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Bookshelf – The Trees

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Finally, a way to never be disappointed by yet another so-so book: Only read what Percival Everett writes.

A few weeks ago, I gushed over “James,” Everett’s current reimagining of “The Tales of Huckleberry Finn,” this time told from the perspective of Jim, the slave. Seeing my comments in an online book group, someone suggested that “The Trees” was equally terrific.

And it is.

“The Trees” also uses history as a fulcrum, in this case the 1955 murder in Mississippi of 14-year-old Emmett Till, who was tortured, shot and lynched after being falsely accused of flirting with a white woman. Till was one of more than 4,000 Black victims of lynching and other documented acts of racial terrorism that occurred in the United States between the Civil War and World War II. (Read more: https://lynchinginamerica.eji.org/report/).

Set in the present day in Money, Mississippi (where Till was killed), “The Trees” begins as a crime story: A white resident, Junior Junior, turns up dead and emasculated in his home. Near his bloody corpse lies the body of a Black man. Both cadavers are hauled to the morgue, but that of the Black man disappears, only to reappear again in similar circumstances.

When the dead won’t stay dead, it’s a mystery enough for the state police to send a pair of Black detectives to Money, where they find a townful of cartoonish Southern crackers, a 105-year-old great-grandmother who has amassed thousands of files about lynchings, and a passing-for-white diner waitress who is hiding more than her skin color.

Little by little, “The Trees” reveals itself to be less of a crime story and more of an artful, incisive indictment of America’s shameful past and of the shameless persistence of racist values disguised as regional culture.

Everett pulls off this impeachment with a mix of violence, sarcasm, caricature, and humor (the latter especially evident in the book’s wonderful dialogues). To say more is to reveal too much, so I’ll end with this: “The Trees” is inventive, entertaining, and enlightening, a virtuoso work that anyone who loves good books should read.

Bookshelf – The Gathering, Anne Enright

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Some people carry so much drag and ache and dread that they cannot separate the weight from themselves. They are what they suffer.

The fate of these tormented beings, thinks Veronica Hegarty as she laments the death of her brother, Liam, older by only eleven months and drowned by his own hand in the cold of the English Channel, is imprinted in their bones.

“History is biological, that’s what I think,” says Veronica as her family gathers in Dublin for Liam’s wake. “What is written for the future is written in the body, the rest is only spoor.”

What Liam bore, etched into his marrow, was the scar of a terrible incident that befell him when he was nine, a moment witnessed by Veronica. Liam lives with pain, Veronica with shame. “After a lifetime of spreading the hurt around,” she thinks, “(Liam) managed to blame me. And I managed to feel guilty.”

Veronica feels guilt for her escape from the claustrophobic environment of a family of a dozen children, a mother vanishing into herself, and a rough-cut father. She made it to the middle class. Liam, her soulmate, didn’t. He drank and practiced enough general fecklessness to earn labels like gurrier, messer, and thug from even his siblings.

Liam’s death unleashes not only Veronica’s memories of what happened that fateful day in her grandmother’s house, but also brings to the boil long-simmering dissatisfactions with her own “normal” life – materially rich, emotionally impoverished.

“The Gathering” asks some patience of the reader. Veronica, seeking to make sense of her brother’s death, hopscotches through the calendar — her grandmother’s time, her own childhood, the present, when she is 39. Hard things happen, and both their overhang and portent infuse the story with a heaviness, but it is tolerable because nothing occurs in the story that couldn’t occur to anyone at any time in real life. It is the heaviness of being human.

Enright is a masterful writer and a pleasure to read. The narration is almost elegiac, but also precise and not at all wimpy. When, for example, Veronica speaks of her jumbled sex life, Enright endows her with schoolyard language that shocks with directness. In all, “The Gathering” is as complicated and mysterious as life itself, and just as rewarding.