The Trees by Percival Everett review – potent satire of US racism

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.

Wheat is found dead and brutally disfigured, with the mutilated corpse of a young Black man next to him, which subsequently goes missing. The same thing happens to Junior Junior, with the same disappearing cadaver, and all at once we’re in a horror story. As with the films of Jordan Peele, the paranormal is used to depict the African American experience in extremis, and here supernatural horror and historical reality collide in dreadful revelation. We are presented with a ghostly yet corporeal presence that haunts America’s consciousness. Money, Mississippi is a real place. It was where the 14-year-old Emmett Till was lynched in 1955, after being accused by a white woman of making suggestive remarks. We learn that Granny C is that woman, and the corpse is Emmett, returned to take his revenge on her descendants.

As this phenomenon is repeated elsewhere, the crime genre comes into play, interrogating notions of justice and law enforcement in a racist culture. Two Black officers of the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation provide a wise-cracking double act full of dry observation. When asked by an FBI agent why they joined the service they reply in unison: “So Whitey wouldn’t be the only one in the room with a gun.” A bewildering range of characters are called upon to investigate a series of white murder victims found with the bodies of lynched Black or Asian Americans. But this is not so much a mystery to be solved, rather a greater crime to be addressed: a police procedural that investigates the lack of any due process in the past, where the crime scene is history itself.

Enter an academic, Damon Thruff, who meets with Mama Z, a 105-year-old survivor of Money who has chronicled lynchings from 1913 onwards. She has read his book on racial violence, which she criticises as “scholastic”, and is curious as to how he was “able to construct three hundred and seven pages on such a topic without an ounce of outrage”. As they work through her comprehensive files on historical victims of this atrocity, the author takes a chapter to simply list them all in his own act of remembrance, and, in a nod to his earlier work, has Thruff write them in pencil and explain that: “When I’m done I’m going to erase every name, set them free.” Mama Z tells him that: “Less than 1 percent of lynchers were ever convicted of a crime. Only a fraction of those ever served a sentence.” A footnote to the case of her own murdered father remarks: “No one was interviewed. No suspects were identified. No one was arrested. No one was charged. No one cared.”

The plot escalates as the lynched dead begin to rise up. There is widespread panic, a sense of an impending reckoning, but also a feeling that any real resolution is beyond these pages. The genius of this novel is that in an age of reactionary populism it goes on the offensive, using popular forms to address a deep political issue as page-turning comic horror. It’s a powerful wake-up call, as well as an act of literary restitution. What is truly disturbing is that in the 20 years between Erasure and The Trees we appear at times to be going backwards in terms of consciousness, so that an African American word for awakening can now be used as a pejorative term. In his earlier work Everett might have mused, like Joyce, that history is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake. Now his analysis is more blunt. As the FBI agent declares: “History is a motherfucker.”

• The Trees is published by Influx (£9.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.