interacting with him (pranking him) seemed appropriate towards another boy, not a man.

In a world where slavery exists, relationships have a perverse hierarchy, one that is demonstrated from the opening scene of the novel. When I go back and close read I see where there were signs I missed.

Jim helps collect wood and takes a risk by putting some aside (hidden) for different members of his family and community.

The weather remain unseasonably cold and I found myself pilfering wood for not only April and Cotton, but also my family and a couple of others. I was terribly concerned that the wood might be missed, and that fear worked its way into reality one Sunday afternoon.

He hears that the owner is planning to sell him to a man in New Orleans. Without waiting for morning Jim decides to escape, though he feels bad about leaving his family. He is determined to find a way to raise the funds to free his family from slavery.

“You can’t run,” Sadie said. “You know what they do to runaways.”

“I’ll hide out. I’ll hide out on Jackson Island. They’ll think I’ve run north, but I’ll be there. Then I will figure out something.”

He heads down to the river, the Mississippi, crosses to an island where he finds a safe place to rest a while. To his surprise he encounters the boy Huck, who is running from his abusive, drunkard father Pap. It is not good news, because Huck has left things in a way that people will believe him to have been murdered. And now Jim is missing.

Language and Expectations

Whenever Jim is around Huck, he speaks in a certain way, a kind of dialect. We know that Jim has had access to the house library in the past, that he can read, write and articulate, but he must suppress his ability to understand intellectually and more importantly hide his capable manner of his speech, in order to keep him safe from those whose racist ways of thinking will be threatened by a man showing superior comprehension.

When Jim gets bitten by a snake and spends a few nights in a fever, his dream time ramblings put him at risk. He starts having conversations with Voltaire and other French philosophers, a pattern that emerges whenever he enters dream state. (And typical of Everett to throw in French literary motifs – they add both comic relief and increase the danger surrounding the protagonist). His subconscious is unable to hide the knowledge he has acquired over the years.

François-Marie Arouet Voltaire put a fat stick into the fire. His delicate fingers held the wood for what seemed like too long a time.

On the inside cover there is a map of the river and the locations on his journey south where they will have different encounters, where they become separated for a while. Each time they are separated, sometimes for a significant period, they manage to find each other again.

How To Trust a Man

It is not easy for Jim to trust another man. The people he encounters may be slaves or white men, or men passing as white, or white men. Each encounter presents a situation he must navigate, an aspect of the society within which they live, how different people are.

He has withheld information from Huck that might have benefited him. He considers telling him, but fears he might be angry and betray him, causing his capture.

One of the most uncomfortable encounters he has is with a travelling minstrel show, a band of white men who put on a show and sing to people, songs that mock black people. While the man who runs that show says he does not believe in slavery, he “hires” Jim as a tenor for his show. This presents the farcical and most dangerous situation as he is be painted to be a black man as if he were a white man.

The most costly, traumatic episode for Jim comes following the help of four men he encounters at the riverside. They ask what they might bring him and he asks for a pencil. It is a most dangerous thing for an enslaved man to have on him or for another to source for him and the cost will be high. They also understand its power and want him to have it.

To Read and Write, A Subversive Act

The discovery of abandoned books and paper is one of the most significant discoveries Jim makes. It marks the beginning of a new stage in his life. He is going to write. About his life and its meaning. His first attempt is with a stick, the pencil he obsesses over and eventually acquires will bring further elucidation.

I really wanted to read. Though Huck was asleep, I could not chance his waking and discovering me with my face in an open book. Then I thought, How could he know that I was actually reading? I could simply claim to be staring dumbly at the letters and words, wondering what in the world they meant. How could he know? At that moment the power of reading made itself clear and real to me. If I could see the words, then no one could control them or what I got from them. They couldn’t even know if I was merely seeing them or reading them, sounding them out or comprehending them. It was a completely private affair and completely free and, therefore, completely subversive.

A Turning Point

There comes a point where Jim has had enough experiences and encountered sufficient people that his purpose becomes stronger and clearer and his fear dissipates. The mood is changing as groups of young people begin to amass to fight in the war. At this point he turns around and heads back north, from where he came. His purpose changes, becomes clear, his resolve strong.

It marks a shift in his relations with those around him, including Huck. He has encountered help and harm from different quarters, he has taken risks and overcome adversity. He moves from “running from” to “running towards”. His language changes and he begins to take on the character of a leader.

I thought it was an excellent novel and collection of encounters that confronted many of the issues and circumstances of the society they lived in at the time and the dangers a runaway slave had to navigate in order to seek freedom. How the journey changed him and the inevitability of violence taking a place in the life a man, not prone to violence, but brought to it by the oppression and injustice surrounding him.

I love that we are beginning to see a narrative shift in stories, in terms of the perspective from which stories are told and the nuance of character developed in those who have been sidelined or typecast.

From Book to Film, Writing Slant

I’m looking forward to what the partnership between Percival Everett and Taika Waititi will create, in bringing this story to the big screen, a creative partnership just announced this past week.

With my pencil, I wrote myself into being. James

Percival Everett, Author

author of James, Erasure, So Much Blue

Percival Everett is the author of over thirty books, including So Much Blue, Telephone, Dr No and The Trees, which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize and won the 2022 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize.

He has received the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the PEN Center USA Award for Fiction, has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. His novel Erasure was adapted into the major film American Fiction.

The novel James (a reimagining of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, told from the perspective of the enslaved Jim) was published on 11 April 2024. He lives in Los Angeles.

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Erasure by Percival Everett (2001)

I read this after Percival Everett’s excellent So Much Blue (my review) so my reading was influenced by having read that earlier novel, which I enjoyed more.

I did really enjoy this, however I enjoyed So Much Blue more on account of the type of reader I am, because it takes you outside of America to Paris and El Salvador – that novel was about the growth of the protagonist as a result of those experiences, whereas Erasure is more of a commentary on American culture and racial bias.

Revenge Can Backfire

American Fiction film classic satire Cord Jefferson book cover young smiling black boy child holds a toy pistol to his head wearing checked shirt and jeans with braces photo in black and white the word Erasure in yellow text

In Erasure, a deeply satirical novel of the publishing industry and its biases; we have a Black American writer ‘Monk’ as protagonist, whose current work isn’t gaining traction.

I called my agent to check on the status of my novel and he had no good news for me. Three more editors had turned it down. ‘Too dense,’ one had said. ‘Not for us,’ a simple reply from another. And, ‘The market won’t support this kind of thing,’ from the third.

‘So, what now?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know what to tell you,’ Yul said. ‘If you could just write something like The Second Failure again.’ The ice clinked in his glass.

‘What are you telling me?’ I asked.

‘I’m not telling you anything.’

He feels resentful of some of what he is seeing gain popularity (fiction about the Black community using performative and pejorative racial themes and language); and he has had enough of his work being criticised for being too white.

He is middle aged and his mother is showing signs of needing additional care as her dementia begins to endanger her life. His sister and brother are both Doctors as was his late father. He visits his mother and sister, to learn his sister is being harassed by pro-life protestors every day and his mother has been lighting fires inside – a box of papers his father asked her to burn.

The Novel With A Novel

In his angst about work he writes a revenge novella using the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh, one that uses every terrible trope about his race and sends it to his agent. The agent thinks it is a joke, he is instructed to send it out to prospective publishers anyway.

I remembered passages of Native Son and The Color Purple and Amos and Andy and my hands began to shake, the world opening around me, tree roots trembling on the ground outside, people in the street shouting dint, ax, fo, screet, and fahvre! and I was screaming inside, complaining that I didn’t sound like that, that my mother didn’t sound like that, that my father didn’t sound like that and I imagined myself sitting on a park bench counting the knives in my switchblade collection and a man came up to me and he asked me what I was doing and my mouth opened and I couldn’t help what came out, ‘Why fo you be axin?

I put a page in my father’s old manual typewriter. I wrote this novel,, a book on which I knewI could never put my name:

That 80 page novella, initially entitled My Pafology is contained within the novel Erasure. When I started reading, I skipped ahead to see how long it was. It is a unique experience to read a novel within a novel and one that is…well, I don’t really know how to describe it, because it is so deliberately offensive – and so then we witness the author watch his act of protest backfire as he is made to kind of account for what he has done.

Dealing With A Parent With Dementia

In the meantime he takes his mother and her maid on a short holiday, which results in hastening things forward there, dealing with a tragedy and coming to terms with aspects of the family that had been hidden.

Photo furkanfdemir Pexels.com

As in So Much Blue, where we learned that Percival Everett has a bit of a fascination for secrets, so too are they present here. He explores their impact on those whom they have been withheld from.

It is a thought provoking novel and there are many references to other writers and artists and thinkers within, like clues to the things that the author might have been thinking about while writing, that can take the reader down various rabbit holes. Like this one:

* * *
D.W. Griffith: I like your book very much.
Richard Wright: Thank you.
* * *

Going Down A Rabbit Hole

I learned that film director D.W.Griffith, in 1915, directed a controversial, silent film, Birth of a Nation, that depicted previously enslaved African Americans as uncivilised, and that order was restored to the chaotic South by the noble KKK.

African American author Richard Wright wrote Native Son, a book with a similar premise to My Pafology, one that may or may not undermine the humanity of the African American. James Baldwin objected to it, believing it confirmed the damning judgment on African-Americans delivered by their longstanding tormentors.

All that to say there are complex references and issues contained within Erasure that might require more close reading.

It also satirises the book prize industry, when our protagonist finds himself in a dilemma having been asked to judge a prize.

The Movie American Fiction

The book has recently been made into a film which I have not seen, entitled American Fiction. It was written and directed by Cord Jefferson and won an Academy Award (Oscar) for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2024. Jefferey Wright plays the role of the author ‘Monk’, he received a nomination for Best Actor in the Academy Awards 2024.

I was aware of this, although I did not look at any reviews or trailers, but did wonder how much of the depth of reflection could ever be portrayed in a film.

Highly Recommended. Read the book before seeing the film.

Have you read Erasure or seen the film American Fiction? What did you think?

Further Reading

New York Times: The Book Behind ‘American Fiction’ Came Out 23 Years Ago. It’s Still Current.

NPR: Advice from a critic: Read ‘Erasure’ before seeing ‘American Fiction’ by Carole V. Bell

Percival Everett, Author

Percival Everett is the author of over thirty books, including So Much Blue, Telephone, Dr No and The Trees, which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize and won the 2022 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize.

He has received the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the PEN Center USA Award for Fiction, has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. His novel Erasure has now been adapted into the major film American Fiction.

His latest novel James (a reimagining of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, told from the perspective of the enslaved Jim) was published on 11 April 2024. He lives in Los Angeles.

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So Much Blue by Percival Everett (2017)

This is my first read of American author Percival Everett, a prolific writer I have been aware of for a few years and wanted to read. So Much Blue is partly set in France so I chose to read that first. I loved it. It’s a multi-layered novel with different strands contributing to an eventual shift in the main protagonist.

A Triple Timeline Narrative

It starts out light and comical with a number of laugh out loud moments and as the story develops, the reflections grow deeper and the experiences become more risky, it becomes more serious.

There are three timelines and the narrative switches between the three, as all are important to the present situation, where the protagonist, artist Kevin Pace is painting a large 12 X 21 foot canvas in his shed and will not show it to anyone, not his wife Linda, his best friend Richard or his children. The painting harbours his secrets. In a rare interview Percival said:

“I’m interested in secrets: how important they are, and how much secrets contribute to the truth of something.”

House – Present Moment

The chapters entitled House are set in the present. Pace is fifty six years old, a recovering alcoholic and abstract artist, living with his wife Linda and their two children Will (12) and April (16). He is experiencing a kind of reckoning with himself. It has something to do with the locked shed where he works on a ‘maybe masterpiece’ he is creating, and events of the past that he is reconciling with. At the same time, right now, there is a situation with his daughter, which he is not managing very well.

I considered myself a significant and singular failure as both a husband and a father.

Paris – Ten Years Ago

Musée Carnavalet Me Marais Paris History Madame Sévigné de Seve

To understand who he is and what is behind his painting, we read about two life changing experiences he went through, that have contributed to who he is today. The first, in the chapters entitled Paris took place ten years ago when he was 46 years old; a brief affair with a very young Parisian woman. Though it is one of his secrets and regrets, it was the first time he had experienced something and it contributes to his later understanding and growth.

It could have been argued that ten years earlier I had succumbed to a banal midlife crisis, but now I was falling victim to something far worse, a late-life revelation.

1979 – 30 years ago

The second experience was a covert trip to El Salvador in 1979 with his friend Richard, while they were still university students. They travelled there to look for Richard’s brother Tad, who was missing, believed to be involved in bad business. The two boys went there without knowledge that the country was on the brink of civil war and witnessed terrible things, that would haunt Kevin for years to come. The 1979 chapters are a wild ride and a shocking wake up call to the young men.

If only I had the excuse of misunderstanding why I was there, perhaps then some of the guilt would not exist, perhaps then I would not have blamed myself to this day, perhaps then I would not long for a piece of me that died that day. But my friend had come to me, depressed, fearful, lost, and he had asked for my help. I offered it willingly, if not completely innocently or selflessly. That was 30 years ago. It was May 1979.

Alcoholic or Workaholic

As an artist, he is interested in colour and its representation and so we too come to understand what that means to him. Though we are not able to see what he creates, we can imagine. Ultimately, the art is not enough and he must revisit some of the past in order to realise what he must do to make amends.

It was far more socially acceptable to be a workaholic, the obsessed artiste, than it was to be a drunk, but using an old neighbour’s phrase, I’m here to tell you that one addiction was as bad as the next.
The real sadness was that I drifted away from my life and children because of alcohol, but instead of finding the current back to them when I ceased, I camped out on an uncharted island in the middle of myself. Nonetheless, selfish as I was, things were better. I was more trustworthy. An absentminded artist is more forgivable than an alcoholic.

So Much Blue After the Reds, Browns and Ochres

I found reading it very vivid and could imagine the scenes so well. The character of Kevin is flawed but self-aware, he is aware of his failings and there will be transformation of sorts by the end.

I looked across the dining room at a small canvas of mine. There was no blue in it. It was often pointed out that I avoided blue. It was true. I was uncomfortable with the colour. I could never control it. It was nearly always a source of warmth in the underpainting, but it was never on the surface, never more than an idea on any work. Regardless that blue was so likeable, a colour that so many loved or liked – no one hated blue – I could not use it. The colour of trust, loyalty, a subject for philosophical discourse, the name of a musical form, blue was not mine. And by extension green was not mine. In fact, in Japanese and Korean, blue and green have the same name. As blue as the sky is, the colour came late to humans.

Brilliant. Look forward to reading more.

‘A picture is a secret about a secret’. Diane Arbus

Further Reading

NPR Review: So Much Blue is Everett’s Best Yet by Michael Schaub

New York Times: In ‘So Much Blue,’ a Married Painter Spills Secrets by Gerald Early

Percival Everett, Author

Percival Everett is the author of over thirty books, including So Much Blue, Telephone, Dr No and The Trees, which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize and won the 2022 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize.

He has received the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the PEN Center USA Award for Fiction, has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. His novel Erasure has now been adapted into the major film American Fiction.

His latest novel James (a reimagining of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, told from the perspective of the enslaved Jim) was published on 11 April 2024. He lives in Los Angeles.