As well as being a painter and university professor, the American author Percival Everett has been publishing novels, short stories, and poems since the 1980s. Published in 2021, The Trees was his 22nd novel, and it went on to receive significant attention culminating in being shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. In the two years since, the novel has already become the focus of scholarship, too.
Last year, a Humanities special issue on “The Continuing Challenges of Percival Everett” was published. Edited by Anthony Stewart, the collection of scholarship included two contributions on The Trees: Michel Feith’s on humour and outrage, and my own on post-postmodernism and the post-racial in the novel. This special issue also included Anne-Laure Tissut’s discussion of Everett’s “community of voices” in his poetry collection Trout’s Lie (2015), alongside important articles on other areas of Everett’s work from Zach Linge, Leah Abuan Milne, and Joe Weixlmann. Last year’s Everett special issue in Orbit: A Journal of American Literature, edited by Martin Paul Eve and Sascha Pöhlmann, also included an article on The Trees—Arin Keeble and Sheri-Marie Harrison’s on archive, textuality, and genre. A forthcoming edited print collection on Everett’s work will also include a discussion of The Trees by Claudine Raynaud.
As the politics, legislation, and language of racial inequality continue to be defining aspects of America’s national identity, The Trees is a novel already worth revisiting, particularly given its complex approach to history: authenticity andmanipulation, seriousness and irony, outrage and comedy. Its story of a present day Money, Mississippi that sees the body of Emmett Till—the 14-year-old African American boy lynched in 1955 after being accused of offending Carolyn Bryant, a White woman—has lost none of its relevance in 2024. Since the novel’s 2021 publication, an acclaimed dramatisation of the history was directed by Chinonye Chukwu and released in cinemas in 2022; and Carolyn Bryant died in 2023, reigniting discussion of her responsibility for what is a traumatic and pivotal moment in African American history.
In March this year, Anne-Laure Tissut organised a one-day symposium in Paris in which she and I hosted a discussion with international scholars both in-person and online about The Trees. The day also included a screening of the excellent documentary L’écrivain et son double (2023), directed by Alexandre Westphal—a film about Everett’s life and work, featuring long conversations between Westphal and Everett, with particular focus on The Trees. Tissut and I interviewed Westphal after this screening, before interviewing Everett via Zoom. Everett was predictably great company, which was a new first-hand experience for me but which Tissut is accustomed to—after interviewing Everett, organising academic conferences on his work that he has attended, and working with him closely as the translator for French editions of his books for many years. In our hour-long conversation with him, he was at turns wise, serious, and funny—just like The Trees, and so many of his other important works.
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Anne-Laure Tissut (ALT): It’s good to see you, Percival—thank you so much for joining us. It’s only morning for you.
We’ve been discussing your work all afternoon, and also before that. We are delighted that you should be able to join this conversation and answer our questions. You may not have met George Kowalik, who is in the process of turning his PhD into a book that is largely devoted to your work. George kindly agreed to join me to animate this interview process and ask questions to you. So, many thanks again.
Percival Everett (PE): Oh, my pleasure. Thanks for the attention to the work.
ALT: Because of the French version of The Trees that has recently been released, we thought we would focus on this book first and then develop this into a conversation about your whole work.
The Trees has American history and specifically the lynching of Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi in 1955—but also Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968—at its core. There are several illusions in the novel to decisive history. Could you tell us more about the uses of American history?
PE: I don’t know if I would say that they are decisive moments as much as they are—or have become—iconic moments. Moments that become representative of a great number of things. The sadness in American culture is that these are ongoing moments, and are not rare at all. Some of them stand out as moments when there might be a display of cultural or at least national outrage, which is usually marked by a very brief lifespan, but does have some resonance, historically.
George Kowalik (GK): Following on from that, I’d like to ask about your use of temporality, and the relationship between temporality and trauma, which seems to be a central theme or idea in the book. I think it’s nowhere more effectively captured than in chapter 64, when Damon Thruff is writing out the names of victims of lynching throughout history… “scratching” is the term you use in the book, which is a really particular word choice. Painful pasts, difficult pasts, and uncomfortable histories seem to recur in your work—from the literary to the political, the national to the universal. How important are these things to you when you write a book, particularly The Trees?
PE: I don’t know if I can gauge how important they are. They occur rather organically. One can’t hide from one’s own politics, so these things find their way into the work. I wouldn’t say that I intentionally set out to do this ever, but these things are available as not only material, but as the basis of my understanding of the culture in which I live. It seems almost a necessity that they would show up.
ALT: Would you make this statement in the novel—the character Mama Z’s—yours? “If you want to know a place, you talk to its history.”
PE: If it says that there, I believe you. You know I forget what I’ve written. But it may be tautological. What Mama Z is saying… I’m not sure if it’s imparting great wisdom. We do understand places and people by what they have done. And what they remember. In that regard, history is not simply a knowledge of the past. It’s also a knowledge of what the historiography is, how what has been done has been written.
ALT: In the novel, the South is described as being wrecked by racism and also by stupidity. In Alexandre Westphal’s film L’écrivain et son double, you mentioned stupidity and ignorance. In The Trees, there seems to be a full awareness of that. Many of the characters apologise and claim to be unlike the other people in the South.
Some characters gravitate towards archetypes, but stop short of being this. In most cases, they show some redeeming, distinctive individual features—sparkles of humanity that rescue them from being too severely judged by the reader. Could you tell us more about this?
PE: I was employing stereotype quite freely and unabashedly. Part of this novel is a subversive attempt to turn around the camera of stereotyping. Also, it’s important to point out that though the American South gets isolated as a particular villain, these are American characters, and they cannot be judged regionally. They share American traits, which is why the novel branches out to so many places. I was hard pressed to find any State that didn’t have at least one lynching. Perhaps Vermont did not. It’s certainly not the case that I was attempting to be fair, at all, in my depiction of the White characters in this novel.
ALT: The two Black special detectives—Ed Morgan and Jim Davis—have failings. They often admit that they are scared, especially in the South. They feel out of place. Yet, they are good at their jobs, super cops of sorts. I was wondering if this hero kind is also a stereotype or cliché in detective or crime fiction? And does this connect to other narrators in your work, who are highly introspective and aware of their failings but also, in a way, unreachable? They are often so much in control, or too perfect, so to speak.
PE: I don’t know. If that’s what you see, that’s what’s there. I can’t say that any of that is intentional. It might be, and might not be. But what the work represents is what the work is. So if that’s what you read, then I’m confident in standing behind it.
GK: Percival, I’d love to ask you about genre. Perhaps even more so than in your other works, though you often move in and out of different modes, The Trees feels like one where you combine and merge genres. The novel has variously been described as detective fiction, political satire, a tale of revenge, and a horror (and, more specifically, a zombie) novel. It seems to me—and maybe you would disagree—that individual descriptors do not do justice to what this book does. It merges. It mutates. It plays with multiple different expectations of genre at once.
The scenes with Jim and Ed driving, for example the idiosyncrasies in their discussions here and at the “Dinah” almost feel like a different book to, say, the jokes during the assault on the White House at the end. We’ve gone from something like Twin Peaks to Veep, to move out of a literary context for a moment. What was your approach to genre, and how consciously were you playing with expectations of different genres?
PE: I’m certainly playing with the expectations of genres. I have to say that I have never actually read a detective novel—well, I read some Agatha Christie when I was a kid. But I don’t read genre fiction at all. However, living in this culture, when you turn on the television one afternoon and you know genres—you know the moves of them, the turns—you can recognise, say, the police procedural. Or, even if you’ve never watched a zombie movie all the way through, you get it in the first five minutes. These things permeate the culture. So I do play with the expectations that are associated with those. I also play with the idea that we’re versed in them, which makes them very easy to corrupt and to steal and to exploit. What I’m trying to do when I do that… I’m not smart enough to say, but something’s going on.
GK: We were discussing earlier with Alexandre about how in his documentary you talk about watching Sidney Poitier films 40 times each in preparation for writing the 2009 novel I Am Not Sidney Poitier, which is interesting and slightly crazy. You said yourself in the film that it drove you to the point of being sick of them. Does watching films figure much into your fiction writing process? Do you watch in preparation as well as read, or do things present themselves that weren’t necessarily the plan when you started writing?
PE: I don’t really watch films to write. I did that because the main character was Not Sidney Poitier, and I was actually visiting his films within the text. Watching them a couple of times, I ran the risk of merely regurgitating them. I needed it to be a blur. I needed to forget them, but know them, so that I could own the material and use it in the way I needed to. But films hardly ever play into my understanding of fiction. In fact, I don’t think cinematically at all when I’m writing novels. Most of my attention is on the way the words look on the page. It’s quite visual for me, and in a word way, not a story way.
To address one other thing about repetition as it relates to genre: it doesn’t take very many experiences with a particular genre to get it. For example, while working on The Trees, I was watching the 2020–2023 TV series Perry Mason. I’m not really a police procedural person, but what I loved about it was the fact that, every show, the writing had to come to an end. Unlike television shows that I don’t watch but I know exist, it’s not an ongoing thing with hooks that keep us moving as, say, the picaresque might. The writing, every episode, has a complete arc—completely recognisable, completely and cogently intentional. That’s fascinating to me. I would never be able to do that. Watching it, it gave me a kind of comfort and a model for the different arcs that might occur through that model, whether I’m successful or not in The Trees, I have no idea.
ALT: As in your other works, The Trees is rich in irony and uses double entendre. Despite the gravity and the extremity of the topic, the comic often springs from the representation of stupidity, as can be seen in the scene where Delroy Digby goes undercover and makes a phone call that exposes how ridiculous his cover is. There are many other very funny scenes in the novel, and a comic of repetition. Yet repetition in the novel creates anxiety, the main repeated pattern being that of lynching, which keeps failing to trigger the appropriate outrage amongst characters. At one point, the waitress at the Dinah, Gertrude, claims that “American outrage is always for show.”
Repetition also seems to bring us back to our common denominator as human beings: our awareness of death. The Sheriffs and Deputies in The Trees are often made to look ridiculous through their repetitive, predictable actions, which move them further away from their humanity and closer to being robots. These characters only stop being funny when they’re killed. Could you tell us more about your use of repetition and alternating tones in this novel?
PE: I wish I could. Of course, repetition is one of the oldest comedic devices. It creates focus on a particular thing, in the same way that omission might. Anytime I can create anxiety in a reader, whether it’s comedic or simply the recognition of something being missing, then it gives me an opportunity to open avenues of discussion of things that are unexpected. But again, I think these are things that are so ingrained in the way I think and in my worldview that it would be disingenuous to say that I’m participating in some thoughtful execution of a plan.
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GK: I have a question about your use of voice and language. I interviewed the author Brandon Taylor in 2022 and we talked about your work and the preface to the 20th anniversary edition of Erasure that Brandon had just written. Brandon said that Erasure taught him to be less “polite” in his fiction. He spoke to me about how your work opened the door to his own writerly voice being able to move more freely between registers and voices. I wonder whether it comes naturally to you to play with voice and tone and register in your work?
PE: It’s what I do. Whether it comes naturally, I don’t know. It doesn’t always come naturally. I sometimes have to fight to find a voice. But it’s where I feel most comfortable in writing fiction. I very seldom write in the third person. I really enjoy inhabiting a character, and also it grants me, and the reader I think, the sense that at least they know what’s going on in one person, completely. Because my interest is often not the story as much as the experience of the story. I don’t know if that makes sense. But that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
GK: This nicely follows on from the discussion we had with Alexandre, where we were talking about the use of sound in his film, and the contrast between noise and voice—including the extracts that were read—but also the space between sounds, the silences, the pauses.
PE: It’s fantastic that you should mention that. Of late, I’ve been studying John Cage. I’m fascinated by the idea of the impossibility of silence. I think, without my knowing it, that has often been a part of my thinking. The depiction of any world is not simply the words that are spoken, but the spaces between them.
ALT: The Trees is yet another fascinating exploration of language, which like your other works draws attention to language itself. It opens the readers to unheard uses of language. I could refer to so many examples, but I’m very fond of the lines ““There will be more ducks,” Quip said. “A sentence I never imagined myself saying.”” This reminded me of your taste for nonsense. Is The Trees an exploration of this—and if so, in which ways?
PE: Well, look at the number of lynchings. If that’s not nonsense, then nothing is. We can tell every one of those stories, but the fact that a culture would employ this—let’s call it a device, a practice—in such an uninspected way… is complete nonsense. Not nonsense in the way that it’s something that cannot be understood, but nonsense in a way that something should not be understood.
ALT: Would it relate to some of the references to “crazy talk” in the novel? I have in mind an instance about the nuances in being dead—the conversation with the lines “the black guy looks so dead” and “these white men look pretty dead, but at least they look like they were once alive.” The phrase “talking crazy” itself is then used. Here, the crazy talk seems to point towards racial conflict in US history, by raising the question of what being alive actually means. Can you further comment about that?
PE: No, that was pretty good, Anne-Laure.
ALT: Thank you.
GK: Racial conflict comes to the forefront of The Trees, often through political rhetoric, but as it is promoted by the media. It’s often shown through the lens of satire.
ALT: Yes, this reminds me of a scene in which there is quite a pernicious shift between “any” and “all” “coloured individuals” in the governor of South Carolina’s speech—the character “Pinch Wheyface.” The speech seems to wrap up all Black Americans in the same hatred and accusation.
GK: It’s interesting that caricatures pervade your work. I’d be intrigued to hear more on how your characters are often these larger-than-life—not so much unrealistic—but the exaggerated versions of people that we do meet and do interact with. I wrote an article on The Trees last year and in it I discussed the appearances of Donald Trump in the novel, the comical episodes he appears in. You’ve talked about this in interviews, I believe, but Trump is such a caricature that one wouldn’t expect to be a real, three-dimensional human being. But he is. And that’s what is so bizarre and alienating about someone like him. What’s your approach to character, in this regard?
PE: Well, first of all, I bristle at the idea of thinking of Trump as three-dimensional. I toyed with the idea of not putting him in that novel because there was a part of me that hoped that he was merely an insignificant flash in the American pan. But I suspected that he was not, and it turns out that is true. So I’m glad that I put this, not caricature of him, but a fairly clear representation of the person that he has presented himself to be. He’s never expressed an idea in his life, and he’s only expressed clearly heated invectives about, well, anyone. The fact that he is taken seriously in the US is the real embarrassment—not his existence, not his presence. That his behaviour is allowed is shameful. Regardless of his political stance, his method and his language… he is the hobo billionaire. So, there was some passion in me about having included this depiction of this symptom of American deficiency.
But, in this novel, everything is extreme, because the actions at the base of it are extreme. Lynching is extreme. There is no way to talk about it in some general, soft way. To do that normalises it. It would be easy to write a sad novel about lynching. It’s a sad business. And what does one come away with? Oh, yes, I get it: lynching is bad. None of us have learned anything from this. What we need to learn from any work of fiction that addresses such outrageous human behaviour is shame, and perhaps fear. So that’s what’s at the base of this, and that’s why exaggeration is a necessary component in The Trees’ representation of lynching.
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George Kowalik
Anne-Laure Tissut