In a powerful conversation for the Service95 Book Club, Dua Lipa sits down with acclaimed American author Percival Everett to discuss The Trees – his genre-defying novel that confronts the brutal legacy of racial violence in the United States. The book begins as a murder mystery but quickly becomes something stranger and far more unsettling, dealing explicitly with the history of lynchings in the US and how it isn’t ancient history; the practise continues, just in different forms.
Central to the novel, both literally and symbolically, is the ghost of Emmett Till – the 14-year-old boy whose brutal abduction and lynching in 1955 was a flashpoint in the Civil Rights Movement. “Emmett Till was accused of whistling or saying something to a white woman... and he was subsequently tortured, murdered and tossed into the Tallahatchie River,” says Percival. “He was beaten so badly that he was unrecognisable as a person... [His mother] refused to close the casket at his funeral, stating that the world should see what racist America had done to her child.”
It’s this imagery – the violence, the refusal to look away – that echoes through The Trees. “The body disappears and reappears,” Percival notes. “It’s the ghost that should haunt America.”
However – and surprisingly, considering the subject matter –The Trees is also bitingly funny; a satire that flips the American crime procedural on its head. “As soon as we start talking about it, there’s no way for it to be funny,” he admits. “And when people start on your side, it’s just preaching to the choir. So the humour is necessary to open up a world that allows people to ask questions.”
For Percival, irony is not a detour from truth, but a tool to expose it. The novel critiques white complicity and the deeply embedded racist tropes that persist in American culture and media. “When I started the novel, I turned to my wife and said, ‘I’m not being very fair to white people.’ And then I thought, Well, screw that,” he says. “I was raised in American popular culture, and the stereotypes of Black people are repetitive and pernicious and insidious... I thought, Well, that’s the real subject for me in this novel – how does it feel to have these images thrust on you?”
Indeed, he doesn’t shy away from turning the lens. In The Trees, it’s the competent Black detectives who are called in to lead the investigation. “It’s just turning everything around – the Black expertise showing up,” he says. “We’re bombarded with the white saviour... even now in movies. Cambodia and Thailand are at war, and they come to the peace table because Donald Trump wants them to... that’s something that’s hard for white people in the West to shake.”
But alongside this sharp satirical inversion, writing The Trees also became something more personal – an act of remembrance. “I actually did what [the character] Damon Thruff does in the novel: I wrote all the names out by hand,” Percival shares. “It was a meaningful experience... I never would have been able to come up with that many names. The most chilling part of the list is the unknown victims: unknown male, unknown female.”
Percival also acknowledges the limits of being writer. “As a writer, I may well have something that I mean, something that I think I’m saying,” he reflects. “But the art itself does the work in the world. It’s not complete until the reader comes to it... People find their truth in art... They bring their world to the work and find what they need.”
With The Trees, Percival has given readers a work that is furious, funny and haunting. It doesn’t offer easy answers, but it does open the door to difficult, necessary conversations.
Watch Dua’s full interview with Percival here.
The Trees by Percival Everett is Dua’s Monthly Read For September – discover her full conversation with the author and more with the Service95 Book Club...
WATCH Dua’s interview with the author, Percival Everett
LISTEN to the interview on the go with the new Service95 Book Club podcast
BOOKMARK the novels and music that inspire Percival Everett
READ the story of Emmett Till and how his murder launched a movement
DISCOVER what to read next in Percival Everett’s back catalogue
